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Intellectual life

Cathedral chapters were expected to operate a school beginning in the late 11th century, and the more-lenient cathedral schools quickly marginalised the traditional monastic schools. Schools reaching the highest level of mastery in the disciplines they taught received the rank of studium generale, or university, from the pope or the Holy Roman Emperor. The new educational institutions encouraged scholarly discussion. Debates between the realists and the nominalists about the concept of " universals " were especially heated. Philosophical discourse was stimulated by the rediscovery of Aristotle (d. 322 BC), the Ancient Greek philosopher, and his emphasis on empiricism and rationalism. Scholars such as Peter Abelard (d. 1142) and Peter Lombard (d. 1164) introduced Aristotelian logic into theology. Scholasticism (a new method of intellectual discourse and pedagogy) required the study of authoritative texts, notably the Vulgate and patristic literature, but references to them could no longer override rational arguments. Scholastic academics summarised their (and other authors') views on specific subjects in comprehensive sentence collections known as summae, including the Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274).

Chivalry and the ethos of courtly love developed in royal and noble courts. This culture was expressed in the vernacular languages, rather than Latin, and consisted of poems, stories, legends, and popular songs. Often the stories were written down in chansons de geste (songs of great deeds), glorifying their male heroes' often-brutal acts, including The Song of Roland and The Poem of the Cid. Chivalric romance praised chaste love, and eroticism was primarily expressed in poems by troubadours. Chivalric literature was inspired by classical mythology and the Celtic legends of the Arthurian cycle collected by Geoffrey of Monmouth (d. c. 1155). Other literary genres included spiritual autobiographies, chronicles, philosophical poems, and hymns. Theatre developed in mystery plays, but comic farces such as those by Adam de la Halle (d. 1287/88) also became popular.

The 11th-century discovery of a copy of the Corpus Juris Civilis paved the way for the systematic study of Roman law at Bologna, which led to the recording and standardisation of legal codes throughout Western Europe. Around 1140, the monk Gratian (fl. 12th century)—a teacher at Bologna—wrote what became the standard text of ecclesiastical law in Catholic Europe: the Decretum Gratiani. Greek and Islamic influence replaced Roman numerals with the decimal positional number system, and the invention of algebra allowed more-advanced mathematics. Astronomy benefited from the translation of Ptolemy 's Almagest from Greek into Latin. Medicine was studied, especially in southern Italy, where Islamic medicine influenced the school at Salerno.