It would be a rewarding endeavour to try to find out whether a certain play quality was not an essential part of what is called the Carolingian Renaissance –that pompous display of erudition, poetry, and pietistic sententiousness where the leading lights adorned themselves with classical or Biblical names……….Courtly culture is particularly prone to adopt the play-form…..In Charles’s ‘Academia Palatina’ the avowed ideal was the establishment of an ‘Athenae Novae’ but in actual fact pious aspirations were tempered by elegant entertainment…………. by no means excluded some very ancient traits. “What is writing?” asks Pippin, Charles’s son, and Alcuin answers: “The keeper of knowledge.” What is the word?” – “The betrayer of thought.” “Who begot the word?” – “The tongue.” “What is the tongue?” – “The scourge of the air.” “What is the air?” - “The preserver of life.” “What is life?” –“The delight of the happy, the bane of the sorrowful, the expectation of death.” “What is man?” – “The slave of death, the guest of one place, a traveller passing.” All this strikes a familiar note: it is the old game of question and answer, the riddle contest, the hiding of sense in a ‘kenning’. In short, we meet once more all the characteristics of the knowing-game as found among the ancient Hindus, the pre-Islamic Arabs, and the Scandinavians.
Towards the end of the Eleventh century the young countries of the West were pervaded by an all-consuming thirst for knowledge of life and everything that existed. It would ere long find institutional form in the University, one of the greatest single creations of medieval civilization, and in Scholasticism its highest expression. The beginnings of this great of this great spiritual ferment were marked by the almost febrile agitations which seem inseparable from all major renewals of culture (i.e. peasant uprisings and subsequent creation of ‘middle class’ – note H.L.) The agonistic element inevitably comes to the fore at such times……To beat your opponent by reason or the force of word becomes a sport comparable with the profession of arms.