An epistemological revolution swept Western Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The face of learning in the West was radically transformed by a new type of educational institution, a proliferation of authoritative texts, innovative methodologies for gathering knowledge, and new genres for classifying information. Leading the charge was an emerging generation of thinkers known as the Schoolmen or the Scholastics.

Up until the twelfth century, formal education (which was available only for boys throughout the medieval period) had been carried out in schools associated with the major European cathedrals, and school masters were learned and pious men familiar with standard curriculum texts such as the Bible and the Church Fathers. All this changed when the educational institutions known as universities began to be established, divorcing centres of learning from places of Christian worship. It was a time of informational foment in the West: Spain, a country with sizable Jewish populations and which functioned as a site of cross-cultural contact between the European West and Islamic North Africa, developed a Latin translation movement that would rewrite the Western curriculum. Suddenly Western Europe had access for the first time to Latin translations of Jewish and Arabic texts of philosophy, medicine, and astronomy, and to a vast range of Ancient Greek writings that had been lost to the West for centuries. This included major works of Aristotle on rhetoric, politics, ethics, and the natural sciences. The same process of literary and scholarly transmission also took place in the East as trade and military routes opened up by the Crusades brought new texts and knowledge into Europe.

These texts challenged Western epistemologies, or ways of knowing. Previously Western education had been reliant on traditions of Church-approved texts and doctrines established at ecumenical councils, but now it was confronted by innovative ways of obtaining knowledge including sense perception, observation, personal experi-ence, and scientific experiment. This influx meshed fortuitously with an intellectual approach already underway in the West. For some time in the twelfth century there had been a growing dissatisfaction amongst scholars with the manifold contradictions (some of which we have seen in previous chapters) that could be found within and between the approved authors and teachings of the Church. Scholars had begun to synthesize these and iron out discrepancies between them.