The culture of the learned elite in the Latin world bordering on the Mediterranean and stretching north into Europe underwent a profound transformation between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries. Although the traditions of the immediately preceding period were never completely submerged, speculative and literary activity from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries on began to generate a kind of work that speaks to us with a philosophical immediacy that almost nothing from the seventh through eleventh centuries can presume to do. As with any cultural process, the roots of the change reached back deep in time, and in its entirety it extended to all areas of society, economic and political as well as literary and intellectual. It is no accident that the twelfth century has been characterized by Western medievalists as a period of “renaissance,” while the origins of “Europe” as we think of it, and as it has exercised power in the modern world, have increasingly been pushed back to that era.

In a guide to medieval philosophy there is no need to engage this historical phenomenon in all its breadth or to speculate very deeply on its causation. Reduced to the scope of medieval intellectual history, our concern is with the emergence of “scholasticism” in its strictest sense – or, as the title of this chapter suggests, with the appearance of a cultural sphere linked to the universities. Despite the fact that either orientation – broadly cultural or narrowly intellectual – must necessarily go seriously astray about the place it assigns the history of Arabic culture or of Byzantine Greek culture (see Chapters 1 and 3), the perspective they both provide gives us an entrée to a cultural shift of dramatic proportions.