Structures and origins of the twelfth-century "renaissance"

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Considering the many seminal innovations that took place in the Central Middle Ages, this epoch can be regarded as an ?axis time? of European history. Previous scholarship has so far mostly focused on descriptions of what appeared to be new within the diverse areas of material and spiritual life. The present book, by contrast, analyzes the structural foundations of those innovations from the standpoint of the history of mentality, identifying general categories such as differentiation, psychologization, rationalization, and desacralization. The numerous changes in the thought patterns, the emotional set-ups, the aesthetics, and in the behavior of the medieval elite demonstrate more similarities to the main features characteristic of modern times than to those typical of the second half of the first millennium.