A Brill Calendar: September 9

Few perspectives on Europe’s past – and on its future – are more interesting than the 'life of the mind' as it developed from 330 AD.

This was the year when the Roman Emperor Constantine dedicated the renamed and rebuilt city of Byzantium to his Christian God, resulting in a ‘Second Rome’. Western Europe ceased to be the power-house of imperial civilization. Increasingly left to its own purposes, the subcontinent started to become, slowly but surely, the crucible for a new awareness of human existence.

Monasticism, St. Benedict’s Rule, Jewish and Arab textual learning, the scribal tradions of monasteries, (augmented by the great schools of Oxford and Cambridge) produced the unexampled consistency and coherence of scholasticism. Such were the foundations on which post-Renaissance new institutes like Leyden University could start and build new traditions.

In the two centuries following the Renaissance, it is seldom that approaches to learning and intellectual sensitivity change greatly. The advent of German Romanticism early in the 19th century chances this paradigm in a revolutionary way; it is heralded by poetry and ‘belles lettres’; rather than by linguistics and physical sciences. Clemens Brentano (Ehrenbreitstein, September 9 1778 – Aschaffenburg 28 July 1842) and his seven years younger sister Bettina should be seen as the godfather and –mother of the Heidelberg Romantic school, that fountainhead of new scholarly and philosophical study and scrutiny. From its beginning it was blessed with an important role for talented and extraordinary women; the male bastion began to crumble with the French Revolution.