In the shorthand of introductory history courses, Western civilization lapsed into a dark night of the soul with the fall of the Roman Empire, to re-emerge in Italy hundreds of years later during the Renaissance. As scholars have long known, that formula was never entirely true, but it was tidy enough to shape the thought of a schoolboy. In the true sense of the meaning of Renaissance, it can be argued, an earlier rebirth occurred at the end of the 11th and the beginning of the 12th centuries. The age produced in its cathedrals perhaps the greatest architecture yet...
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