Alcuin of York

Alcuin of York was the foremost scholar of his age and the intellectual architect of the Carolingian Renaissance. Brought from the cathedral school of York to the court of Charlemagne, he directed the emperor’s palace school and later became abbot of St Martin’s at Tours, reforming education across the Frankish realm, producing a corrected text of the Latin Bible, and encouraging the clear new handwriting — Carolingian minuscule — in which the works of antiquity were recopied and saved. Through his many letters, poems, and textbooks he did more than any other man to revive learning in the Latin West.