[Sidenote: After retirement Alcuin’s influence continued, but he became narrow.]
=Alcuin’s Educational Work at Tours.=--After fourteen years of strenuous service, Alcuin retired from the active headship of the educational system to the abbacy of the monastery at Tours. But even here his educational work did not cease. He soon established a model house of learning and education, whither flocked the most brilliant youths in the empire, and since they rapidly became prominent as teachers and churchmen, his influence upon the schools remained fully as marked as before. He also wrote a number of educational works, mostly on the seven liberal arts, and had a large correspondence about education with kings and the higher clergy. Alcuin, however, was by nature conservative, and with his retirement he became decidedly set and narrow. His fear of dialectic and the more advanced views of certain Irish scholars is almost ludicrous, and his repudiation of the classic poets, even his former favorite, Vergil, is pathetic.
[Sidenote: His pupils retained his broader spirit.]
=Rabanus Maurus, Erigena, and Others Concerned in the Revival.=--Fortunately, Alcuin’s pupils, who at his death occupied practically all positions of educational importance, retained his broader spirit. This was true in particular of Rabanus Maurus (776-856), whose leadership caused the monastic school at Fulda to become the great center of learning. Rabanus wrote even more prolifically than Alcuin upon grammar, language, and theology, but was not afraid to emphasize the study of classic literature or the new training in dialectic. He also greatly expanded the mathematical subjects of the curriculum, and tended to ascribe all phenomena to natural laws. Rabanus, in his turn, influenced a large number of pupils, and a further impetus was given to the movement by a cross-fertilization of Irish learning, which was also introduced, especially through the mastership of Joannes Scotus Erigena (810-876) at the Palace School.
[Sidenote: Permanent effects of the revival.]
Thus during the ninth century and the first half of the tenth there arose, through the initiative of Charlemagne and Alcuin, a marked revival in education, and for several generations the cathedral and monastic schools enthusiastically fostered education and learning. Curricula were expanded, and many famous scholars appeared. While, owing to the weakness of Charlemagne’s successors and the attacks of the Northmen, learning gradually faded once more, intellectual stagnation never again prevailed. Through the revival of the great Frankish monarch, classical learning had to some extent been recalled to continental Europe from its insular asylum in the extreme West.