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and the subject to which this volume is devoted have both no ordinary claim on the attention of the student, — the former, as representing the era wherein, by the common consent of the most eminent authorities, we may find the true boundary line between ancient and modern history, — the latter, as containing the key to those traditions which have ever since prevailed in European education and can scarcely even yet be regarded as superseded or effete.

The present work is restricted to an attempt to place in a clearer light the character of the learning and the theory of education which mediaeval Europe inherited from a combination of pagan science and Christian theology, before that learning and that education were, in turn, modified by the teaching of the Schoolmen. The following pages accordingly represent but a very limited field of enquiry in the wide province of Carolingian history; but that field, though narrow, is not unimportant. That it is altogether erroneous to look upon the influences