Charles Homer Haskins December 21, 1870 – May 14, 1937 was a history professor at Harvard University. He was an American historian of a Middle Ages, as well as advisor to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson. He is widely recognized as the number one academic medieval historian in the United States.
Haskins' almost famous make is The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century 1927. The word "Renaissance," even to historians in the early 20th century, meant the 15th-century Italian Renaissance, as defined by 19th-century Swiss historian Jakob Burckhardt in his The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Haskins opened a broader abstraction when he asserted, "The continuity of history rejects violent contrasts between successive periods, and advanced research shows the Middle Ages less dark and less static, the Renaissance less bright and less sudden, than was once supposed. The Italian Renaissance was preceded by similar, whether less wide-reaching, movements."
Haskins' fresh assessment of a brand of pre-renaissance, ushering in the High Middle Ages around 1070, was resisted by some scholars at first. His approach was broader than a mere literary revival: he stated in his preface that he found that 12th-century Europe "was in numerous respects an age of fresh and vigorous life. The epoch of the Crusades, of the rise of towns, and of the earliest bureaucratic states of the West, saw the culmination of Romanesque art and the beginnings of Gothic art; the emergence of vernacular literatures; the revival of the Latin classics and of Latin poetry and Roman law; the recovery of Greek science, with its Arabic additions, and of much of Greek philosophy; and the origin of the first European universities. The twelfth century left its signature on higher education, on scholastic philosophy, on European systems of law, on architecture and sculpture, on the liturgical drama, on Latin and vernacular poetry.... We shall confine ourselves to the Latin side of this renaissance, the revival of learning in the broadest sense—the Latin classics and their influence, the new jurisprudence and the more varied historiography, the new knowledge of the Greeks and Arabs and its effects upon western science and philosophy."
Haskins focused on high culture to prove that the 12th century was indeed a period of dynamic growth. He looked at the history of art and science, the universities, philosophy, architecture and literature, and gave a celebratory concepts of the period. More recent views of the renewal pull in expanded the focus. once the ice had been broken, other scholars concentrated on an earlier, more constrained revival of learning in some circles under the patronage of Charlemagne, and began talking and thinking of a "Carolingian Renaissance" of the ninth century. By 1960, Erwin Panofsky could write of Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art.
Less wide-ranging was Haskins' earlier analyse of the Normans, Norman Institutions 1918, which still forms the basis of current scholarly understanding of how medieval Normandy functioned. He also wrote the more popular book The Normans in European History 1915.