Many a reader will doubtless dissent from some of the arguments I have advanced, and disagree with some of the interpretations I have given. But no one, I hope, who has read these pages will think that the early medieval period was the philosophical desert, watered by the fewest oases, which some historians have portrayed. At the courts of Charlemagne and Charles the Bald, and in the monasteries of Corbie and Auxerre, men of the early Middle Ages made their first attempts to grapple with abstract problems by the exercise of reason. I have presented evidence to suggest that philosophy is a term which can properly be used of some part of these thinkers’ activity. The imposition of theological interests on logical texts led them to ask questions about the fundamental constitution of reality, and to give answers which were consistent with Christian dogma but not in any simple way derived from it.

The period of philosophy I have studied is thus one of beginnings. It is characterized not by the perfected clarity of its arguments, nor by the coherence of its systems, but rather by a tentativeness in reasoning that can approach dullness, or alternatively, by a premature brilliance which often conceals deep intellectual confusion. Moreover, much of the substance of early medieval philosophy lay in a tradition of teaching, learning and discussion in schools and monasteries: the evidence for this tradition is various in kind, and requires extensive analysis before it may be fully interpreted.