r is Cicero, and in all the Latin literature accessible to him he
is the best-read scholar of his age. Among Latin scholars of the next
generation we have Giraldus Cambrensis (d. c. 1222), the author of
topographical and historical writings on Ireland and Wales, and of other
works teeming with quotations from the Latin classics. During the middle
ages Latin prose never dies out. It is the normal language of
literature. In England it is used by many chroniclers and historians,
the best known of whom are William of Malmesbury (d. 1142) and Matthew
Paris (d. 1259). In Italy Latin verse had been felicitously applied to
historic themes by William of Apulia (fl. 1100) and other Latin poets
(1088-1247). In the 12th century England claims at least seven Latin
poets, one of these being her only Latin epic poet, Joseph of Exeter (d.
1210), whose poem on the Trojan war is still extant. The Latin
versifier, John of Garlandia, an Englishman who lived mainly in France
(fl. 1204-1252), produced several Latin vocabularies which were still in
use in the boyhood of Erasmus. The Latin poets of French birth include
Gautier and Alain de Lille (d. c. 1203), the former being the author of
the _Alexandreis_, and the latter that of the _Anti-Claudianus_, a poem
familiar to Chaucer.

During the hundred and thirty years that elapsed between the early
translations of Aristotle executed at Toledo about 1150 and the death in
1281 of William of Moerbeke, the translator of the _Rhetoric_ and the
_Politics_, the knowledge of Aristotle had been greatly extended in
Europe by means of translations, first from the Arabic, and, next, from
the original Greek. Aristotle had been studied in England by Grosseteste
(d. 1253), and expounded abroad by the great Dominican, Albertus Magnus
(d. 1280), and his famous pupil, Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274). Among the
keenest critics of the Schoolmen and of the recent translations of
Aristotle was Roger Bacon (d. 1294), whose _Opus majus_ has been
recognized as the _Encyclopedie_ and the _Organon_ of the 13th century.
His knowledge of Greek, as shown in his _Greek Grammar_ (first published
in 1902), was clearly derived from the Greeks of his own day. The
medieval dependence on the authority of Aristotle gradually diminished.
This was partly due to the recovery of some of the lost works of ancient
literature, and the transition from the middle ages to the revival of
learning was attended by a general widening of the range of cla