Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Carolingian Renaissance was the first of three medieval renaissances, a period of cultural and intellectual revival within the Carolingian Empire that began in the 8th century and continued throughout the 9th century. It was driven by royal patronage under Charlemagne and Louis the Pious, and focused on education, manuscript production, liturgical reform, and the development of a standardized Latin script.
Alcuin of York was the foremost scholar, serving as head of the Palace School from 782 to 796 and later as abbot of St. Martin's Monastery in Tours. Other key figures included Theodulf of Orléans, who produced a scholarly edition of the Vulgate Bible, Paul the Deacon, Peter of Pisa, and later the Irish scholar John Scotus Eriugena, who headed the Palace School at Aachen under Charles the Bald.
Charlemagne discovered through letters from monasteries that many parish priests could not read the Vulgate Bible. This alarmed him because the clergy were his intended agents for Christianizing the empire. To address this, he issued the De litteris colendis, a letter circulated to major monasteries, and the Charter of Modern Thought in 787, ordering the creation of schools.
Carolingian minuscule was a standardized book script first used at the monasteries of Corbie and Tours that introduced lower-case letters, consistent letter heights, punctuation, and word spacing. Renaissance humanists later mistook it for an authentic Roman script and adopted it as humanist minuscule, from which early modern Italic script and the typefaces in use today directly descended.
Carolingian workshops are estimated to have produced over 100,000 manuscripts in the 9th century, of which some 6,000 to 7,000 survive. Fewer than 2,000 Latin manuscripts survive from before AD 800, meaning the Carolingian century produced more than ten surviving copies for every one that survived from the preceding era.
According to Roger Wright, the Carolingian Renaissance introduced what became modern Ecclesiastical Latin pronunciation by spreading a spelling-based pronunciation, first used by Anglo-Saxon and Irish clergy, to native Romance speakers in France. The resulting unintelligibility of Latin sermons led the Council of Tours to instruct priests to preach in the vernacular, and eventually prompted local scholars to develop written forms of their own Romance languages.