Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Renaissance of the 12th century was a period of social, political, economic, and intellectual transformation in Western Europe beginning around 1070. It included the recovery of ancient Greek scientific and philosophical works, the rise of universities, the emergence of Scholasticism, and major technological advances. Harvard professor Charles Homer Haskins was the first historian to write extensively about it.
The Renaissance of the 12th century was far more thoroughgoing than either the Carolingian or Ottonian periods. The Carolingian Renaissance was described as more particular to Charlemagne himself, a veneer on a changing society rather than a movement springing from society at large. The 12th-century renaissance, by contrast, transformed institutions, trade, theology, law, and technology across Western Europe.
Islamic philosophers and scientists preserved and expanded upon ancient Greek works, especially those of Aristotle and Euclid, which were then translated into Latin and brought to Western Europe. Contact through Muslim-dominated Iberia, Southern Italy, the Crusades, and the Reconquista created the channels for this transfer. Thinkers including Avicenna, Averroes, and Maimonides reached European scholars through these same routes.
Water-driven hammers for processing plant fibres are documented as early as 1010 in Upper Palatinate in Germany, and post windmills appeared in the 12th century, becoming so numerous that Pope Celestine III taxed them between 1191 and 1198. The magnetic compass is attested in Europe in the late 12th century, and the dry compass was invented in 12th-century France. Waterpowered paper mills were first documented in 1238 in Spanish Valencia.
Scholasticism was a new form of Christian theology emphasizing a systematic and rational approach to divine matters, rooted partly in Boethius's commentaries on Aristotle and Calcidius's commentary on Plato's Timaeus. Early figures including Bernard of Chartres and William of Conches advanced the movement, which was later strengthened by Latin translations of Avicenna, Averroes, and Maimonides. By the 13th century, scholars such as Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus were using secular logic to uphold Church orthodoxy.
The early 12th century saw a revival of Latin classics at cathedral schools including Chartres, Orleans, and Canterbury, where scholars read Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, and other classical authors. Charles Homer Haskins argued that this revival was ultimately displaced not by religious opposition but by the rise of Aristotelian logic in the emerging universities. The Latin humanist tradition was not revived again until Petrarch took it up in the 14th century.