The first half of the twelfth century in northern France and Flanders was a period of startling economic growth,  extraordinary cultural creativity, violent aristocratic competition, new political and religious practices, all set in the context of a bitter struggle among the region’s leading powers. All of this is recorded in some of the most memorable and vivid literary works of the medieval west. Those taking the paper meet such extraordinary figures as Heloise and Abelard (intellectual star and self-publicist, and a warning to tutors not to seduce their pupils -- he was castrated by her kinsmen), Abbot Suger (political fixer and artistic patron extraordinaire, credited with the invention of Gothic architecture),  the charismatic, hugely influential, admired and loathed Bernard of Clairvaux, and Orderic Vitalis, the exiled English boy turned Norman monk and obsessive chronicler of his age. Looking at letters, poems, documents of all sorts, takers of the paper read the first-hand accounts of love affairs, murders, political crises, spiritual adventures, intellectual discoveries, and hair-raising violence. They look at wonderfully impressive cathedrals and castles, gold treasures and stained glass, as well as the ordinary detritus left behind by people’s everyday lives. Why was this time and place so creative? The paper throws takers into a highly contested debate. But beware. Many innocent modernists, taking the paper as an adventurous dip into the middle ages before getting back to the twentieth century, have been too gripped to give it up.