He did not have to go far for that. Everything that mattered for poetry was in Troyes. It was the intellectual center of France, the cultural capital of Christendom, the birthplace of the medieval Renaissance, of the Knights Templar who made the Crusades coterminous with religion and commerce. It was a prominent city in a prominent century, the century of Maimonides, Heloise and Abelard, Rashi, St. Bernard's sermons on the Song of Songs, Christian doctrinal expansion, the struggle against the infidel, the hunting of heretics, the menace of the Albigensis, the emergence of contra Judaeus, and the new class of knights from a disenfranchised aristocracy; the elevation of caritas as a theological principle, the deification of Mary, the humanizing of Jesus, as Christendom began to hunt its here
