Paralleling the high-medieval revival of learning were important achievements in literature, art, and music.  This chapter discusses how these arts evolved and the ways in which they express the medieval Christian world view.

During this period, literature developed in both Latin and vernacular languages.  Latin religious hymns expressed love for Jesus and Mary and disdain for earthly concerns.  Descended from the mummer tradition, Latin mystery plays dramatized scriptural passages from both the Old and New Testaments for audiences gathered outside the church.  By the thirteenth century, these plays also included secular themes, were translated into vernaculars, and were performed by students, wandering minstrels, and other lay actors.  University students also created Latin Goliardic poetry to express their youthful love of life and disdain for responsibility.  Epic poetry flourished as well, including the French Song of Roland that explores the struggle between good and evil in terms of chivalric duty and Christian faith; and the German Niebelungenlied that examines vengeance unredeemed by Christian morality.  Most popular were the chivalric romances about King Arthur and his knights.  Chivalry also inspired a rich body of love poetry.  Composed by men and women alike, these poems of idealized love demonstrate both the civilizing of the warrior class and changing attitudes toward women.  Marie de France's Yonec, for example, shows how adulterous yet self-sacrificing love ultimately triumphs over jealous rage to the benefit of all.  The most important work of medieval literature is the Divine Comedy, Dante's three-part Italian epic of Christian self-realization that, like Aquinas's Summa Theologica, synthesizes the principal elements of the medieval world view.

High medieval faith was most vividly expressed through architecture. Adapting Roman vaulting techniques, Romanesque architects built large basilican cathedrals and churches, using barrel vaults, rounded arches, and arcades to cover and divide interior spaces.  The heavy vaults required massive piers and thick walls with small windows to support them. The most restrained and classical of the regional variations, the Italian Romanesque employed rounded arches and left exteriors relatively unadorned.  The more ornate and experimental French Romanesque typically divides the nave into bays marked by piers and arches, and late examples include ribbed groin vaulting that became standard in Gothic architecture.  Pilgrimage churches also included elongated naves, widened side aisles, and full ambulatories to accommodate large numbers of pilgrims visiting chapels devoted to saints' relics.  Gothic architects transformed Romanesque elements with a variety of new techniques.  Pointed arches, slender columns, and high ribbed groin vaults supported by flying buttresses permitted vast airy spaces flooded with light from tall nave and celerestory windows.  French and German Gothic cathedrals emphasized great vertical sweeps, while their English counterparts tended to stress horizontal lines.  The most conservative of the regional styles, Italian Gothic typically emphasized width over height and involved fewer and smaller windows, thicker walls, and few, if any, flying buttresses.

Monumental sculpture revived during this period and appeared on church facades for the purpose of religious instruction.  Romanesque sculpture was subordinated to architectural constraints, with figures twisted or otherwise distorted to fit spaces around church portals.  Gothic sculpture achieved greater freedom from such constraints.  Figures were treated increasingly as natural entities with an integrity distinct from the architectural setting.

Pictorial art served mainly religious functions but also explored some secular themes.  Metalworkers produced fine reliquaries and other liturgical items, and Byzantine-influenced enamels were popular throughout the period.  Stained glass windows conveyed religious messages and gave the light of Gothic cathedrals an unearthly quality.  This art declined after the great age of cathedral building, giving way to manuscript illumination that reinforced Scripture with delicately drawn and painted images.  Tapestries served narrative functions, illustrating both secular-historical stories and religious-allegorical tales.  Overshadowed by these arts, painting made no great advances, except in Italy where a new naturalism appeared during the thirteenth century.

During the High Middle Ages, music achieved a new complexity.  Early medieval thinkers revived Pythagorean theories of music, and the Carolingian Renaissance saw renewed interest in musical instruments.  Later, as sensual troubadour music grew popular, the church encouraged the development of sacred music.  Composers theorized the eight church modes, and monophony gave way to polyphony as Gregorian plainchant opened to include more voices and varied texts and musical settings.  Staff notation and solmization developed to guide monastic singers through settings, and schools of music emerged to teach music as the ars antiqua.  As composition techniques evolved into greater polyphony, chants became more expressive, giving figures such as Mary distinct musical characters.  The Mass provided the framework for most sacred music, but Hildegard of Bingen notably composed antiphons to the Virgin, as well as music for lyric poems and morality plays.  In France, the motet developed as a distinct genre combining vocal and instrumental music.  Instrumental music developed further to meet the demands of mystery plays, and in the thirteenth century, a system of rhythmic church modes emerged that paved the way for the more dissonant ars nova of the fourteenth century.

Christian themes informed all of the medieval arts.  Writers praised the spiritual life and explored the difficulties of the individual's struggle against sin; pictorial artists represented the achievements of the saints and the punishments of Hell; and architects raised Romanesque and Gothic monuments to ever-greater heights, thus prompting believers to contemplate God's glory.  The themes established during this period continued to inspire artists of subsequent periods, even some in our own secular age.