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Title: The Rise of Universities

Author: Charles Homer Haskins

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Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES ***




  THE COLVER LECTURES
  IN BROWN UNIVERSITY

  1923

  THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES

  BY

  CHARLES H. HASKINS




  COLVER LECTURES

  HUMAN LIFE AS THE BIOLOGIST
  SEES IT

  BY VERNON KELLOGG


  Published by
  HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY




  BROWN UNIVERSITY. THE COLVER LECTURES, 1923

  THE
  RISE OF UNIVERSITIES


  BY
  CHARLES HOMER HASKINS

  GURNEY PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AND POLITICAL SCIENCE
  DEAN OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
  HARVARD UNIVERSITY

  [Illustration]


  NEW YORK
  HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
  1923




  COPYRIGHT, 1923
  BY BROWN UNIVERSITY


  PRINTED IN
  UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




  TO MY STUDENTS
  IN THREE UNIVERSITIES
  1888-1923




The Colver lectureship is provided by a fund of $10,000 presented to
the University by Mr. and Mrs. Jesse L. Rosenberger of Chicago in
memory of Mrs. Rosenberger’s father, Charles K. Colver of the class of
1842. The following sentences from the letter accompanying the gift
explain the purposes of the foundation:--

“It is desired that, so far as possible, for these lectures only
subjects of particular importance and lecturers eminent in scholarship
or of other marked qualifications shall be chosen. It is desired that
the lectures shall be distinctive and valuable contributions to human
knowledge, known for their quality rather than their number. Income,
or portions of income, not used for lectures may be used for the
publication of any of the lectures deemed desirable to be so published.”

Charles Kendrick Colver (1821-1896) was a graduate of Brown University
of the class of 1842. The necrologist of the University wrote of him:
“He was distinguished for his broad and accurate scholarship, his
unswerving personal integrity, championship of truth, and obedience
to God in his daily life. He was severely simple and unworldly in
character.”

The lectures now published in this series are:--

1916

  _The American Conception of Liberty and Government_, by Frank Johnson
    Goodnow, LL.D., President of Johns Hopkins University.

1917

  _Medical Research and Human Welfare_, by W. W. Keen, M.D., LL.D.
    (Brown), Emeritus Professor of Surgery, Jefferson Medical College,
    Philadelphia.

1918

  _The Responsible State: A Reëxamination of Fundamental Political
    Doctrines in the Light of World War and the Menace of Anarchism_,
    by Franklin Henry Giddings, LL.D., Professor of Sociology and the
    History of Civilization in Columbia University; sometime Professor
    of Political Science in Bryn Mawr College.

1919

  _Democracy: Discipline: Peace_, by William Roscoe Thayer.

1920

  _Plymouth and the Pilgrims_, by Arthur Lord.

1921

  _Human Life as the Biologist Sees It_, by Vernon Kellogg, Sc.D.,
    LL.D., Secretary, National Research Council; sometime Professor in
    Stanford University.

1922

  _The Rise of Universities_, by Charles H. Haskins, Ph.D., LL.D.,
    Litt.D., Gurney Professor of History and Political Science, Dean of
    the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, in Harvard University.




CONTENTS


                                       PAGES

    I. THE EARLIEST UNIVERSITIES        3-36
         Introduction                      3
         Bologna and the South            10
         Paris and the North              19
         The mediaeval inheritance        31

   II. THE MEDIAEVAL PROFESSOR         37-78
         Studies and textbooks            37
         Teaching and examinations        54
         Academic status and freedom      68

  III. THE MEDIAEVAL STUDENT          79-126
         Sources of information           79
         Student manuals                  89
         Student letters                 102
         Student poetry                  111
         Conclusion                      120

       BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE          127-130

       INDEX                         131-134




THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES




THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES


I

THE EARLIEST UNIVERSITIES


Universities, like cathedrals and parliaments, are a product of the
Middle Ages. The Greeks and the Romans, strange as it may seem, had
no universities in the sense in which the word has been used for the
past seven or eight centuries. They had higher education, but the terms
are not synonymous. Much of their instruction in law, rhetoric, and
philosophy it would be hard to surpass, but it was not organized into
the form of permanent institutions of learning. A great teacher like
Socrates gave no diplomas; if a modern student sat at his feet for
three months, he would demand a certificate, something tangible and
external to show for it--an excellent theme, by the way, for a Socratic
dialogue. Only in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries do there
emerge in the world those features of organized education with which
we are most familiar, all that machinery of instruction represented
by faculties and colleges and courses of study, examinations and
commencements and academic degrees. In all these matters we are the
heirs and successors, not of Athens and Alexandria, but of Paris and
Bologna.

The contrast between these earliest universities and those of today
is of course broad and striking. Throughout the period of its origins
the mediaeval university had no libraries, laboratories, or museums,
no endowment or buildings of its own; it could not possibly have met
the requirements of the Carnegie Foundation! As an historical textbook
from one of the youngest of American universities tells us, with an
unconscious touch of local color, it had “none of the attributes
of the material existence which with us are so self-evident.” The
mediaeval university was, in the fine old phrase of Pasquier, “built
of men”--_bâtie en hommes_. Such a university had no board of trustees
and published no catalogue; it had no student societies--except so far
as the university itself was fundamentally a society of students--no
college journalism, no dramatics, no athletics, none of those “outside
activities” which are the chief excuse for inside inactivity in the
American college.

And yet, great as these differences are, the fact remains that the
university of the twentieth century is the lineal descendant of
mediaeval Paris and Bologna. They are the rock whence we were hewn, the
hole of the pit whence we were digged. The fundamental organization
is the same, the historic continuity is unbroken. They created the
university tradition of the modern world, that common tradition which
belongs to all our institutions of higher learning, the newest as well
as the oldest, and which all college and university men should know
and cherish. The origin and nature of these earliest universities
is the subject of these three lectures. The first will deal with
university institutions, the second with university instruction, the
third with the life of university students.

       *       *       *       *       *

In recent years the early history of universities has begun to
attract the serious attention of historical scholars, and mediaeval
institutions of learning have at last been lifted out of the region
of myth and fable where they long lay obscured. We now know that the
foundation of the University of Oxford was not one of the many virtues
which the millennial celebration could properly ascribe to King Alfred;
that Bologna did not go back to the Emperor Theodosius; that the
University of Paris did not exist in the time of Charlemagne, or for
nearly four centuries afterward. It is hard, even for the modern world,
to realize that many things had no founder or fixed date of beginning
but instead “just grew,” arising slowly and silently without definite
record. This explains why, in spite of all the researches of Father
Denifle and Dean Rashdall and the local antiquaries, the beginnings of
the oldest universities are obscure and often uncertain, so that we
must content ourselves sometimes with very general statements.

The occasion for the rise of universities was a great revival of
learning, not that revival of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to
which the term is usually applied, but an earlier revival, less known
though in its way quite as significant, which historians now call the
renaissance of the twelfth century. So long as knowledge was limited
to the seven liberal arts of the early Middle Ages, there could be no
universities, for there was nothing to teach beyond the bare elements
of grammar, rhetoric, logic, and the still barer notions of arithmetic,
astronomy, geometry, and music, which did duty for an academic
curriculum. Between 1100 and 1200, however, there came a great influx
of new knowledge into western Europe, partly through Italy and Sicily,
but chiefly through the Arab scholars of Spain--the works of Aristotle,
Euclid, Ptolemy, and the Greek physicians, the new arithmetic, and
those texts of the Roman law which had lain hidden through the Dark
Ages. In addition to the elementary propositions of triangle and
circle, Europe now had those books of plane and solid geometry which
have done duty in schools and colleges ever since; instead of the
painful operations with Roman numerals--how painful one can readily see
by trying a simple problem of multiplication or division with these
characters--it was now possible to work readily with Arabic figures; in
the place of Boethius the “Master of them that know” became the teacher
of Europe in logic, metaphysics, and ethics. In law and medicine men
now possessed the fulness of ancient learning. This new knowledge burst
the bonds of the cathedral and monastery schools and created the
learned professions; it drew over mountains and across the narrow seas
eager youths who, like Chaucer’s Oxford clerk of a later day, ‘would
gladly learn and gladly teach,’ to form in Paris and Bologna those
academic gilds which have given us our first and our best definition of
a university, a society of masters and scholars.

To this general statement concerning the twelfth century there is one
partial exception, the medical university of Salerno. Here, a day’s
journey to the south of Naples, in territory at first Lombard and later
Norman, but still in close contact with the Greek East, a school of
medicine had existed as early as the middle of the eleventh century,
and for perhaps two hundred years thereafter it was the most renowned
medical centre in Europe. In this “city of Hippocrates” the medical
writings of the ancient Greeks were expounded and even developed on the
side of anatomy and surgery, while its teachings were condensed into
pithy maxims of hygiene which have not yet lost their vogue--“after
dinner walk a mile,” etc. Of the academic organization of Salerno we
know nothing before 1231, and when in this year the standardizing
hand of Frederick II regulated its degrees Salerno had already been
distanced by newer universities farther north. Important in the
history of medicine, it had no influence on the growth of university
institutions.

If the University of Salerno is older in time, that of Bologna has
a much larger place in the development of higher education. And
while Salerno was known only as a school of medicine, Bologna was a
many-sided institution, though most noteworthy as the centre of the
revival of the Roman law. Contrary to a common impression, the Roman
law did not disappear from the West in the early Middle Ages, but its
influence was greatly diminished as a result of the Germanic invasions.
Side by side with the Germanic codes, Roman law survived as the
customary law of the Roman population, known no longer through the
great law books of Justinian but in elementary manuals and form-books
which grew thinner and more jejune as time went on. The _Digest_,
the most important part of the _Corpus Juris Civilis_, disappears
from view between 603 and 1076; only two manuscripts survived; in
Maitland’s phrase, it “barely escaped with its life.” Legal study
persisted, if at all, merely as an apprenticeship in the drafting of
documents, a form of applied rhetoric. Then, late in the eleventh
century, and closely connected with the revival of trade and town
life, came a revival of law, foreshadowing the renaissance of the
century which followed. This revival can be traced at more than one
point in Italy, perhaps not first at Bologna, but here it soon found
its centre for the geographical reasons which, then as now, made this
city the meeting-point of the chief routes of communication in northern
Italy. Some time before 1100 we hear of a professor named Pepo, “the
bright and shining light of Bologna”; by 1119 we meet with the phrase
_Bononia docta_. At Bologna, as at Paris, a great teacher stands at
the beginning of university development. The teacher who gave Bologna
its reputation was one Irnerius, perhaps the most famous of the many
great professors of law in the Middle Ages. Just what he wrote and
what he taught are still subjects of dispute among scholars, but he
seems to have fixed the method of ‘glossing’ the law texts upon the
basis of a comprehensive use of the whole _Corpus Juris_, as contrasted
with the meagre epitomes of the preceding centuries, fully and finally
separating the Roman law from rhetoric and establishing it firmly as
a subject of professional study. Then, about 1140, Gratian, a monk of
San Felice, composed the _Decretum_ which became the standard text
in canon law, thus marked off from theology as a distinct subject of
higher study; and the preëminence of Bologna as a law school was fully
assured.

A student class had now appeared, expressing itself in correspondence
and in poetry, and by 1158 it was sufficiently important in Italy to
receive a formal grant of rights and privileges from Emperor Frederick
Barbarossa, though no particular town or university is mentioned. By
this time Bologna had become the resort of some hundreds of students,
not only from Italy but from beyond the Alps. Far from home and
undefended, they united for mutual protection and assistance, and this
organization of foreign, or Transmontane, students was the beginning of
the university. In this union they seem to have followed the example of
the gilds already common in Italian cities. Indeed, the word university
means originally such a group or corporation in general, and only
in time did it come to be limited to gilds of masters and students,
_universitas societas magistrorum discipulorumque_. Historically, the
word university has no connection with the universe or the universality
of learning; it denotes only the totality of a group, whether of
barbers, carpenters, or students did not matter. The students of
Bologna organized such a university first as a means of protection
against the townspeople, for the price of rooms and necessaries rose
rapidly with the crowd of new tenants and consumers, and the individual
student was helpless against such profiteering. United, the students
could bring the town to terms by the threat of departure as a body,
secession, for the university, having no buildings, was free to move,
and there are many historic examples of such migrations. Better rent
one’s rooms for less than not rent them at all, and so the student
organizations secured the power to fix the prices of lodgings and books
through their representatives.

Victorious over the townsmen, the students turned on ‘their other
enemies, the professors.’ Here the threat was a collective boycott,
and as the masters lived at first wholly from the fees of their pupils,
this threat was equally effective. The professor was put under bond to
live up to a minute set of regulations which guaranteed his students
the worth of the money paid by each. We read in the earliest statutes
(1317) that a professor might not be absent without leave, even a
single day, and if he desired to leave town he had to make a deposit
to ensure his return. If he failed to secure an audience of five for
a regular lecture, he was fined as if absent--a poor lecture indeed
which could not secure five hearers! He must begin with the bell and
quit within one minute after the next bell. He was not allowed to skip
a chapter in his commentary, or postpone a difficulty to the end of the
hour, and he was obliged to cover ground systematically, so much in
each specific term of the year. No one might spend the whole year on
introduction and bibliography! Coercion of this sort presupposes an
effective organization of the student body, and we hear of two and even
four universities of students, each composed of ‘nations’ and presided
over by a rector. Emphatically Bologna was a student university, and
Italian students are still quite apt to demand a voice in university
affairs. When I first visited the University of Palermo I found it
just recovering from a riot in which the students had broken the front
windows in a demand for more frequent, and thus less comprehensive,
examinations. At Padua’s seventh centenary last May the students
practically took over the town, with a programme of processions and
ceremonies quite their own and an amount of noise and tumult which
almost broke up the most solemn occasions and did break the windows of
the greatest hall in the city.

Excluded from the ‘universities’ of students, the professors also
formed a gild or ‘college,’ requiring for admission thereto certain
qualifications which were ascertained by examination, so that no
student could enter save by the gild’s consent. And, inasmuch as
ability to teach a subject is a good test of knowing it, the student
came to seek the professor’s license as a certificate of attainment,
regardless of his future career. This certificate, the license to
teach (_licentia docendi_), thus became the earliest form of academic
degree. Our higher degrees still preserve this tradition in the words
master (_magister_) and doctor, originally synonymous, while the French
even have a _licence_. A Master of Arts was one qualified to teach the
liberal arts; a Doctor of Laws, a certified teacher of law. And the
ambitious student sought the degree and gave an inaugural lecture,
even when he expressly disclaimed all intention of continuing in the
teaching profession. Already we recognize at Bologna the standard
academic degrees as well as the university organization and well-known
officials like the rector.

Other subjects of study appeared in course of time, arts, medicine,
and theology, but Bologna was preëminently a school of civil law, and
as such it became the model of university organization for Italy,
Spain, and southern France, countries where the study of law has always
had political and social as well as merely academic significance. Some
of these universities became Bologna’s competitors, like Montpellier
and Orleans as well as the Italian schools nearer home. Frederick II
founded the University of Naples in 1224 so that the students of his
Sicilian kingdom could go to a Ghibelline school at home instead of the
Guelfic centre in the North. Rival Padua was founded two years earlier
as a secession from Bologna, and only last year, on the occasion of
Padua’s seven-hundredth anniversary, I saw the ancient feud healed by
the kiss of peace bestowed on Bologna’s rector amid the encores of
ten thousand spectators. Padua, however, scarcely equalled Bologna in
our period, even though at a later age Portia sent thither for legal
authority, and though the university still shines with the glory of
Galileo.

       *       *       *       *       *

In northern Europe the origin of universities must be sought at Paris,
in the cathedral school of Notre-Dame. By the beginning of the twelfth
century in France and the Low Countries learning was no longer confined
to monasteries but had its most active centres in the schools attached
to cathedrals, of which the most famous were those of Liège, Rheims,
Laon, Paris, Orleans, and Chartres. The most notable of these schools
of the liberal arts was probably Chartres, distinguished by a canonist
like St. Ives and by famous teachers of classics and philosophy
like Bernard and Thierry. As early as 991 a monk of Rheims, Richer,
describes the hardships of his journey to Chartres in order to study
the _Aphorisms_ of Hippocrates of Cos; while from the twelfth century
John of Salisbury, the leading northern humanist of the age, has left
us an account of the masters which we shall later have occasion to
cite. Nowhere else today can we drop back more easily into a cathedral
city of the twelfth century, the peaceful town still dominated by its
church and sharing, now as then,

                      the minster’s vast repose.
  Silent and gray as forest-leaguered cliff
  Left inland by the ocean’s slow retreat,
                    ... patiently remote
  From the great tides of life it breasted once,
  Hearing the noise of men as in a dream.

By the time the cathedral stood complete, with its “dedicated shapes of
saints and kings,” it had ceased to be an intellectual centre of the
first importance, over-shadowed by Paris fifty-odd miles away, so that
Chartres never became a university.

The advantages of Paris were partly geographical, partly political
as the capital of the new French monarchy, but something must be set
down to the influence of a great teacher in the person of Abelard.
This brilliant young radical, with his persistent questioning and his
scant respect for titled authority, drew students in large numbers
wherever he taught, whether at Paris or in the wilderness. At Paris
he was connected with the church of Mont-Sainte-Geneviève longer than
with the cathedral school, but resort to Paris became a habit in his
time, and in this way he had a significant influence on the rise of
the university. In an institutional sense the university was a direct
outgrowth of the school of Notre-Dame, whose chancellor alone had
authority to license teaching in the diocese and thus kept his control
over the granting of university degrees, which here as at Bologna
were originally teachers’ certificates. The early schools were within
the cathedral precincts on the Ile de la Cité, that tangled quarter
about Notre-Dame pictured by Victor Hugo which has long since been
demolished. A little later we find masters and scholars living on the
Little Bridge (Petit-Pont) which connected the island with the Left
Bank of the Seine--this bridge gave its name to a whole school of
philosophers, the Parvipontani--but by the thirteenth century they have
over-run the Left Bank, thenceforth the Latin Quarter of Paris.

At what date Paris ceased to be a cathedral school and became a
university, no one can say, though it was certainly before the end of
the twelfth century. Universities, however, like to have precise dates
to celebrate, and the University of Paris has chosen 1200, the year of
its first royal charter. In that year, after certain students had been
killed in a town and gown altercation, King Philip Augustus issued a
formal privilege which punished his prévôt and recognized the exemption
of the students and their servants from lay jurisdiction, thus creating
that special position of students before the courts which has not yet
wholly disappeared from the world’s practice, though generally from
its law. More specific was the first papal privilege, the bull _Parens
scientiarum_ of 1231, issued after a two years’ cessation of lectures
growing out of a riot in which a band of students, having found “wine
that was good and sweet to drink,” beat up the tavern keeper and his
friends till they in turn suffered from the prévôt and his men, a
dissension in which the thirteenth century clearly saw the hand of the
devil. Confirming the existing exemptions, the Pope goes on to regulate
the discretion of the chancellor in conferring the license, at the
same time that he recognizes the right of the masters and students
“to make constitutions and ordinances regulating the manner and time
of lectures and disputations, the costume to be worn,” attendance at
masters’ funerals, the lectures of bachelors, necessarily more limited
than those of fully fledged masters, the price of lodgings, and the
coercion of members. Students must not carry arms, and only those who
frequent the schools regularly are to enjoy the exemptions of students,
the interpretation in practice being attendance at not less than two
lectures a week.

While the word university does not appear in these documents, it is
taken for granted. A university in the sense of an organized body
of masters existed already in the twelfth century; by 1231 it had
developed into a corporation, for Paris, in contrast to Bologna, was
a university of masters. There were now four faculties, each under a
dean: arts, canon law (civil law was forbidden at Paris after 1219),
medicine, and theology. The masters of arts, much more numerous than
the others, were grouped into four ‘nations:’ the French, including
the Latin peoples; the Norman; the Picard, including also the Low
Countries; and the English, comprising England, Germany, and the
North and East of Europe. These four nations chose the head of the
university, the rector, as he is still generally styled on the
Continent, whose term, however, was short, being later only three
months. If we may judge from such minutes as have survived, much of the
time of the nations was devoted to consuming the fees collected from
new members and new officers, or, as it was called, drinking up the
surplus--at the Two Swords near the Petit-Pont, at the sign of Our Lady
in the Rue S.-Jacques, at the Swan, the Falcon, the Arms of France,
and scores of similar places. A learned monograph on the taverns of
mediaeval Paris has been written from the records of the English
nation alone. The artificial constitution of the nations seems to have
encouraged rather than diminished the feuds and rivalries between the
various regions represented at Paris, of which Jacques de Vitry has
left a classic description:[1]

“They wrangled and disputed not merely about the various sects or
about some discussions; but the differences between the countries also
caused dissensions, hatreds, and virulent animosities among them, and
they impudently uttered all kinds of affronts and insults against
one another. They affirmed that the English were drunkards and had
tails; the sons of France proud, effeminate, and carefully adorned
like women. They said that the Germans were furious and obscene at
their feasts; the Normans, vain and boastful; the Poitevins, traitors
and always adventurers. The Burgundians they considered vulgar and
stupid. The Bretons were reputed to be fickle and changeable, and were
often reproached for the death of Arthur. The Lombards were called
avaricious, vicious, and cowardly; the Romans, seditious, turbulent,
and slanderous; the Sicilians, tyrannical and cruel; the inhabitants
of Brabant, men of blood, incendiaries, brigands, and ravishers;
the Flemish, fickle, prodigal, gluttonous, yielding as butter, and
slothful. After such insults, from words they often came to blows.”

Another university institution which goes back to twelfth-century
Paris is the college. Originally merely an endowed hospice or hall of
residence, the college early became an established unit of academic
life at many universities. “The object of the earliest college-founders
was simply to secure board and lodging for poor scholars who could
not pay for it themselves;” but in course of time the colleges became
normal centres of life and teaching, absorbing into themselves much
of the activity of the university. The colleges had buildings and
endowments, if the university had not. There was a college at Paris as
early as 1180; there were sixty-eight by 1500, and the system survived
until the Revolution, to leave behind it only fragments of buildings or
local names like the Sorbonne of today, sole memento of that Collège
de la Sorbonne founded for theologians by a confessor of St. Louis in
the thirteenth century. Many other continental universities had their
colleges, one of which, the ancient College of Spain at Bologna, still
survives for the delectation of the few Spanish youths who reach its
quiet courtyard. But of course the ultimate home of the college was
Oxford and Cambridge, where it came to be the most characteristic
feature of university life, arrogating to itself practically all
teaching as well as direction of social life, until the university
became merely an examining and degree-conferring body. Here the older
colleges like Balliol, Merton, and Peterhouse date from the thirteenth
century.

Paris was preëminent in the Middle Ages as a school of theology, and,
as theology was the supreme subject of mediaeval study, “Madame la
haute science” it was called, this means that it was preëminent as a
university. “The Italians have the Papacy, the Germans have the Empire,
and the French have Learning,” ran the old saying; and the chosen abode
of learning was Paris. Quite naturally Paris became the source and the
model for northern universities. Oxford branched off from this parent
stem late in the twelfth century, likewise with no definite date of
foundation; Cambridge began somewhat later. The German universities,
none of them older than the fourteenth century, were confessed
imitations of Paris. Thus the Elector Palatine, Ruprecht, in founding
the University of Heidelberg in 1386--for these later universities were
founded at specific dates--provides that it “shall be ruled, disposed,
and regulated according to the modes and matters accustomed to be
observed in the University of Paris, and that as a handmaid of Paris--a
worthy one let us hope--it shall imitate the steps of Paris in every
way possible, so that there shall be four faculties,” four nations and
a rector, exemptions for students and their servants, and even caps and
gowns for the several faculties “as has been observed at Paris.”[2]

By the end of the Middle Ages at least eighty universities had
been founded in different parts of Europe.[3] Some of these were
short-lived, many were of only local importance, others like Salerno
flourished only to die, but some like Paris and Montpellier, Bologna
and Padua, Oxford and Cambridge, Vienna and Prague and Leipzig, Coimbra
and Salamanca, Cracow and Louvain, have an unbroken history of many
centuries of distinction. And the great European universities of more
recent foundation, like Berlin, Strasbourg, Edinburgh, Manchester, and
London, follow in their organization the ancient models. In America
the earliest institutions of higher learning reproduced the type of
the contemporary English college at a time when the university in
England was eclipsed by its constituent colleges; but in the creation
of universities in the later nineteenth century, America turned to
the universities of the Continent and thus entered once more into the
ancient inheritance. Even in the colonial period a sense of the general
university tradition survived, for the charter of Rhode Island College
in 1764 grants “the same privileges, dignities, and immunities enjoyed
by the American colleges, and European universities.”

       *       *       *       *       *

What then is our inheritance from the oldest of universities? In the
first place it is not buildings or a type of architecture, for the
early universities had no buildings of their own, but on occasion used
private halls and neighboring churches. After all, as late as 1775 the
First Baptist Church in Providence was built “for the publick worship
of Almighty God, and also for holding Commencement in”! Indeed one
who seeks to reconstruct the life of ancient universities will find
little aid in their existing remains. Salerno retains no monuments of
its university, though its rare old cathedral, where Hildebrand lies
buried, must have seen the passing of many generations of would-be
physicians. In the halls and coats of arms of “many-domed Padua proud”
we behold the Renaissance, not the Middle Ages. Even Bologna, _Bononia
docta_, with its leaning towers and cool arcades, has no remains of
university architecture earlier than the fourteenth century, from
which date the oldest monuments of its professors of law gathered now
into the municipal museum. Montpellier and Orleans preserve nothing
from this period. Paris, too often careless of its storied past, can
show today only the ancient church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, where
university meetings were often held, unless we count, as we should, the
great cathedral in the Cité whence the university originally sprang.
The oldest Cambridge college, Peterhouse, has only a fragment of its
earliest buildings; the finest Cambridge monument, King’s College
chapel, is of the late fifteenth century. More than all others Oxford
gives the deepest impression of continuity with an ancient past,
Matthew Arnold’s Oxford, “so venerable, so lovely ... steeped in
sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens to the moon-light, and
whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age;”
yet so far as the actual college buildings are concerned they have much
more of sentiment than of the Middle Ages. Only at Merton, which fixed
the college type at Oxford, do any of the present structures carry us
back of 1300, and nowhere is there much of the fourteenth century.
Those venerable glories of Oxford, the Bodleian library, the tower of
Magdalen, and the hall of Christ Church, belong to a much later age,
the period of the Tudors, and thus by ordinary reckoning to modern
times. When we say how very mediaeval, we often mean how very Tudor!

Neither does the continuity lie in academic form and ceremony, in
spite of occasional survivals, like the conferring of degrees by the
ring or the kiss of peace, or the timing of examinations by the hour
glass as I have seen it at Portuguese Coimbra. Academic costume has in
it some element of tradition where it is a daily dress as at Oxford,
Cambridge, and Coimbra, but in America the tradition was broken by our
ancestors, and the formal cap and gown current in the United States
today are a product of modern Albany rather than of mediaeval Paris
and Bologna. Even in their ancient homes the costumes have changed.
“It is probable,” says Rashdall, “that no gown now worn in Oxford has
much resemblance to its mediaeval ancestor.” A student of mediaeval
Padua would not recognize the variegated procession which wound through
its streets last summer; Robert de Sorbon would rub his eyes at the
non-mediaeval styles of the gorgeous gowns which were massed on the
stage of the great hall of the Sorbonne when President Wilson received
his honorary degree in 1918.

It is, then, in institutions that the university tradition is most
direct. First, the very name university, as an association of masters
and scholars leading the common life of learning. Characteristic
of the Middle Ages as such a corporation is, the individualistic
modern world has found nothing to take its place. Next, the notion
of a curriculum of study, definitely laid down as regards time and
subjects, tested by an examination and leading to a degree, as well
as many of the degrees themselves--bachelor, as a stage toward the
mastership, master, doctor, in arts, law, medicine, and theology. Then
the faculties, four or more, with their deans, and the higher officers
such as chancellors and rectors, not to mention the college, wherever
the residential college still survives. The essentials of university
organization are clear and unmistakable, and they have been handed
down in unbroken continuity. They have lasted more than seven hundred
years--what form of government has lasted so long? Very likely all this
is not final--nothing is in this world of flux--but it is singularly
tough and persistent, suited to use and also to abuse, like Bryce’s
university with a faculty “consisting of Mrs. Johnson and myself,”
or the “eleven leading universities” of a certain state of the Middle
West! Universities are at times criticised for their aloofness or
their devotion to vocationalism, for being too easy or too severe, and
drastic efforts have been made to reform them by abolishing entrance
requirements or eliminating all that does not lead directly to bread
and butter; but no substitute has been found for the university in its
main business, the training of scholars and the maintenance of the
tradition of learning and investigation. The glory of the mediaeval
university, says Rashdall, was “the consecration of Learning,” and
the glory and the vision have not yet perished from the earth. “The
mediaeval university,” it has been said, “was the school of the modern
spirit.” How the early universities performed this task will be the
theme of the next lecture.




II

THE MEDIAEVAL PROFESSOR


In the last lecture we considered the mediaeval university as an
institution. We come now to examine it as an intellectual centre. This
involves some account of its course of study, its methods of teaching,
and the status and freedom of its teachers. The element of continuity,
so clear in institutions, is often less evident in the content of
learning, but even here the thread is unbroken, the contrast with
modern conditions less sharp than is often supposed.

The basis of education in the early Middle Ages consisted, as we have
seen, of the so-called seven liberal arts. Three of these, grammar,
rhetoric, and logic, were grouped as the trivium; the remaining four,
arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music, made up the quadrivium.
The first group was the more rudimentary, but the second was
rudimentary enough. The number was fixed and the content standardized
during the decadence of ancient learning, and the whole conception
reached the Middle Ages chiefly in the book of a certain Martianus
Capella, written in the early fifth century. These later ages of
classical antiquity, in condensing and desiccating knowledge for their
own more limited intelligence, were also unconsciously preparing for
later times those small and convenient packages which alone could be
carried as a _viaticum_ through the stormy times of the Dark Ages.
It was almost wholly as formulated in a few standard texts that the
learning of the ancient world was transmitted to mediaeval times, and
the authority of these manuals was so great that a list of those in use
in any period affords an accurate index of the extent of its knowledge
and the nature of its instruction. It was a bookish age, with great
reverence for standard authorities, and its instruction followed
closely the written word.

In the monastic and cathedral schools of the earlier period the
textbooks were few and simple, chiefly the Latin grammars of Donatus
and Priscian with some elementary reading-books, the logical manuals of
Boethius, as well as his arithmetic and music, a manual of rhetoric,
the most elementary propositions of geometry, and an outline of
practical astronomy such as that of the Venerable Bede. Of Greek,
of course, there was none. This slender curriculum in arts was much
enlarged by the renaissance of the twelfth century, which added to
the store of western knowledge the astronomy of Ptolemy, the complete
works of Euclid, and the Aristotelian logic, while at the same time
under the head of grammar great stimulus was given to the study and
reading of the Latin classics. This classical revival, which is
noteworthy and comparatively little known, centred in such cathedral
schools as Chartres and Orleans, where the spirit of a real humanism
showed itself in an enthusiastic study of ancient authors and in the
production of Latin verse of a really remarkable quality. Certain
writings of one of these poets, Bishop Hildebert of Le Mans, were even
mistaken for “real antiques” by later humanists. Nevertheless, though
brilliant, this classical movement was short-lived, crushed in its
early youth by the triumph of logic and the more practical studies
of law and rhetoric. In the later twelfth century John of Salisbury
inveighs against the logicians of his day, with their superficial
knowledge of literature; in the university curriculum of the thirteenth
century, literary studies have quite disappeared. Toward 1250, when a
French poet, Henri d’Andeli, wrote his _Battle of the Seven Arts_, the
classics are already the ancients, fighting a losing battle against the
moderns:

  Logic has the students,
  Whereas Grammar is reduced in numbers.

         *       *       *       *       *

  Civil Law rode gorgeously
  And Canon Law rode haughtily
  Ahead of all the other arts.

If the absence of the ancient classics and of vernacular literature is
a striking feature of the university curriculum in arts, an equally
striking fact is the amount of emphasis placed on logic or dialectic.
The earliest university statutes, those of Paris in 1215, require the
whole of Aristotle’s logical works, and throughout the Middle Ages
these remain the backbone of the arts course, so that Chaucer can speak
of the study of logic as synonymous with attendance at a university--

  That un-to logik hadde longe y-go.

In a sense this is perfectly just, for logic was not only a major
subject of study itself, it pervaded every other subject as a method
and gave tone and character to the mediaeval mind. Syllogism,
disputation, the orderly marshalling of arguments for and against
specific theses, these became the intellectual habit of the age in
law and medicine as well as in philosophy and theology. The logic,
of course, was Aristotle’s, and the other works of the philosopher
soon followed, so that in the Paris course of 1254 we find also the
_Ethics_, the _Metaphysics_, and the various treatises on natural
science which had at first been forbidden to students. To Dante
Aristotle had become “the Master of them that know,” by virtue of the
universality of his method no less than of his all-embracing learning.
“The father of book knowledge and the grandfather of the commentator,”
no other writer appealed so strongly as Aristotle to the mediaeval
reverence for the textbook and the mediaeval habit of formal thought.
Doctrines like the eternity of matter which seemed dangerous to faith
were explained away, and great and authoritative systems of theology
were built up by the methods of the pagan philosopher. And all idea of
literary form disappeared when everything depended on argument alone.

If the study of the classics became confined to examples and
excerpts designed to illustrate the rules of grammar, rhetoric had
a somewhat different fate by reason of its practical applications.
The intellectual life of the Middle Ages was not characterized by
spontaneous or widely diffused power of literary expression. Few
were able to write, still fewer could compose a letter, and the
professional scribes and notaries on whom devolved the greater part of
the labor of mediaeval correspondence fastened upon the letter-writing
of the period the stereotyped formalism of a conventional rhetoric.
Regular instruction in the composition of letters and official acts
was given in the schools and chanceries, and numerous professors,
called _dictatores_, went about from place to place teaching this
valuable art--“often and exceeding necessary for the clergy, for
monks suitable, and for laymen honorable,” as one rhetorician tells
us. By the thirteenth century such masters had found a place in
certain universities, especially in Italy and Southern France, and
they advertised their wares in a way that has been compared to the
claims of a modern business course--short and practical, with no time
wasted on outgrown classical authors but everything fresh and snappy
and up-to-date, ready to be applied the same day if need be! Thus one
professor at Bologna derides the study of Cicero, whom he cannot recall
having read, and promises to train his students in writing every sort
of letter and official document which was demanded of the notaries and
secretaries of his day. Since, as we shall see in the next lecture,
such teachers specialized in the composition of student letters,
chiefly skilful appeals to the parental purse, their practical utility
was at once apparent. “Let us,” says one writer, “take as our theme
today that a poor and diligent student at Paris is to write his mother
for necessary expenses.” Would not every listener be sure that here at
least he had found “the real thing”? The professor of rhetoric might
also be called in to draft a university prospectus, like the circular
issued in 1229 by the masters of the new University of Toulouse setting
forth its superiority to Paris--theologians teaching in the pulpits
and preaching at the street corners, lawyers magnifying Justinian
and physicians Galen, professors of grammar and logic, and musicians
with their organs, lectures on the books of natural philosophy then
forbidden at Paris, low prices, a friendly populace, the way now
prepared by the extirpation of the thorns of heresy, a land flowing
with milk and honey, Bacchus reigning in the vineyards and Ceres in the
fields under the mild climate desired by the philosophers of old, with
plenary indulgence for all masters and students. Who could resist such
an appeal from the South?

With grammar and rhetoric reduced to a subordinate position and the
studies of the quadrivium receiving but scant attention, the arts
course was mainly a course in logic and philosophy, plus so much of the
natural sciences as could be apprehended by the scholastic study of the
“natural books” of Aristotle. Laboratories there were none until long
after the Middle Ages were past, and of history and the social sciences
nothing was heard in universities until still later. Hard, close drill
on a few well-thumbed books was the rule. The course in arts led
normally to the master’s degree in six years, with the baccalaureate
somewhere on the way. Graduation in arts was the common preparation for
professional study, being regularly required for theology and usual
for intending lawyers and physicians. A sound tradition, to which the
American world has given too little attention!

Contrary to a common impression, there were relatively few students
of theology in mediaeval universities, for a prescribed theological
training for the priesthood came in only with the Counter-Reformation.
The requirements for admission were high; the course in theology itself
was long; the books were costly. True, these books were commonly only
the Bible and the _Sentences_ of Peter Lombard, but the Bible in the
Middle Ages might run into several volumes, especially when accompanied
by gloss and commentary, and the copying of these by hand was a tedious
and costly business. An ambitious student at Orleans who asks for money
to buy a Bible and begin theology is advised by his father to turn
rather to some lucrative profession. At the best, complain the Paris
chancellors, students come late to theology, which should be the wife
of their youth.

Medicine likewise was studied in books, chiefly Galen and Hippocrates
with their Arabic translators and commentators, among whom Avicenna
held the first place after the thirteenth century. Indeed Avicenna
was still more firmly intrenched in the East, for as late as 1887 a
majority of the native physicians in the Persian capital “knew no
medicine but that of Avicenna.”[4] Except for some advance in anatomy
and surgery at certain southern schools, like Bologna and Montpellier,
the mediaeval universities made no contributions to medical knowledge,
for no subject was less adapted to their prevailing method of verbal
and syllogistic dogmatism.

In law the basis of all instruction was inevitably the _Corpus Juris
Civilis_ of Justinian, for the customary law of mediaeval Europe was
never a subject of university study. The central book was the _Digest_,
summarizing the ripest fruits of Roman legal science, and it was
their mastery of the _Digest_ that gives preëminence to the mediaeval
civilians. They brought the resources of the whole _Corpus_ to bear
on each passage in an elaborate gloss, and they showed refinement
and subtlety of legal thought analogous to that of the scholastic
philosophers. After all, “law is a form of scholasticism.” But whereas
the scholastic method in philosophy has lost hold on much of the modern
world, the work of the glossators still survives. “In many respects,”
says Rashdall,[5] “the work of the School of Bologna represents the
most brilliant achievement of the intellect of mediaeval Europe. The
mediaeval mind had, indeed, a certain natural affinity for the study
and development of an already existing body of Law. The limitations
of its knowledge of the past and of the material Universe were not,
to any appreciable extent, a bar to the mastery of a Science which
concerns itself simply with the business and the relations of every-day
life. The Jurist received his Justinian on authority as the Theologian
received the Canonical and Patristic writings, or the Philosopher his
Aristotle, while he had the advantage of receiving it in the original
language. It had only to be understood, to be interpreted, developed,
and applied.... The works of these men are, perhaps, the only
productions of mediaeval learning to which the modern Professor of any
science whatever may turn, not merely for the sake of their historical
interest, not merely in the hope of finding ideas of a suggestive
value, but with some possibility of finding a solution of the doubts,
difficulties and problems which still beset the modern student.”

The canon law was closely associated with the civil, indeed for
many purposes it was desirable to graduate in both these subjects
as a _Doctor utriusque juris_, or as we say a J.U.D. or an LL. D.
Canon law was condemned by the theologians as a “lucrative” subject,
which drew students away from pure learning toward the path of
ecclesiastical preferment. By the thirteenth century the mediaeval
church was a vast administrative machine which needed lawyers to run
it, and a well-trained canonist had a good chance of rising to the
highest dignities.[6] No wonder canon law attracted the ambitious,
the wealthy, even the idle, for at Paris we are told that the lazy
students frequented the lectures of the canonists in the middle of the
morning, rather than the other courses which began at six. The standard
textbook in canon law was the _Decretum_ of Gratian, supplemented by
the decretals of subsequent popes, especially the great collection
which Gregory IX in 1234 distributed to the principal universities.
The methods of studying these texts were the same as in the civil law,
giving rise to the rich canonistic literature of the later Middle Ages
and the marginal glosses for which, according to Dante, “the Gospel and
the great doctors are deserted.”

Of the textbooks needed in all these subjects the university undertook
to secure a supply at once sufficient, correct, and cheap, for the
regulation of the book trade was one of the earliest and most valued
of university privileges. As books were costly they were commonly
rented, at a fixed price per quire, rather than owned; indeed the
sale of books was hedged in by close restrictions designed to curb
monopoly prices and to prevent their removal from town. The earliest
Paris tariff, ca. 1286, lists for rent copies of one hundred and
thirty-eight different books. In course of time many students came to
have books of their own--a Bible, or at least some part of it, a piece
of the _Digest_, perhaps even the “twenty bokes clad in blak or reed”
of Chaucer’s Oxford clerk. Whether rented or owned, the supply was not
inconsiderable; on the Bolognese monuments each student has a book
before him. So long as each copy had to be made by hand, accuracy was a
matter of much importance, and the university had its supervisors and
correctors who inspected periodically all the books for sale in the
town. Moreover, at Bologna a constant supply of new books was secured
by the requirement that every professor should turn over a copy of
his repetitions and disputations to the stationers for publication.
The principal books of law and theology were the natural outgrowth of
university lectures. With demand and supply so largely concentrated in
the universities, it is not surprising that these should have become
the chief centres of the book trade and, as we should say, of the
publishing business. So long as students could rent the books they
required, there was less need for libraries than we might at first
suppose, and it was quite natural that for long the university as
such should have no library. In course of time, however, books were
given for the use of students, chiefly in the form of bequests to
the colleges, where they could be borrowed or consulted on the spot.
By 1338 the oldest extant catalogue of the Sorbonne, the chief Paris
library, lists 1722 volumes, many of them still to be seen in the
Bibliothèque Nationale, while many an Oxford college still preserves
codices which belonged to its library in the Middle Ages.

Turning from books to professors, we should note at the outset that
the Middle Ages produced many excellent and renowned teachers. The
mechanism of learning was still comparatively simple, its content not
yet overwhelming, and, in spite of the close adherence to texts, there
was a large scope for the personality of the instructor. Thus, long
before the days of universities, Alcuin was the moving spirit in the
revival of education at the court of Charlemagne and the monastery
school of Tours, and two centuries later Gerbert of Rheims roused the
wonder of contemporaries by his skilful use of the classics in the
study of rhetoric and by devices for the teaching of astronomy so
ingenious that they seemed in some way “divine.”[7] From the period
of university origins we get a fairly clear impression of Abelard
as a teacher and ‘class-room entertainer,’ bold, original, lucid,
sharply polemical, always fresh and stimulating, and withal “able to
move to laughter the minds of serious men.” His procedure as exhibited
in his _Sic et non_ was to marshal authorities and arguments for and
against specific propositions, a method which was soon imitated in
Gratian’s _Concord of Discordant Canons_, and, reënforced by the _New
Logic_ of Aristotle, was to culminate in the scholastic method of St.
Thomas Aquinas and stamp itself upon the thought of many generations.
Sharpening to the wits as this method was in the hands of Abelard and
his successors, the very antagonism of yes or no as he formulated it
left no room for intermediate positions, for those _nuances_ of thought
in which, as Renan pointed out, truth is usually to be found.

For a contemporary impression of the teachers of the twelfth century,
nothing is so good as the oft-quoted passages in which John of
Salisbury describes his _Wanderjahre_ in France from 1136 to 1147,
chiefly at Paris and Chartres.[8] Learning the rudiments of dialectic
from Abelard, he continued under two other teachers of this art, one
over-scrupulous in detail, perspicuous, brief, and to the point, the
other subtle and profuse, showing that simple answers could not be
given. “Afterward one of them went to Bologna and unlearned what he had
taught, so that on his return he also untaught it.” John then passed
on to Chartres to study grammar under William of Conches and Bernard.
The humane yet thorough teaching of literature here excited his warm
admiration--close study, memorizing choice extracts, grammar taught
by composition, imitation of excellent models but merciless exposure
of borrowed finery, qualities which made Bernard “the most copious
source of letters in Gaul in modern times.” Returning to Paris after
twelve years’ absence, John found his old companions “as before, and
where they were before; nor did they appear to have reached the goal
in unravelling the old questions, nor had they added one jot of a
proposition. The aims that once inspired them, inspired them still:
they had progressed in one point only: they had unlearned moderation,
they knew not modesty; in such wise that one might despair of their
recovery. And thus experience taught me a manifest conclusion, that,
whereas dialectic furthers other studies, so if it remain by itself it
lies bloodless and barren, nor does it quicken the soul to yield fruit
of philosophy, except the same conceive from elsewhere.”

The teachers of the thirteenth century who talk most about themselves
are the professors of grammar and rhetoric like Buoncompagno at
Bologna, John of Garlande at Paris, Ponce of Provence at Orleans, and
Lorenzo of Aquileia at Naples and almost everywhere, but we shall
make sufficient acquaintance with their inflated writings in other
connections. More significant is the account which Odofredus gives of
his lectures on the _Old Digest_ at Bologna:

“Concerning the method of teaching the following order was kept by
ancient and modern doctors and especially by my own master, which
method I shall observe: First, I shall give you summaries of each title
before I proceed to the text; second, I shall give you as clear and
explicit a statement as I can of the purport of each law [included in
the title]; third, I shall read the text with a view to correcting it;
fourth, I shall briefly repeat the contents of the law; fifth, I shall
solve apparent contradictions, adding any general principles of law
[to be extracted from the passage], commonly called ‘Brocardica,’ and
any distinctions or subtle and useful problems (_quaestiones_) arising
out of the law with their solutions, as far as the Divine Providence
shall enable me. And if any law shall seem deserving, by reason of
its celebrity or difficulty, of a repetition, I shall reserve it for
an evening repetition, for I shall dispute at least twice a year, once
before Christmas and once before Easter, if you like.

“I shall always begin the _Old Digest_ on or about the octave of
Michaelmas [6 October] and finish it entirely, by God’s help, with
everything ordinary and extraordinary, about the middle of August. The
_Code_ I shall always begin about a fortnight after Michaelmas and by
God’s help complete it, with everything ordinary and extraordinary,
about the first of August. Formerly the doctors did not lecture on the
extraordinary portions; but with me all students can have profit, even
the ignorant and the new-comers, for they will hear the whole book, nor
will anything be omitted as was once the common practice here. For the
ignorant can profit by the statement of the case and the exposition of
the text, the more advanced can become more adept in the subtleties
of questions and opposing opinions. And I shall read all the glosses,
which was not the practice before my time.” Then comes certain general
advice as to the choice of teachers and the methods of study, followed
by some general account of the _Digest_.

This course closed as follows: “Now gentlemen, we have begun and
finished and gone through this book as you know who have been in the
class, for which we thank God and His Virgin Mother and all His saints.
It is an ancient custom in this city that when a book is finished
mass should be sung to the Holy Ghost, and it is a good custom and
hence should be observed. But since it is the practice that doctors on
finishing a book should say something of their plans, I will tell you
something but not much. Next year I expect to give ordinary lectures
well and lawfully as I always have, but no extraordinary lectures,
for students are not good payers, wishing to learn but not to pay, as
the saying is: All desire to know but none to pay the price. I have
nothing more to say to you beyond dismissing you with God’s blessing
and begging you to attend the mass.”[9]

Important as was the formal lecture in those days of few books and no
laboratories, it was by no means the sole vehicle of instruction. A
comprehensive survey of university teaching would need also to take
account of the less formal ‘cursory’ or ‘extraordinary’ lectures,
many of them given by mere bachelors; the reviews and ‘repetitions,’
which were often given in hospices or colleges in the evenings; and
the disputations which prepared for the final ordeal of maintaining
publicly the graduation thesis.

The class-rooms in which these lectures were given have long since
disappeared. If the master’s house had no suitable room, he literally
hired a hall in some convenient neighborhood. At Paris such halls
were mostly in a single street on the Left Bank, the Vicus Stramineus
or Rue du Fouarre celebrated by Dante, apparently so-called from the
straw-covered floor on which the students sat as they took notes. At
Bologna the class-rooms were rather more ambitious. Here Buoncompagno,
writing in 1235, has described an ideal lecture hall, quiet and clean,
with a fair prospect from its windows, its walls painted green but
with no pictures or statues to distract attention, the lecturer’s
seat elevated so that he may see and be seen by all, the seats of the
students permanently assigned by nations and according to individual
rank and fame; but he adds significantly, “I never had such a house
myself and do not believe any of this sort was ever built.” Our
knowledge of the realities of the Bolognese class-room is derived
chiefly from the monuments and miniatures of the professors of the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in which the master is regularly
seated at a desk under a canopy on a raised platform, while the
students have flat or inclined desks on which their books lie open. The
professors, in medicine as in law, regularly have an open volume before
them.

The nature of the final examination is best illustrated at Paris,
where it is described in the _De conscientia_ of that genial moralist,
Robert de Sorbon, founder of the Sorbonne, by means of a suggestive
parallel with the Last Judgment. Taking as his text Job’s desire that
his “adversary had written a book,” and outlining his headings in the
approved fashion of his time, Robert begins with the statement that
if any one decides to seek the _licentia legendi_ at Paris and cannot
be excused from examination--as many of the great, by special favor,
are--he would much like to be told by the chancellor, or by some one
in his confidence, on what book he would be examined. Just as he would
be a crazy student indeed, who, having found out which book this was,
should neglect it and spend his time on others, even so is he mad who
fails to study the book of his own conscience, in which we shall all,
without exception, be examined at the great day. Moreover, if any one
is rejected by the chancellor, he may be reëxamined after a year, or
it may be that, through the intercession of friends or by suitable
gifts or services to the chancellor’s relatives or other examiners,
the chancellor can be induced to change his decision; whereas at the
Last Judgment the sentence will be final and there will be no help
from wealth or influence or stout assertion of ability as canonist or
civilian or of familiarity with all arguments and all fallacies. Then,
if one fails before the chancellor of Paris, the fact is known to but
five or six and the mortification passes away in time, while the Great
Chancellor, God, will refute the sinner ‘in full university’ before
the whole world. The chancellor, too, does not flog the candidate,
but in the Last Judgment the guilty will be beaten with a rod of iron
from the valley of Jehosaphat through the length of hell, nor can we
reckon, like idle boys in the grammar-schools, on escaping Saturday’s
punishment by feigning illness, playing truant, or being stronger
than the master, or like them solace ourselves with the thought
that after all our fun is well worth a whipping. The chancellor’s
examination, too, is voluntary; he does not force any one to seek the
degree, but waits as long as the scholars wish, and is even burdened
with their insistent demands for examinations. In studying the book
of our conscience we should imitate the candidates for the license,
who eat and drink sparingly, conning steadily the one book they are
preparing, searching out all the authorities that pertain to this,
and hearing only the professors that lecture on this subject, so that
they have difficulty in concealing from their fellows the fact that
they are preparing for examination. Such preparation is not the work
of five or ten days--though there are many who will not meditate a day
or an hour on their sins--but of many years. At the examination the
chancellor asks, “Brother, what do you say to this question, what do
you say to this one and this one?” The chancellor is not satisfied with
a verbal knowledge of books without an understanding of their sense,
but unlike the Great Judge, who will hear the book of our conscience
from beginning to end and suffer no mistakes, he requires only seven
or eight passages in a book and passes the candidate if he answers
three questions out of four. Still another difference lies in the
fact that the chancellor does not always conduct the examination in
person, so that the student who would be terrified in the presence of
so much learning often answers well before the masters who act in the
chancellor’s place. Nothing is here said of the public maintenance of
a thesis against all comers, an important final exercise which still
survives as a form in German universities.

At Bologna there was first a “rigorous and tremendous examination”
before doctors, each sworn to treat the candidate “as he would his own
son.” Then followed a public examination and inception which a letter
home described as follows: “‘Sing unto the Lord a new song, praise him
with stringed instruments and organs, rejoice upon the high-sounding
cymbals,’ for your son has held a glorious disputation, which was
attended by a great multitude of teachers and scholars. He answered
all questions without a mistake, and no one could prevail against his
arguments. Moreover he celebrated a famous banquet, at which both rich
and poor were honored as never before, and he has duly begun to give
lectures which are already so popular that others’ class-rooms are
deserted and his own are filled.” The same rhetorician also tells of an
unsuccessful candidate who could do nothing in the disputation but sat
in his chair like a goat while the spectators in derision called him
rabbi; his guests at the banquet had such eating that they had no will
to drink, and he must needs hire students to attend his classes.

The social position of mediaeval professors must be seen against the
background of the social system of a different age from ours. We come
perhaps nearest to modern conditions in the cities of Italy, where
there is evidence in the Middle Ages as now of the distinguished
position of many professors of medicine and civil law. Many theologians
and teachers of canon law reached high places in the church such as
bishoprics and cardinalates. Among the theologians and philosophers
those of highest distinction were regularly university professors:
Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, Bonaventura, all the great array
of doctors angelic, invincible, irrefragable, seraphic, subtle, and
universal. That these were also Dominicans or Franciscans withdrew them
only partially from the world.

If, as some reformers maintain, the social position and self-respect
of professors involve their management of university affairs, the
Middle Ages were the great age of professorial control. The university
itself was a society of masters when it was not a society of students.
As there were no endowments of importance there were no boards of
trustees, nor was there any such system of state control as exists on
the Continent or in many parts of the United States. Administration in
the modern sense was strikingly absent, but much time was consumed in
various sorts of university meetings. In a quite remarkable degree the
university was self-governing as well as self-respecting, escaping some
of the abuses of a system which occasionally allows trustees or regents
to speak of professors as their “hired men.” Whether the individual
professor was freer under such a system is another question, for the
corporation of masters was apt to exercise a pretty close control over
action if not over opinion, and the tyranny of colleagues is a form of
that “tyranny of one’s next-door neighbor” from which the world seems
unable to escape.

There remains the question of the professor’s intellectual liberty,
the right to teach truth as he sees it, which we have come to call
academic freedom. It is plain that much depends here, as with Pilate,
on our conception of truth. If it is something to be discovered by
search, the search must be free and untrammelled. If, however, truth
is something which has already been revealed to us by authority, then
it has only to be expounded, and the expositor must be faithful to the
authoritative doctrine. Needless to say, the latter was the mediaeval
conception of truth and its teaching. “Faith,” it was held, “precedes
science, fixes its boundaries, and prescribes its conditions.”[10] “I
believe in order that I may know, I do not know in order to believe,”
said Anselm. If reason has its bounds thus set, it befits reason to be
humble. Let not the masters and students of Paris, says Gregory IX,
“show themselves philosophers, but let them strive to become God’s
learned.” The dangers of intellectual pride and reliance upon reason
alone are illustrated by many characteristic stories of masters struck
dumb in the midst of their boasting, like Étienne de Tournay, who,
having proved the doctrine of the Trinity “so lucidly, so elegantly, so
catholically,” asserted that he could just as easily demolish his own
proof. Mediaeval orthodoxy looked askance at mere cleverness, partly
because much of the discussion of the schools led nowhere, partly
because a mind that played too freely about a proposition might easily
fall into heresy. And for the detection and punishment of heresy the
mediaeval church organized a special system of courts known as the
Inquisition.

Such being the general conditions, what was the actual situation? In
practice freedom was general, save in philosophy and theology. In
law, in medicine, in grammar and mathematics, men were normally free
to lecture and dispute as they would. As there was no social problem
in the modern sense and no teaching of the social sciences as such,
a fruitful source of difficulty was absent. So far as I know, no
mediaeval professor was condemned for preaching free trade or free
silver or socialism or non-resistance. Moreover, while individual
treatises might be publicly burnt, as in the later Roman Empire, there
was no organized censorship of books before the sixteenth century.

Now as to philosophy and theology. The trouble lies of course with
theology, for philosophy was free save when it touched theological
questions. But then, philosophy is very apt to touch theological
questions, and all through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
there was an intermittent fight between Christian theology and pagan
philosophy as represented by the works of Aristotle. It began with
Abelard when he tried to apply his logical method of inquiry to
theology, and it went on when his contemporary, Gilbert de la Porrée,
directed still more of the Aristotelian logic toward theological
speculation. By the end of the twelfth century, the _New Logic_ was
pretty well assimilated, but then came Aristotle’s _Metaphysics_ and
natural philosophy, with their Arabic commentators, the study of which
at Paris was formally forbidden in 1210 and 1215. In 1231 the Pope
requires them to be “examined and purged of all suspicion of error,”
but by 1254 they are a fixed part of the curriculum in arts, not
expurgated but reconciled by interpretation to the Christian faith. A
generation later there is a recrudescence of Averroism, emphasizing the
doctrine of the eternity of matter and the determination of earthly
acts by the heavenly bodies; and two hundred and nineteen errors of
this party were condemned in 1277 by the bishop of Paris, who took
occasion to lament incursions into theology on the part of students
of arts. Throughout this period the whole of Aristotle was taught and
studied at Paris, and his method was used by Thomas Aquinas to rear his
vast structure of scholastic theology. Others reserved for themselves
a wide range of philosophic speculation, and in case of trouble they
could save themselves by falling back on the doctrine that what was
true in philosophy might be false in theology, and _vice versa_.

With an eye to this question of freedom of teaching, I have gone
through all the documents of the thirteenth century in the Paris
_Chartularium_. Outside of the great controversies just mentioned the
result is meagre. In 1241 a series of ten errors was examined and
condemned by the chancellor and the professors of theology, a very
abstract series of propositions dealing with the visibility of the
divine essence, angels, and the exact abiding-place of glorified souls
in the next world, whether in the empyrean or the crystalline heaven.
In 1247 it appears that a certain Master Raymond had been imprisoned
for his errors by the advice of the masters of theology, and one
John de Brescain had been deprived of his right to teach because of
certain errors in logic “which seemed to come near Arian heresy,” thus
confusing the subjects of the two faculties, whose bounds had been
set by the fathers. In and about 1255 Paris was in a ferment over the
so-called ‘Eternal Gospel,’ an apocalyptic treatise which foretold a
new era of the Spirit, beginning in 1260, in which the New Testament,
the Pope, and the hierarchy should be superseded. Accepted by certain
advanced Franciscans, these doctrines became the occasion of a long
conflict with the Mendicant orders, but with no very decisive results.
In 1277 Paris received notice of thirty errors in arts condemned at
Oxford, not as heretical but as sufficient to cause the deposition of
the master teaching them; but when we find among them the abolition
of the cases of Latin nouns and the personal endings of verbs (_ego
currit_, _tu currit_, etc.), we are likely to sympathize more with
their unfortunate students than with the deposed masters. One is
reminded of the modern definition of academic freedom as “the right to
say what one thinks without thinking what one says!”

With these as the only notable examples of interference with free
teaching at the storm centre of theological speculation in the most
active period of its history, we must infer that there was a large
amount of actual freedom. Trouble arose almost entirely out of what was
deemed theological heresy, or undue meddling with theological subjects
by those who lacked theological training. Those who stuck to their
job seem generally to have been let alone. As the great jurist Cujas
replied in the sixteenth century when asked whether he was Protestant
or Catholic, _Nihil hoc ad edictum praetoris_. Even within the more
carefully guarded field of theology and philosophy, it is doubtful
whether many found themselves cramped. Accepting the principle of
authority as their starting-point, men did not feel its limitations as
we should feel them now. A fence is no obstacle to those who do not
desire to go outside, and many barriers that would seem intolerable to
a more sceptical age were not felt as barriers by the schoolmen. He is
free who feels himself free.

Furthermore, for those accustomed to the wide diversities of the
modern world, it is easy to form a false impression of the uniformity
and sameness of mediaeval thought. Scholasticism was not one thing
but many, as its historians constantly remind us, and the contests
between different schools and shades of opinion were as keen as
among the Greeks or in our own day. And if the differences often
seem minute or unreal to our distant eye, we can make them modern
enough by turning, for example, to the old question of the nature of
universal conceptions, which divided the Nominalists and Realists
of the Middle Ages. Are universals mere names, or have they a real
existence, independent of their individual embodiments? A bit arid
it all sounds if we make it merely a matter of logic, but exciting
enough as soon as it becomes a question of life. The essence of the
Reformation lies implicit in whether we take a nominalist or a realist
view of the church; the central problem of politics depends largely
upon a nominalist or a realist view of the state. Upon the two sides
of this last question millions of men have “all uncouthly died,” all
unconsciously too, no doubt, in the majority of cases, unaware of the
ultimate issues of political authority for which they fought, but yet
able to comprehend them when expressed in the concrete form of putting
the interest of the state above the interest of its members.

In his own time and his own way the mediaeval professor often dealt
with permanent human interests as he sharpened men’s wits and kept
alive the continuous tradition of learning.




III

THE MEDIAEVAL STUDENT


“A University,” it has more than once been remarked by professors,
“would be a very comfortable place were it not for the students.” So
far we have been considering universities from the point of view of
professors; it is now the turn of the students, for whether these be
regarded as a necessary evil or as the main reason for the university’s
existence, they certainly cannot be ignored. A mediaeval university
was no regiment of colonels but “a society of masters _and scholars_,”
and to this second and more numerous element we must now direct our
attention.

The mediaeval student is a more elusive figure than his teachers, for
he is individually less conspicuous and must generally be seen in
the mass. Moreover the mass is much diversified in time and space,
so that generalization is difficult, what is true of one age and one
university being quite untrue of other times and places. Even within
the briefer span of American universities there are wide differences
among the students of, let us say, Harvard in the seventeenth
century, William and Mary in the eighteenth century, California in
the nineteenth century, and Columbia in the twentieth century; and
it would be impossible to make a true picture out of elements drawn
indiscriminately from such disparate sources. Until the conditions
at each university of the Middle Ages shall have been studied
chronologically, no sound account of student life in general can be
written, and this preliminary labor has nowhere been systematically
attempted. At present we can do no more than indicate the principal
sources of our information and the kind of light they throw upon
student life.

Fortunately, out of the scattered remains of mediaeval times, there
has come down to us a considerable body of material which deals, more
or less directly, with student affairs. There are, for one thing, the
records of the courts of law, which, amid the monotonous detail of
petty disorders and oft-repeated offences, preserve now and then a
vivid bit of mediaeval life--like the case of the Bolognese student who
was attacked with a cutlass in a class-room, to the great damage and
loss of those assembled to hear the lecture of a noble and egregious
doctor of laws; or the student in 1289 who was set upon in the street
in front of a lecture-room by a certain scribe, “who wounded him on
the head with a stone, so that much blood gushed forth,” while two
companions gave aid and counsel, saying, “Give it to him, hit him,”
and when the offence had been committed ran away. So the coroners’
rolls of Oxford record many a fatal issue of town and gown riots, while
a recently published register of 1265 and 1266 shows the students
of Bologna actively engaged in raising money by loans and by the
sale of textbooks. There are of course the university and college
statutes, with their prohibitions and fines, regulating the subjects
of conversation, the shape and color of caps and gowns, that academic
dress which looks to us so mediaeval and is, especially in its American
form, so very modern; careful also of the weightier matters of the law,
like the enactment of New College against throwing stones in chapel, or
the graded penalties at Leipzig for him who picks up a missile to throw
at a professor, him who throws and misses, and him who accomplishes
his fell purpose to the master’s hurt. The chroniclers, too, sometimes
interrupt their narrative of the affairs of kings and princes to tell
of students and their doings, although their attention, like that
of their modern successors, the newspapers, is apt to be caught by
outbreaks of student lawlessness rather than by the wholesome routine
of academic life.

Then we have the preachers of the time, many of them also professors,
whose sermons contain frequent allusions to student customs; indeed
if further evidence were needed to dispel the illusion that the
mediaeval university was devoted to biblical study and religious
nurture, the Paris preachers of the period would offer sufficient
proof. “The student’s heart is in the mire,” says one of them, “fixed
on prebends and things temporal and how to satisfy his desires.” “They
are so litigious and quarrelsome that there is no peace with them;
wherever they go, be it Paris or Orleans, they disturb the country,
their associates, even the whole university.” Many of them go about
the streets armed, attacking the citizens, breaking into houses, and
abusing women. They quarrel among themselves over dogs, women, or
what-not, slashing off one another’s fingers with their swords, or,
with only knives in their hands and nothing to protect their tonsured
pates, rush into conflicts from which armed knights would hold back.
Their compatriots come to their aid, and soon whole nations of
students may be involved in the fray. These Paris preachers take us
into the very atmosphere of the Latin quarter and show us much of its
varied activity. We hear the cries and songs of the streets--

  Li tens s’en veit,
  Et je n’ei riens fait;
  Li tens revient,
  Et je ne fais riens--

the students’ tambourines and guitars, their “light and scurrilous
words,” their hisses and handclappings and loud shouts of applause at
sermons and disputations. We watch them as they mock a neighbor for her
false hair or stick out their tongues and make faces at the passers-by.
We see the student studying by his window, talking over his future with
his room-mate, receiving visits from his parents, nursed by friends
when he is ill, singing psalms at a student’s funeral, or visiting a
fellow-student and asking him to visit him--“I have been to see you,
now come to our hospice.”

All types are represented. There is the poor student, with no friend
but St. Nicholas, seeking such charity as he can find or earning a
pittance by carrying holy water or copying for others, in a fair but
none too accurate hand, sometimes too poor to buy books or afford
the expense of a course in theology, yet usually surpassing his more
prosperous fellows who have an abundance of books at which they never
look. There is the well-to-do student, who besides his books and desk
will be sure to have a candle in his room and a comfortable bed with a
soft mattress and luxurious coverings, and will be tempted to indulge
the mediaeval fondness for fine raiment beyond the gown and hood and
simple wardrobe prescribed by the statutes. Then there are the idle
and aimless, drifting about from master to master and from school to
school, and never hearing full courses or regular lectures. Some, who
care only for the name of scholar and the income which they receive
while attending the university, go to class but once or twice a week,
choosing by preference the lectures on canon law, which leave them
plenty of time for sleep in the morning. Many eat cakes when they
ought to be at study, or go to sleep in the class-rooms, spending the
rest of their time drinking in taverns or building castles in Spain
(_castella in Hispania_); and when it is time to leave Paris, in order
to make some show of learning such students get together huge volumes
of calfskin, with wide margins and fine red bindings, and so with wise
sack and empty mind they go back to their parents. “What knowledge
is this,” asks the preacher, “which thieves may steal, mice or moths
eat up, fire or water destroy?” and he cites an instance where the
student’s horse fell into a river, carrying all his books with him.
Some never go home, but continue to enjoy in idleness the fruits of
their benefices. Even in vacation time, when the rich ride off with
their servants and the poor trudge home under the burning sun, many
idlers remain in Paris to their own and the city’s harm. Mediaeval
Paris, we should remember, was not only the incomparable “parent of
the sciences,” but also a place of good cheer and good fellowship and
varied delights, a favorite resort not only of the studious but of
country priests on a holiday; and it would not be strange if sometimes
scholars prolonged their stay unduly and lamented their departure in
phrases which are something more than rhetorical commonplace.

Then the student is not unknown to the poets of the period, among whom
Rutebeuf gives a picture of thirteenth-century Paris not unlike that
of the sermonizers, while in the preceding century Jean de Hauteville
shows the misery of the poor and diligent scholar falling asleep over
his books, and Nigel “Wireker” satirizes the English students at Paris
in the person of an ass, Brunellus,--“Daun Burnell” in Chaucer--who
studies there seven years without learning a word, braying at the end
as at the beginning of his course, and leaving at last with the resolve
to become a monk or a bishop. Best of all is Chaucer’s incomparable
portrait of the clerk of Oxenford, hollow, threadbare, unworldly--

  For him was lever have at his beddes heed
  Twenty bokes, clad in blak or reed,
  Of Aristotle and his philosophye,
  Than robes riche, or fithele, or gay sautrye.

         *       *       *       *       *

  Souninge in moral vertu was his speche,
  And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche.

But after all, no one knows so much about student life as the students
themselves, and it is particularly from what was written by and for
them, the student literature of the Middle Ages, that I wish to draw
more at length. Such remains of the academic past fall into three chief
classes: student manuals, student letters, and student poetry. Let us
consider them in this order.

The manuals of general advice and counsel addressed to the mediaeval
scholar do not call for extended consideration. Formal treatises on the
whole duty of students are characteristic of the didactic habit of mind
of the Middle Ages, but the advice which they contain is apt to be of a
very general sort, applicable to one age as well as another and lacking
in those concrete illustrations which enliven the sermons of the period
into useful sources for university life.

A more interesting type of student manual, the student dictionary,
owes its existence to the position of Latin as the universal language
of mediaeval education. Textbooks were in Latin, lectures were in
Latin, and, what is more, the use of Latin was compulsory in all forms
of student intercourse. This rule may have been designed as a check
on conversation, as well as an incentive to learning, but it was
enforced by penalties and informers (called wolves), and the freshman,
or yellow-beak, as he was termed in mediaeval parlance, might find
himself but ill equipped for making himself understood in his new
community. For his convenience a master in the University of Paris
in the thirteenth century, John of Garlande, prepared a descriptive
vocabulary, topically arranged and devoting a large amount of space
to the objects to be seen in the course of a walk through the streets
of Paris. The reader is conducted from quarter to quarter and from
trade to trade, from the book-stalls of the Parvis Notre-Dame and the
fowl-market of the adjoining Rue Neuve to the money-changers’ tables
and goldsmiths’ shops on the Grand-Pont and the bow-makers of the Porte
S.-Lazare, not omitting the classes of _ouvrières_ whose acquaintance
the student was most likely to make. Saddlers and glovers, furriers,
cobblers, and apothecaries, the clerk might have use for the wares of
all of them, as well as the desk and candle and writing-materials which
were the special tools of his calling; but his most frequent relations
were with the purveyors of food and drink, whose agents plied their
trade vigorously through the streets and lanes of the Latin quarter and
worked off their poorer goods on scholars and their servants. There
were the hawkers of wine, crying their samples of different qualities
from the taverns; the fruit-sellers, deceiving clerks with lettuce and
cress, cherries, pears, and green apples; and at night the vendors of
light pastry, with their carefully covered baskets of wafers, waffles,
and rissoles--a frequent stake at the games of dice among students,
who had a custom of hanging from their windows the baskets gained by
lucky throws of the six. The _pâtissiers_ had also more substantial
wares suited to the clerical taste, tarts filled with eggs and cheese
and well-peppered pies of pork, chicken, and eels. To the _rôtissiers_
scholars’ servants resorted, not only for the pigeons, geese, and
other fowl roasted on their spits, but also for uncooked beef, pork,
and mutton, seasoned with garlic and other strong sauces. Such fare,
however, was not for the poorer students, whose slender purses limited
them to tripe and various kinds of sausage, over which a quarrel
might easily arise and “the butchers be themselves butchered by angry
scholars.”

A dictionary of this sort easily passes into another type of treatise,
the manual of conversation. This method of studying foreign languages
is old, as survivals from ancient Egypt testify, and it still spreads
its snares for the unwary traveller who prepares to conquer Europe _à
la_ Ollendorff. To the writers of the later Middle Ages it seemed to
offer an exceptional opportunity for combining Instruction in Latin
with sound academic discipline, and from both school and university
it left its monuments for our perusal. The most interesting of these
handbooks is entitled a “Manual of Scholars who propose to attend
universities of students and to profit therein,” and while in its
most common form it is designed for the students of Heidelberg about
the year 1480, it could be adapted with slight changes to any of the
German universities. “Rollo at Heidelberg,” we might call it. Its
eighteen chapters conduct the student from his matriculation to his
degree, and inform him by the way on many subjects quite unnecessary
for either. When the young man arrives he registers from Ulm; his
parents are in moderate circumstances; he has come to study. He is
then duly hazed after the German fashion, which treats the candidate
as an unclean beast with horns and tusks which must be removed by
officious fellow-students, who also hear his confession of sin and
fix as the penance a good dinner for the crowd. He begins his studies
by attending three lectures a day, and learns to champion nominalism
against realism and the comedies of Terence against the law, and to
discuss the advantages of various universities and the price of food
and the quality of the beer in university towns. Then we find him and
his room-mate quarrelling over a mislaid book; rushing at the first
sound of the bell to dinner, where they debate the relative merits of
veal and beans; or walking in the fields beyond the Neckar, perhaps by
the famous Philosophers’ Road which has charmed so many generations
of Heidelberg youth, and exchanging Latin remarks on the birds and
fish as they go. Then there are shorter dialogues: the scholar breaks
the statutes; he borrows money, and gets it back; he falls in love
and recovers; he goes to hear a fat Italian monk preach or to see the
jugglers and the jousting in the market-place; he knows the dog-days
are coming--he can feel them in his head! Finally our student is told
by his parents that it is high time for him to take his degree and
come home. At this he is much disturbed; he has gone to few lectures,
and he will have to swear that he has attended regularly; he has not
worked much and has incurred the enmity of many professors; his master
discourages him from trying the examination; he fears the disgrace of
failure. But his interlocutor reassures him by a pertinent quotation
from Ovid and suggests that a judicious distribution of gifts may do
much--a few florins will win him the favor of all. Let him write home
for more money and give a great feast for his professors; if he treats
them well, he need not fear the outcome. This advice throws a curious
light upon the educational standards of the time; it appears to have
been followed, for the manual closes with a set of forms inviting the
masters to the banquet and the free bath by which it was preceded.

If university students had need of such elementary compends of morals
and manners, there was obviously plenty of room for them in the lower
schools as well, where they were apt to take the form of Latin couplets
which could be readily impressed upon the pupil’s memory. Such _statuta
vel precepta scolarium_ seem to have been especially popular in
the later fifteenth century in those city schools of Germany whose
importance has been so clearly brought out by recent historians of
secondary education. Wandering often from town to town, like the roving
scholars of an earlier age, these German boys had good need to observe
the moral maxims thus purveyed. The beginning of wisdom was to remember
God and obey the master, but the student had also to watch his behavior
in church and lift up his voice in the choir--compulsory attendance
at church and singing in the choir being a regular feature of these
schools--keep his books clean, and pay his school bills promptly. Face
and hands should be washed in the morning, but the baths should not be
visited without permission, nor should boys run on the ice or throw
snowballs. Sunday was the day for play, but this could be only in the
churchyard, where boys must be careful not to play with dice or break
stones from the wall or throw anything over the church. And whether at
play or at home, Latin should always be spoken.

More systematic is a manual of the fifteenth century preserved in a
manuscript of the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris.[11] “Since by reason
of imbecility youths cannot advance to a knowledge of the Latin tongue
by theory alone,” the author has for their assistance prepared a set
of forms which contain the expressions most frequently employed by
clerks. Beginning with the courtesies of school life, for obedience
and due reverence for the master are the beginning of wisdom, the
boy learns how to greet his master and to take leave, how to excuse
himself for wrong-doing, how to invite the master to dine or sup with
his parents--there are half a dozen forms for this! He is also taught
how to give proper answers to those who seek to test his knowledge,
“that he may not appear an idiot in the sight of his parents.” “If the
master asks, ‘Where have you been so long?’” he must be ready, not
only to plead the inevitable headache or failure to wake up, but also
to express the causes of delay well known to any village boy. He had
to look after the house or feed the cattle or water the horse; he was
detained by a wedding, by picking grapes, or making out bills, or--for
these were German boys--by helping with the brew, fetching beer, or
serving drink to guests.

In school after the “spiritual refection” of the morning singing-lesson
comes refection of the body, which is placed after study hours because
“the imaginative virtue is generally impeded in those who are freshly
sated.” In their talk at luncheon or on the playground “clerks are
apt to fall from the Latin idiom into the mother tongue,” and for
him who speaks German the discretion of the master has invented a
dunce’s symbol called an ass, which the holder tries hard to pass on
to another. “Wer wel ein Griffel kouffe[n]?” “Ich wel ein Griffel
kouffen.” “Tecum sit asinus.” “Ach, quam falsus es tu!” Sometimes
the victim offers to meet his deceiver after vespers, with the usual
schoolboy brag on both sides. As it is forbidden to come to blows in
school, the boys are taught to work off their enmities and formulate
their complaints in Latin dialogue. “You were outside the town after
dark. You played with laymen Sunday. You went swimming Monday. You
stayed away from matins. You slept through mass.” “Reverend master,
he has soiled my book, he shouts after me wherever I go, he calls me
names.” Besides the formal disputations the scholars discuss such
current events as a street fight, a cousin’s wedding, the coming war
with the duke of Saxony, or the means of getting to Erfurt, whither
one of them is going when he is sixteen to study at the university.
The great ordeal of the day was the master’s quiz on Latin grammar,
when every one was questioned in turn (_auditio circuli_). The pupils
rehearse their declensions and conjugations and the idle begin to
tremble as the hour draws near. There is some hope that the master may
not come. “He has guests.” “But they will leave in time.” “He may go to
the baths.” “But it is not yet a whole week since he was there last.”
“There he comes. Name the wolf, and he forthwith appears.” Finally
the shaky scholar falls back on his only hope, a place near one who
promises to prompt him.

“When the recitation is over and the lesson given out, rejoicing
begins among the youth at the approach of the hour for going home,”
and they indulge in much idle talk “which is here omitted, lest it
furnish the means of offending.” Joy is, however, tempered by the
contest which precedes dismissal, “a serious and furious disputation
for the _palmiterium_,” until one secures the prize and another has the
_asinus_ to keep till next day.

After school the boys go to play in the churchyard, the sports
mentioned being hoops, marbles (apparently), ball (during Lent), and a
kind of counting game. The author distinguishes hoops for throwing and
for rolling, spheres of wood and of stone, but the subject soon becomes
too deep for his Latin, and in the midst of this topic the treatise
comes to an abrupt conclusion.

In some of its forms the student manual touches on territory already
occupied by another type of mediaeval handbook, the manual of manners,
which under such titles as “The Book of Urbanity,” “The Courtesies of
the Table,” etc., enjoyed much popularity from the thirteenth century
onward. Such manuals have, however, none of the polish of Castiglione’s
_Courtier_ or the elaborateness of the modern book of etiquette. Those
who have not mastered the use of knife and fork have little use for the
finer points of social intercourse, and the readers of the mediaeval
manuals were still at their a b c’s in the matter of behavior. Wash
your hands in the morning and, if you have time, your face; use your
napkin and handkerchief; eat with three fingers, and don’t gorge;
don’t be boisterous or quarrelsome at table; don’t stare at your
neighbor or his plate; don’t criticise the food; don’t pick your teeth
with your knife--such, with others still more elementary, are the
maxims which meet us in this period, in Latin and French, in English,
German, and Italian, but regularly in verse. Now and then there is a
further touch of the age: scrape bones with your knife but don’t gnaw
them; when you have done with them, put them in a bowl or on the floor!

       *       *       *       *       *

If the correspondence of mediaeval students were preserved for us in
casual and unaffected detail, nothing could give a more vivid picture
of university conditions. Unfortunately in some respects for us,
the Middle Ages were a period of forms and types in letter-writing
as in other things; and for most men the writing of a letter was
less an expression of individual feeling and experience than it was
the laborious copying of a letter of some one else, altered where
necessary to suit the new conditions. And if something fresh or
individual was produced, there was small chance of preserving it, since
it was on that account all the less likely to be useful to a future
letter-writer--“so careful of the type, so careless of the single”
letter, history seems. The result is that the hundreds of student
letters which have reached us in the manuscripts of the Middle Ages
have come down through the medium of collections of forms or complete
letter-writers, shorn of most of their individuality but for that very
reason reflecting the more faithfully the fundamental and universal
phases of university life.

By far the largest element in the correspondence of mediaeval students
consists of requests for money; “a student’s first song is a demand for
money,” says a weary father in an Italian letter-writer, “and there
will never be a letter which does not ask for cash.” How to secure
this fundamental necessity of student life was doubtless one of the
most important problems that confronted the mediaeval scholar, and
many were the models which the rhetoricians placed before him in proof
of the practical advantages of their art. The letters are generally
addressed to parents, sometimes to brothers, uncles, or ecclesiastical
patrons; a much copied exercise contained twenty-two different methods
of approaching an archdeacon on this ever-delicate subject. Commonly
the student announces that he is at such and such a centre of learning,
well and happy but in desperate need of money for books and other
necessary expenses. Here is a specimen from Oxford, somewhat more
individual than the average and written in uncommonly bad Latin:

“B. to his venerable master A., greeting. This is to inform you that
I am studying at Oxford with the greatest diligence, but the matter
of money stands greatly in the way of my promotion, as it is now
two months since I spent the last of what you sent me. The city
is expensive and makes many demands; I have to rent lodgings, buy
necessaries, and provide for many other things which I cannot now
specify. Wherefore I respectfully beg your paternity that by the
promptings of divine pity you may assist me, so that I may be able to
complete what I have well begun. For you must know that without Ceres
and Bacchus Apollo grows cold.”

If the father was close-fisted, there were special reasons to be urged:
the town was dear--as university towns always are!--the price of living
was exceptionally high owing to a hard winter, a siege, a failure of
crops, or an unusual number of scholars; the last messenger had been
robbed or had absconded with the money; the son could borrow no more of
his fellows or of the Jews; and so on. The student’s woes are depicted
in moving language, with many appeals to paternal vanity and affection.
At Bologna we hear of the terrible mud through which the youth must
beg his way from door to door, crying, “O good masters,” and coming
home empty-handed. In an Austrian formulary a scholar writes from the
lowest depths of prison, where the bread is hard and moldy, the drink
water mixed with tears, the darkness so dense that it can actually be
felt. Another lies on straw with no covering, goes without shoes or
shirt, and eats he will not say what--a tale designed to be addressed
to a sister and to bring in response a hundred _sous tournois_, two
pairs of sheets, and ten ells of fine cloth, all sent without her
husband’s knowledge. “We have made little glosses, we owe money,” is
the terse summary of two students at Chartres.

To such requests the proper answer was, of course, an affectionate
letter, commending the young man’s industry and studious habits and
remitting the desired amount. Sometimes the student is cautioned
to moderate his expenses--he might have got on longer with what he
had, he should remember the needs of his sisters, he ought to be
supporting his parents instead of trying to extort money from them,
etc. One father--who quotes Horace!--excuses himself because of the
failure of his vineyards. It often happened, too, that the father or
uncle has heard bad reports of the student, who must then be prepared
to deny indignantly all such aspersions as the unfounded fabrications
of his enemies. Here is an example of paternal reproof taken from an
interesting collection relating to Franche-Comté:

“To his son G. residing at Orleans P. of Besançon sends greetings with
paternal zeal. It is written, ‘He also that is slothful in his work is
brother to him that is a great waster.’ I have recently discovered that
you live dissolutely and slothfully, preferring license to restraint
and play to work and strumming a guitar while the others are at their
studies, whence it happens that you have read but one volume of law
while your more industrious companions have read several. Wherefore I
have decided to exhort you herewith to repent utterly of your dissolute
and careless ways, that you may no longer be called a waster and your
shame may be turned to good repute.”

In the models of Ponce de Provence we find a teacher writing to a
student’s father that while the young man is doing well in his studies,
he is just a trifle wild and would be helped by judicious admonition.
Naturally the master does not wish it known that the information came
through him, so the father writes his son:

“I have learned--not from your master, although he ought not to hide
such things from me, but from a certain trustworthy source--that you do
not study in your room or act in the schools as a good student should,
but play and wander about, disobedient to your master and indulging in
sport and in certain other dishonorable practices which I do not now
care to explain by letter.” Then follow the customary exhortations to
reform.

Two boys at Orleans thus describe their arrival at this centre of
learning:

“To their dear and respected parents M. Martre, knight, and M. his
wife, M. and S. their sons send greeting and filial obedience. This is
to inform you that, by divine mercy, we are living in good health in
the city of Orleans and are devoting ourselves wholly to study, mindful
of the words of Cato, ‘To know anything is praiseworthy.’ We occupy a
good dwelling, next door but one to the schools and market-place, so
that we can go to school every day without wetting our feet. We have
also good companions in the house with us, well advanced in their
studies and of excellent habits--an advantage which we well appreciate,
for as the Psalmist says, ‘With an upright man thou wilt show thyself
upright.’”

Such youths were slow to quit academic life. Again and again they ask
permission to have their term of study extended; war might break out,
parents or brothers die, an inheritance have to be divided, but the
student pleads always for delay. He desires to “serve longer in the
camp of Pallas;” in any event he cannot leave before Easter, as his
masters have just begun important courses of lectures. A scholar is
called home from Siena to marry a lady of many attractions; he answers
that he deems it foolish to desert the cause of learning for the sake
of a woman, “for one may always get a wife, but science once lost can
never be recovered.”

The time to leave, however, must come at last, and then the great
problem is money for the expenses of commencement, or, as it was then
called, inception. Thus a student at Paris asks a friend to explain to
his father, “since the simplicity of the lay mind does not understand
such things,” how at length after much study nothing but lack of
money for the inception banquet stands in the way of his graduation.
From Orleans D. Boterel writes to his dear relatives at Tours that he
is laboring over his last volume of law and on its completion will
be able to pass to his licentiate provided they send him a hundred
_livres_ for the necessary expenses. An account of the inception at
Bologna was quoted in the preceding chapter.[12]

       *       *       *       *       *

Unlike the student letters, which range over the whole of the later
Middle Ages, mediaeval student poetry, or rather the best of it, is
limited to a comparatively short period comprised roughly within the
years 1125 and 1225, and is closely connected with the classical
phase of the twelfth-century renaissance. It is largely the work of
the wandering clerks of the period--students, ex-students, professors
even--moving from town to town in search of learning and still more of
adventure, nominally clerks but leading often very unclerical lives.
“Far from their homes,” says Symonds, “without responsibilities, light
of purse and light of heart, careless and pleasure-seeking, they ran
a free, disreputable course.” “They are wont,” writes a monk of the
twelfth century, “to roam about the world and visit all its cities,
till much learning makes them mad; for in Paris they seek liberal arts,
in Orleans classics, at Salerno medicine, at Toledo magic, but nowhere
manners and morals.” Their chief habitat, however, was northern France,
the center of the new literary renaissance.

Possibly from some obscure allusion to Goliath the Philistine,
these wandering clerks took the name Goliardi and their verse is
generally known as Goliardic poetry. This literature is for the most
part anonymous, though recent research has individualized certain
writers of the group, notably a Master Hugh, canon of Orleans, ca.
1142, styled the Primate, and the so-called Archpoet. The Primate,
mordant, diabolically clever, thoroughly disreputable, became famous
for generations as “an admirable improviser, who if he had but turned
his heart to the love of God would have had a great place in divine
letters and have proved most useful to God’s church.” The Archpoet is
found chiefly in Italy from 1161 to 1165, going “on his own” in spring
and summer but when autumn comes on turning to beg shirt and cloak
from his patron, the archbishop of Cologne. Ordered to compose an epic
for the emperor in a week, he replies he cannot write on an empty
stomach--the quality of his verse depends on the quality of his wine:

  Tales versus facio quale vinum bibo.

Good wine he must at times have found, for he composed the masterpiece
of the whole school, the Confession of a Goliard, that unforgettable
description of the burning temptations of Pavia which contains the
famous glorification of the joys of the tavern:

  In the public house to die
    Is my resolution;
  Let wine to my lips be nigh
    At life’s dissolution;
  That will make the angels cry,
    With glad elocution,
  “Grant this toper, God on high,
    Grace and absolution!”

Though written in Latin, the Goliardic verse has abandoned the ancient
metrical system for the rhyme and accent of modern poetry, but even the
best of modern versions, such as those of John Addington Symonds, from
which I am quoting, fail to render the swing, the lilt, the rhythmical
flow of the original. Its authors are familiar with classical mythology
and especially with the writings of Ovid, whose precepts, copied even
in severe Cluny, were freely followed. Most of all is this poetry
classical in its frankly pagan view of life. Its gods are Venus and
Bacchus, also Decius, the god of dice. Love and wine and spring, life
on the open road and under the blue sky, these are the common subjects;
the spirit is that of an intense delight in the world that is, a joy in
mere living, such as one finds in the Greek and Roman poets or in that
sonorous song of a later age which the academic world still cherishes,

  Gaudeamus igitur iuvenes dum sumus.

In general the Goliardic poetry is of an impersonal sort, giving us
few details from any particular place, but reflecting the gayer,
more jovial, less reputable side of the life of mediaeval clerks.
The worshipful order of vagrants is described, open to men of every
condition and every clime, with its rules which are no rules,
late-risers, gamesters, roysterers, proud that none of its members has
more than one coat to his back, begging their way from town to town
with requests for money which sound like students’ letters in verse:

  I, a wandering scholar lad,
    Born for toil and sadness,
  Oftentimes am driven by
    Poverty to madness.

  Literature and knowledge I
    Fain would still be earning,
  Were it not that want of pelf
    Makes me cease from learning.

  These torn clothes that cover me
    Are too thin and rotten;
  Oft I have to suffer cold,
    By the warmth forgotten.

  Scarce I can attend at church,
    Sing God’s praises duly;
  Mass and vespers both I miss,
    Though I love them truly.

  Oh, thou pride of N----,
    By thy worth I pray thee
  Give the suppliant help in need,
    Heaven will sure repay thee.

  Take a mind unto thee now
    Like unto St. Martin;
  Clothe the pilgrim’s nakedness,
    Wish him well at parting.

  So may God translate your soul
    Into peace eternal,
  And the bliss of saints be yours
    In His realm supernal.

The brethren greet each other at wayside taverns with songs like this:

  We in our wandering,
  Blithesome and squandering,
    Tara, tantara, teino!

  Eat to satiety,
  Drink with propriety;
    Tara, tantara, teino!

  Laugh till our sides we split,
  Rags on our hides we fit;
    Tara, tantara, teino!

  Jesting eternally,
  Quaffing infernally:
    Tara, tantara, teino!
                    etc.

The assembled topers are described in another poem:

  Some are gaming, some are drinking,
  Some are living without thinking;
  And of those who make the racket,
  Some are stripped of coat and jacket;
  Some get clothes of finer feather,
  Some are cleaned out altogether;
  No one there dreads death’s invasion,
  But all drink in emulation.

Then they sacrilegiously drink once for all prisoners and captives,
three times for the living, a fourth time for the whole body of
Christians, a fifth for those departed in the faith, and so on to
the thirteenth for those who travel by land or water, and a final
and unlimited potation for king and Pope. Such poetry is plainly the
expression of a ‘wet’ age.

Often bibulous and erotic, the Goliardic verse contains a large amount
of parody and satire. Appealing to a public familiar with scripture and
liturgy, its authors parody anything--the Bible, hymns to the Virgin,
the canon of the mass, as in the “Drinkers’ Mass” and the “Office for
Gamblers.” One of the best-known pieces is a satire on the Papacy under
the caption of “The Gospel according to Mark-s of silver.” This is only
one of many bitter attacks on Rome, while the pride, hardness, and
greed of the higher clergy are portrayed in “Golias the Bishop.” The
point of view in general is that of the lower clergy, especially the
looser, wandering, undisciplined element which frequented the schools
and the roads, the _jongleurs_ of the clerical world, familiar subjects
of ecclesiastical legislation since the ninth century.

Poetry of this sort is so contrary to conventional conceptions of the
Middle Ages that some writers have denied its mediaeval character.
“It is,” says one, “mediaeval only in the chronological sense,” while
others find in it close affinities with the spirit of the Renaissance
or of the Reformation. It would be more consonant with the spirit of
history to enlarge our ideas of the Middle Ages so as to correspond to
the facts of mediaeval life. The Goliardi were neither humanists before
the Renaissance nor reformers before the Reformation; they were simply
men of the Middle Ages who wrote for their own time. If the writings of
these northern and chiefly French clerks seem to anticipate the Italian
Renaissance, it may be that the Renaissance began earlier and was less
specifically Italian than has been supposed. If the authors are more
secular, even more earthy, than we should expect clerks to be, we must
learn to expect something different. In lyric poetry, as in the epic
and the drama, we are now learning more of the close interpenetration
of the lay and ecclesiastical worlds, no longer separated by the
air-tight partitions which the imagination of a later day interposed.
And whether their spirit was lay or ecclesiastical, the Goliardi were
certainly human; they saw and felt life keenly, and they wrote of what
they knew.

       *       *       *       *       *

It is time to redress the balance with a word about a less obtrusive
element, the good student. “The life of the virtuous student,” says
Dean Rashdall, “has no annals,”[13] and in all ages he has been less
conspicuous than his more dashing fellows. Thus the ideal scholar
of the sermons is a bit colorless but obedient, respectful, eager
to learn, assiduous at lectures, and bold in debate, pondering his
lessons even during his evening promenades by the river. The ideal
student of the manuals is he who practices their precepts. The typical
student of the letters has already described himself as devoted wholly
to study, though somewhat short of money. The good student of the
poems--there is no such person! Student poetry was “not all bacchic
or erotic or profane,”[14] but much of it was, and we must not look
here for the more serious side of academic life. Jean de Hauteville’s
account of the poor and industrious scholar is representative of a
large class of students but not of a large body of poetry. The good
student’s occupations are best reflected in the course of study, his
assiduity best seen in his note-books and disputations. The documents
which concern the educational side of the university are also a source
for student life! It has been observed that the alumni reunions of our
own day are often more prolific in recollections of student escapades
than of the daily performance of the allotted task. The studious lad
of today never breaks into the headlines as such, and no one has seen
fit to produce a play or a film “featuring the good student.” Yet
everyone familiar with contemporary universities knows that the serious
student exists in large numbers, and it has been shown conclusively
that the distinction he there achieves reflects itself in his later
life. So it was in the Middle Ages. The law students of Bologna
insisted on their money’s worth of teaching from their professors.
The examinations described by Robert de Sorbon required serious
preparation. Not only was the vocational motive a strong incentive to
study in the mediaeval university, but there was much enthusiasm for
knowledge and much discussion of intellectual subjects. The greater
universities, at least, were intellectually very much alive, with
something of that ‘religion of learning’ which had earlier called
Abelard’s pupils into the wilderness, there to build themselves huts
that they might feed upon his words. The books of the age were in large
measure written by its professors, and the students had the advantage
of seeing them in the making and thus drinking of learning at its
fountain-head. Then as now, the moral quality of a university depended
on the intensity and seriousness of its intellectual life.

If we consider the body of student literature as a whole, its most
striking, and its most disappointing, characteristic is its lack of
individuality. The _Manuale Scholarium_ is written for the use of all
scholars who propose to attend universities of students. The letters
are made as general as possible in order to fit the need of any student
who wants money, clothes, or books. Even the poems, where we have
some right to expect personal expression of feeling, have the generic
character of most mediaeval poetry; they are for the most part the
voice of a class, not of individuals.

At the same time it must be remembered that this characteristic of the
student productions, if it robs them of something of their interest,
increases their historical value. The historian deals with the general
rather than the particular, and his knowledge must be built up by a
painful collection and comparison of individual facts, which are often
too few or too unlike to admit of sound generalization. In the case of
these student records, however, that labor has already been performed
for him; in the form in which they come down to us they have lost,
at the hands of the students themselves, what is local and peculiar
and exceptional, and have become, what in view of the nature of our
information no historian could hope to make them, the generalized
experience of centuries of student life.

It is this broadly human quality that gives the productions of
the mediaeval student a special interest for the world of today.
In substance, though not in form, many of them are almost as
representative of modern Harvard or Yale as of mediaeval Oxford or
Paris. The Latin dialogue and disputation, the mud of Bologna, and
the money-changers of the Grand-Pont, belong plainly in the Middle
Ages and not in our time; but money and clothing, rooms, teachers, and
books, good cheer and good fellowship, have been subjects of interest
at all times and all places. A professor of history once said that
the greatest difficulty of historical teaching lay in convincing
pupils that the events of the past did not all happen in the moon.
The Middle Ages are very far away, farther from us in some respects
than is classical antiquity, and it is very hard to realize that men
and women, then and now, are after all much the same human beings. We
need constantly to be reminded that the fundamental factors in man’s
development remain much the same from age to age and must so remain
as long as human nature and physical environment continue what they
have been. In his relations to life and learning the mediaeval student
resembled his modern successor far more than is often supposed. If his
environment was different, his problems were much the same; if his
morals were perhaps worse, his ambition was as active, his rivalries as
intense, his desire for learning quite as keen. And for him as for us,
intellectual achievement meant membership in that city of letters not
made with hands, “the ancient and universal company of scholars.”




BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE


I

The standard work on mediaeval universities is Hastings Rashdall,
_The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages_ (Oxford, 1895; new
edition in preparation), to which my indebtedness will be apparent
throughout. The later literature can be most easily found in L. J.
Paetow, _Guide to the Study of Mediaeval History_ (Berkeley, 1917).
Important materials are conveniently accessible in translation in D.
C. Munro, _The Mediaeval Student_ (Philadelphia, 1895); and A. O.
Norton, _Readings in the History of Education: Mediaeval Universities_
(Cambridge, Mass., 1909). Bologna now has a cartulary and a special
series of _Studî e Memorie_ (both since 1907); while the municipal
history of the early period has been studied by A. Hessel, _Geschichte
der Stadt Bologna von 1116 bis 1280_ (Berlin, 1910). Light has recently
been thrown on Salerno by the studies of Giacosa and Sudhoff and the
dissertations of Sudhoff’s pupils; its most popular product, _The
School of Salernum_, can be read in the quaint English version of Sir
John Harrington, recently reprinted (London, 1922) with a good note by
F. H. Garrison and a less valuable preface by Francis R. Packard. Paris
still lacks a modern historian; Mullinger is still the standard work on
Cambridge; while Oxford can best be studied in Rashdall, supplemented,
as in the case of Cambridge, by the histories of the several colleges.


II

The most useful general work on the content of mediaeval learning is
Henry Osborn Taylor, _The Mediaeval Mind_ (third edition, New York,
1919). This may be supplemented by R. L. Poole, _Illustrations of the
History of Mediaeval Thought and Learning_ (second edition, London,
1920); M. Grabmann, _Geschichte der scholastischen Methode_ (Freiburg,
1909-11); Sir J. E. Sandys, _History of Classical Scholarship_, I
(third edition, Cambridge, 1921); Lynn Thorndike, _History of Magic and
Experimental Science_ (New York, 1923); Pierre Duhem, _Le système du
monde de Platon à Copernic_, II-V (Paris, 1914-17); Charles H. Haskins,
_Studies in the History of Mediaeval Science_ (in press, Harvard
University Press); the standard histories of philosophy, mathematics,
law, and medicine; and the more special literature in Paetow’s
_Guide_, including his own study of the _Arts Course_ (Urbana, 1910)
and his edition of the _Battle of the Seven Arts_ (Berkeley, 1914). For
a sample of Abelard’s _Sic et Non_, see Norton, _Readings_, pp. 20-25.
Abelard’s method can be followed further in the logical writings edited
for the first time by B. Geyer in Baeumker’s _Beiträge zur Geschichte
der Philosophie des Mittelalters_, XXI (Münster, 1919 ff.). The best
account of the class-rooms of a mediaeval university is F. Cavazza, _Le
scuole dell’antico studio bolognese_ (Milan, 1896). Robert de Sorbon’s
_De conscientia_ is edited by Chambon (Paris, 1903).


III

Brief sketches of student life will be found in the last chapter of
Rashdall and in the little volume of R. S. Rait, _Life in the Mediaeval
University_ (Cambridge, 1912). In the text I have drawn freely from an
article of my own on student letters (_American Historical Review_,
III, pp. 203-229) and from one on the Paris sermons (_ib._, X, pp.
1-27). John of Garlande’s _Dictionary_ will be found most conveniently
in T. Wright, _A Volume of Vocabularies_ (London, 1882), pp. 120-138;
he also wrote a _Morale Scolarium_ of which Paetow is preparing an
edition. The _Manuale Scholarium_ has been translated and annotated by
R. F. Seybolt (Harvard University Press, 1921). _Statuta vel Precepta
Scolarium_ have been edited by M. Weingart (Metten, 1894) and by P.
Bahlmann in _Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für deutsche Erziehungs- und
Schulgeschichte_, III, pp. 129-145 (1893). The latest discussion of
mediaeval manuals of manners is by S. Glixelli, in _Romania_, XLVII,
pp. 1-40 (1921). The best single collection of Goliardic verse is J.
A. Schmeller, _Carmina Burana_ (Breslau, 1894); the best translations
are those of J. A. Symonds, _Wine, Women, and Song_. Two poets have
since been individualized, the Primate by Léopold Delisle and W. Meyer,
the Archpoet by B. Schmeidler and M. Manitius. For an introduction to
the vast literature of Goliardic poetry, see Paetow’s _Guide_, pp.
449 f.; P. S. Allen, in _Modern Philology_, V, VI; and H. Süssmilch,
_Lateinische Vagantenpoesie_ (Leipzig, 1917). On the origin of the word
‘Goliardi,’ see James Westfall Thompson, in the _Studies in Philology_,
published by the University of North Carolina, XX, pp. 83-98 (1923).




INDEX


  Abelard, 20, 21, 54-56, 72, 122, 129.

  Albertus Magnus, 68.

  Alcuin, 54.

  Alfred, King, 6.

  Allen, P. S., 130.

  Anselm, 70.

  Arabic learning, 8, 47, 73.

  Archpoet, 112-114, 130.

  Aristotle, 8, 39, 41, 42, 46, 55, 72-74.

  Arnold, Matthew, quoted, 32.

  Arts, seven, 7, 37-46.

  Averroës, 73, 74.

  Avicenna, 47.


  Bede, 39.

  Berlin, 30.

  Bernard of Chartres, 19, 56.

  Besançon, 107.

  Bible, 47, 52.

  Boethius, 8, 39.

  Bologna, 4-6, 10-18, 24, 27, 30, 32, 34, 44, 48, 49, 52, 56-63, 66,
    67, 81, 105, 111, 122, 127.

  Bonaventura, 68.

  Books, control of, 14, 51-53.

  Brown University, 30, 31.

  Bryce, James, quoted, 35.

  Buoncompagni, 44, 57, 62, 67.

  Cambridge, 28, 30, 32, 34, 128.

  Cathedral schools, 9, 19-21.

  Cavazza, F., 129.

  Chancellor, 21, 23, 47, 63-66, 74.

  Charlemagne, 6, 54.

  Chartres, 19, 20, 39, 56, 57, 106.

  Chaucer, 9, 41, 52, 87, 88.

  Classics, 39-41, 54-56, 112, 114.

  Class-rooms, 61, 62.

  Coimbra, 30, 33, 34.

  Colleges, 26-28, 32-35, 53, 82.

  _Corpus Juris Civilis_, 11, 12, 48, 58-61.

  Cracow, 30.

  Cujas, 76.


  Dante, quoted, 42, 51, 62.

  Degrees, 17, 35.

  Denifle, H., 7.

  Dominicans, 68.

  Donatus, 39.

  Duhem, P., 128.


  Edinburgh, 30.

  Erfurt, 99.

  Étienne de Tournay, 71.

  Euclid, 8, 39.

  Examinations, 17, 63-67, 122.

  Franciscans, 68, 75.

  Frederick Barbarossa, 13, 113.

  Frederick II, 10, 18.

  Freedom, academic, 69-78.


  Galen, 45, 47.

  Galileo, 19.

  Gerbert, 54.

  Germany, universities and schools of, 28-30, 66, 92-101.

  Gilbert de la Porrée, 72.

  Gilds, 13-17.

  Glixelli, S., 130.

  Glossators, 12, 49-51.

  Goliardi, 112-120, 130.

  Grabmann, M., 128.

  Gratian, 12, 50, 51, 55.

  Gregory IX, 22, 51, 70.


  Haskins, C. H., 128, 129.

  Heidelberg, 29, 92-95.

  Henri d’Andeli, 40, 129.

  Hessel, A., 127.

  Hildebert, 40.

  Hippocrates, 9, 19, 47.


  Inception, 67, 110, 111.

  Irnerius, 12.


  Jacques de Vitry, quoted, 25.

  John of Brescain, 74.

  John of Garlande, 57, 90-92, 129, 130.

  John of Hauteville, 87.

  John of Salisbury, 19, 40, 55-57.


  Laon, 19.

  Latin, use of, 89-102.

  Law, Canon, 12, 19, 24, 41, 50, 51.

  Law, Roman, 8, 10-18, 24, 41, 48-50, 58-61.

  Leipzig, 30, 82.

  Letters, student, 102-111.

  Libraries, 4, 51-53.

  Liège, 19.

  Logic, 41-43, 56, 57.

  London, 30.

  Lorenzo of Aquileia, 57.

  Louvain, 30.

  Lowell, J. R., quoted, 20.


  Maitland, F. W., quoted, 11.

  Manchester, 30.

  _Manuale Scholarium_, 92-94, 123, 130.

  Manuals of manners, 101, 102, 130.

  Martianus Capella, 38.

  Medicine, 8-10, 19, 24, 47, 48, 127.

  Montpellier, 18, 30, 32, 48.

  Munro, D. C., 25, 127.


  Naples, 18, 57.

  Nations, 24-26.

  Nigel Wireker, 87.

  Nominalism and realism, 77, 78, 93.

  Norton, A. O., 56, 127, 129.

  Odofredus, 58-61.

  Orleans, 18, 19, 32, 39-41, 57, 83, 107-112.

  Oxford, 6, 9, 28, 30, 32-34, 52, 53, 75, 81, 82, 88, 104, 128.


  Padua, 16, 18, 30, 31, 34.

  Paetow, L. J., 127, 129, 130.

  Palermo, 16.

  Paris, 4-6, 12, 19-30, 32, 34, 41-45, 52, 53, 56, 57, 63-66, 73-75,
    83-88, 90-92, 97, 112, 128.

  Parody, 118.

  Pavia, 113.

  Pepo, 12.

  Peter Lombard, 47.

  Philip Augustus, 22.

  Poetry, student, 111-120.

  Ponce of Provence, 57, 108.

  Poole, R. L., 56, 128.

  Prague, 30.

  Primate, 112, 130.

  Priscian, 39.

  Professors, 15-17, 54-78.

  Ptolemy, 8, 39.


  Quadrivium, 7, 37.


  Rait, R. S., 129.

  Rashdall, H., 7, 127;
    quoted, 27, 29, 34, 36, 49, 61, 120, 121.

  Raymond, Master, 74.

  Renaissance, of twelfth century, 7-12, 111, 112.

  Rheims, 19.

  Rhetoric, 40, 43-45, 103.

  Richer, 19, 54.

  Robert de Sorbon, 27, 34, 63-66, 122, 129.

  Ruprecht, 29.

  Rutebeuf, 87.


  Salamanca, 30.

  Salerno, 9, 10, 30, 31, 112, 127.

  Sandys, J. E., 128.

  Savigny, F. K. von, 61.

  Schools, cathedral, 19-21;
    grammar, 95-101.

  Sermons, Paris, 82-87.

  Socrates, 3.

  Sorbonne, 27, 34, 53.

  Spain, 8, 18, 27, 30.

  Strasbourg, 30.

  Students, 13-15, 79-126;
    students, letters by, 102-111;
    students, manuals for, 89-102;
    students, poems concerning, 87, 88, 111-120;
    students, sermons concerning, 82-87.

  Sudhoff, K., 127.

  Süssmilch, H., 130.

  Symonds, J. A., 111, 114, 130.


  Taylor, H. O., 54, 128.

  Textbooks, 37-53.

  Theodosius II, 6.

  Theology, 12, 24, 28, 46, 47, 72-78.

  Thomas Aquinas, 55, 68, 73.

  Thompson. J. W., 130.

  Thorndike, L., 128.

  Toledo, 112.

  Toulouse, 45.

  Tours, 54, 110.

  Trivium, 7, 37.


  United States, university tradition in, 30-36, 125.

  Universities, characterized and defined, 4, 5, 9, 13, 14;
    number of, 29, 30;
    origin of, 5-29;
    studies of, 37-51;
    teaching in, 54-78;
    tradition of, 31-36.


  Vienna, 30.


  William of Conches, 56.




FOOTNOTES:


[1] As translated by Munro, _The Mediaeval Student_, p. 19.

[2] Translated in E. F. Henderson, _Select Historical Documents of the
Middle Ages_, pp. 262-266.

[3] Table in Rashdall, _Universities_, I, p. xxviii; map at beginning
of Vol. II and in Shepherd, _Historical Atlas_ (New York, 1911), p. 100.

[4] E. G. Browne, _Arabian Medicine_ (1921), p. 93.

[5] _Universities_, I, pp. 254-255.

[6] Sic heredes Gratiani
    Student fieri decani,
    Abbates, pontifices.

[7] Richer, I, cc. 45-54; extracts translated in Taylor, _Mediaeval
Mind_ (1919), I, pp. 289-293.

[8] Translated in R. L. Poole, _Illustrations of the History of
Mediaeval Thought_, pp. 203-212; A. O. Norton, _Readings in the History
of Education_, pp. 28-34. What we know of these masters is analyzed by
Poole in the _English Historical Review_, xxxv, pp. 321-342 (1920).

[9] Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS. Lat. 4489, f. 102; Savigny,
_Geschichte des römischen Rechts im Mittelalter_ (1834), III, pp. 264,
541, 553; cf. Rashdall, I, p. 219.

[10] Alzog, _Church History_ (1876), II, p. 733.

[11] MS. Lat. n. a. 619, ff. 28-35.

[12] Supra, p. 67.

[13] _Universities_, II, p. 692.

[14] _Ib._, II, p. 686, note.




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.




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