The era that has been called the “renaissance of the 12th century” corresponds to a rediscovery of studies originating in the 11th century in a West in the process of transformation. The church cast off the tutelage of lay power, and there was general acceptance of the authority of the church in matters of belief, conduct, and education; the papacy took over the direction of Christianity and organized the Crusades to the East; the monarchies regrouped the political and economic forces of feudal society; the cities were reanimated and were organized into communes; the merchants traced out the great European trade routes and, before long, the Mediterranean ones. Soon contact with the East, by trade and in the Crusades, and with the highly cultivated Moors in Spain further stimulated intellectual life. Arabic renderings of some of the works of Aristotle, together with commentaries, were translated into Latin, exercising a profound influence on the trend of culture. It was inevitable that the world of education would take on a new appearance.
Changes in the schools and philosophies
Monastic schools
In the first place, the monastic reformers made the decision to close their schools to those who did not intend to enter upon a cloistered life. According to their idea of solitude and sanctity, recalling the words of St. Jerome, “the monk was not made to teach but to mortify himself.” Divine works were to be the only object of study and meditation, and Pierre de Celle asserted that “divine science ought to mould rather than question, to nourish conscience rather than knowledge.”
The scholarly monks completed their studies before being admitted to the monastery—the age of entrance in Benedictine houses, for instance, being fixed at 15 years at Cîteaux and 20 years at Cluny. If there were admitted a few oblates (who were laymen living in monasteries under modified rules), they were given an ascetic and moral education and were taught to read the Holy Writ and, what was still more desirable, to “relish” it. In the Carthusian monastery the four steps of required spiritual exercise were reading, meditation, prayer, and contemplation. Thus, there existed a monastic culture, but there were no truly monastic studies such as those that had existed in the 9th and 10th centuries. The rich libraries of the monasteries served only a few scholarly abbots, while the monks searched for God through prayer and asceticism.
Urban schools
In the cities, on the contrary, the schools offered to all the clergy who so desired the means of satisfying their intellectual appetite. More and more of them attended these schools, for the studies were a good means of social advancement or material profit. The development of royal and municipal administrations offered the clergy new occupations. Hence the success of the schools for notaries and the schools of law and rhetoric. These schools were organized under the protection of the collegiate churches and the cathedrals. The schools for secular subjects were directed by an archdeacon, chancellor, cantor, or cleric who had received the title of scholasticus, caput scholae, or magister scholarum and who was assisted by one or more auxiliary masters. The success of the urban schools was such that it was necessary, in the middle of the 12th century, to define the teaching function. Only those could teach who were provided with the licencia docendi conferred by the bishop or, more often, by the scholasticus. Those who were licensed taught within the limits of the city or the diocese, whose clerical leaders supervised this monopoly and intervened if a cleric set himself up as master without having the right. The popes were sufficiently concerned about licensing that the Lateran Council of 1179 gave this institution universal application.
New curricula and philosophies
The pupils who attended these urban schools learned in them their future occupation as clerics; they learned Latin, learned to sing the various offices, and studied Holy Writ. The more gifted ones extended their studies further and applied for admission to the liberal arts (the trivium, made up of grammar, rhetoric, and logic; and the quadrivium, including geometry, arithmetic, harmonics, and astronomy) and, upon completion of the liberal arts, to philosophy. Philosophy had four branches: theoretical, practical, logical, and mechanical. The theoretical was divided into theology, physics, and mathematics; the practical consisted of morals or ethics (personal, economic, political). The logical, which concerned discourse, consisted of the three arts of the trivium. Finally, the mechanical included the work of processing wool, of navigation, of agriculture, of medicine, and so on. This was an ambitious humanistic program. In fact, the students became specialized in the study of one art or another according to their tastes or the presence of a renowned master, such as Guillaume de Champeaux at Paris and St. Victor for rhetoric and theology; Peter Abelard at Paris for dialectic and theology; Bernard de Chartres for grammar; William of Conches at Chartres for grammar, ethics, and medicine; and Thierry de Chartres for rhetoric. In particular, teachers of the “literary” arts, grammar and rhetoric, always had great success in a period of enthusiasm for the ancient authors. It may be noted that Bernard de Chartres organized his literary teaching in this fashion: grammatical explanations (declinatio), studies of authors, and each morning the correction of the exercises given the day before.
The third art of the trivium, logic (or dialectics), was nevertheless a strong competitor of the other two, grammar and rhetoric. Since the 11th century, Aristotle's Posterior Analytics, which had been translated centuries earlier by Boethius, had developed the taste for reasoning, and, by the time that Abelard arrived in Paris around 1100, interest in dialectics was flourishing. The written words of the Scriptures and of the Fathers of the Church were to be subjected to the scrutiny of human reason; a healthy skepticism was to be the stepping-stone to knowledge, aided by an understanding of critical logic. While dialectic reigned in Paris, the masters at Chartres offered a study of the whole of the quadrivium. This interest in the sciences, which had been manifest at Chartres since the early 11th century, had been favoured by the stimulus of Greco-Arabic translations. The works of Euclid, Ptolemy, Hippocrates, Galen, and other Hellenic and Hellenistic scholars, as preserved in the Arabic manuscripts, were translated in southern Italy, Sicily, and Spain and were gradually transmitted northward. The scientific revival allowed the Chartrians to Christianize Greek cosmology, to explain Genesis according to physics, and to rediscover nature. Another revival was that of law. The conflicts in the second half of the 12th century between the church and the lay powers encouraged on both sides a new activity in the juridical field. The princes found in the Corpus Juris Civilis, the 6th-century Roman code of the emperor Justinian, the means of legitimizing their politics, and the papacy likewise used Roman sources to promote its claims.
Thomist philosophy
In the long view, the greatest educational and philosophical influence of the age was St. Thomas Aquinas, who in the 13th century made a monumental attempt to reconcile the two great streams of the Western tradition. In his teaching at the University of Paris and in his writings—particularly the Summa theologiae and the Summa contra gentiles—Aquinas tried to synthesize reason and faith, philosophy and theology, university and monastery, activity and contemplation. In his writings, however, faith and theology ultimately took precedence over reason and philosophy because the former were presumed to give access to truths that were not available through rational inquiry. Hence, Aquinas started with assumptions based on divine revelation and went on to a philosophical explication of man and nature. The model of the educated man that emerged from this process was the Scholastic, a man whose rational intelligence had been vigorously disciplined for the pursuit of moral excellence and whose highest happiness was found in contemplation of the Christian God.
The Scholastic model greatly affected the development of Western education, especially in fostering the notion of intellectual discipline. Aquinas' theological-philosophical doctrine was a powerful intellectual force throughout the West, being officially adopted by the Dominican order (of which Aquinas was a member) in the 13th century and by the Jesuits in the 17th century. Known as Thomism, this doctrine came to constitute the basis of official Roman Catholic theology from 1879. Although Aquinas made an important place in his hierarchy of values for the practical uses of reason, later Thomists were often more exclusively intellectual in their educational emphasis.
The Middle Ages were thus beset by a multiplicity of ideas, both homegrown and imported from abroad. The multiplicity of students and masters, their rivalries, and the conflicts in which they opposed the religious and civil authorities obliged the world of education to reorganize. To understand the reorganization, one must review the various stages of development in the coming together of students and masters. The first stage, already alluded to, occurred when the bishop or some other authority began to accord to other masters permission to open schools other than the episcopal school in the neighbourhood of his church. A further stage was reached when a license to teach, the jus ubique docendi—granted only after a formal examination—empowered a master to carry on his vocation at any similar centre. A further development came when it began to be recognized that, without a license from pope, emperor, or king, no school could be formed possessing the right of conferring degrees, which originally meant nothing more than licenses to teach.
Students and teachers, as clerici (“clerks,” or members of the clergy), enjoyed certain privileges and immunities, but, as the numbers traveling to renowned schools increased, they needed additional protection. In 1158 Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa of the Holy Roman Empire granted them privileges such as protection against unjust arrest, trial before their peers, and permission to “dwell in security.” These privileges were subsequently extended and included protection against extortion in financial dealings and the cessatio, or the right to strike, discontinue lectures, and even to secede to protest against grievances or interference with established rights.
In the north of Europe licenses to teach were granted by the chancellor, scholasticus, or some other officer of a cathedral church; in the south it is probable that the guilds of masters (when these came to be formed) were at first free to grant their own licenses, without any ecclesiastical or other supervision. Gradually, however, toward the end of the 12th century, a few great schools, from the excellence of their teaching, came to assume more than local importance. In practice, a doctor of Paris or Bologna would be allowed to teach anywhere; and those great schools began to be known as studia generalia; that is, places resorted to by scholars from all parts. Eventually the term came to have a more definite and technical significance. The emperor Frederick II in 1225 set the example of attempting to confer upon his new school at Naples, by an authoritative bull, the prestige that the earlier studia had acquired by reputation and general consent. Pope Gregory IX did the same for Toulouse in 1229, and he added to its original privileges in 1233 a bull by which anyone who had been admitted to the doctorate or mastership in that university should have the right to teach anywhere without further examination. Other studia generalia were subsequently founded by papal or imperial bulls, and in 1292 even the oldest universities, Paris and Bologna, found it desirable to obtain similar bulls from Pope Nicholas IV. From this time the notion began to prevail that the essence of the studium generale was the privilege of conferring a universally valid teaching license and that no new studium could acquire that position without a papal or imperial bull. There were, however, a few studia generalia (such as Oxford) the position of which was too well established to be questioned, even though they had never obtained such a bull; these were held to be studia generalia by repute. A few Spanish universities founded by royal charter were held to be studia generalia for the kingdom.
The word universitas originally applied only to the scholastic guild (or guilds)—that is, the corporation of students and masters—within the studium, and it was always modified, as universitas magistrorum, or universitas scholarium, or universitas magistrorum et scholarium. In the course of time, however, probably toward the latter part of the 14th century, the term began to be used by itself, with the exclusive meaning of a self-regulating community of teachers and scholars whose corporate existence had been recognized and sanctioned by civil or ecclesiastical authority.
The Italian universities
The earliest studia arose out of efforts to provide instruction beyond the range of the cathedral and monastic schools for the education of priests and monks. Salerno, the first great studium, became known as a school of medicine as early as the 9th century, and, under the teaching of Constantine the African (died 1087), its fame spread throughout Europe. In 1231 it was licensed by Frederick II as the only school of medicine in the kingdom of Naples. It remained a medical school only.
The great revival of legal studies that took place at Bologna about the year 1000 had been preceded by a corresponding activity at Pavia and Ravenna. In Bologna a certain Pepo was lecturing on parts of the Corpus Juris Civilis about the year 1076. The secular character of this new study and its close connection with the claims and prerogatives of the Western emperor aroused papal suspicion, and for a time Bologna and its students were regarded by the church with distrust. The students found their first real protector in the emperor Frederick I Barbarossa. The immunities and privileges he conferred eventually extended to all the other universities of Italy.
The first university of Bologna was not constituted until the close of the 11th century—the “universities” there being student guilds, formed to obtain by combination that protection and those rights that they could not claim as citizens. As the number of students increased, the number of universitates, or societies of scholars, increased, each representing the national origin of its members (France, England, Provence, Spain, Italy). These confederations were presided over by a common head, the rector scholarium, and the different nations were represented by their consiliarii, a deliberative assembly with which the rector habitually took counsel. The practice at Bologna was adopted as other studia generalia arose.
The students at Bologna were mostly of mature years. Because civil law and canon law were, at first, the only branches of study offered, the class they attracted was often composed of lawyers already filling office in some department of the church or state—archdeacons, heads of schools, canons of cathedrals, and like functionaries. About 1200 the two faculties of medicine and philosophy were formed. The former was developed by a succession of able teachers, among whom Thaddeus Alderottus was especially eminent. The faculty of arts, down to the 14th century, scarcely attained equal eminence.
At Bologna the term college long had a different meaning from the ordinary modern one. The masters formed themselves into collegia (that is, organizations), chiefly for the conferment of degrees. Places of residence for students existed at Bologna at a very early date, but it was not until the 14th century that they possessed any organization; the humble domus, as it was termed, was at first designed solely for necessitous students who were not natives of Bologna; a separate house, with a fund for the maintenance of a specified number of scholars, was all that was originally contemplated.
From the 13th to the 15th century a number of universities in Italy originated from migrations of students; others were established by papal or other charters. Almost all the schools taught civil or canon law or both. Of these institutions the most important were Padua, Piacenza, Pavia, Rome, Perugia, Pisa, Florence, Siena, and Turin.
The French universities
The history of the University of Paris well illustrates the fact that the universities arose in response to new needs. The schools out of which the university arose were those attached to the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris on the Île de la Cité and presided over by its chancellor. Although, in the second decade of the 13th century, some masters placed themselves under the jurisdiction of the abbot of the monastery of Sainte-Geneviève on the Left Bank of the Seine, it was around the bestowal of the license by the chancellor of Notre-Dame that the university grew. It is in this license that the whole significance of the master of arts degree was contained; for admission to that degree was the receiving of the chancellor's permission to “incept”; and by “inception” was implied the master's formal entrance upon the functions of a duly licensed teacher and his recognition as such by his brethren in the profession. The stage of bachelordom had been one of apprenticeship for the mastership; and his emancipation from this state was symbolized by the placing of the magisterial cap (biretta) upon his head. The new master gave a formal inaugural lecture, and he was then welcomed into the society of his professional brethren with set speeches and took his seat in his master's chair.
Some time between 1150 and 1170 the University of Paris came formally into being. Its first written statutes were not, however, compiled until about 1208, and it was not until long after that date that it possessed a “rector.” Its earliest recognition as a legal corporation belongs to about the year 1211, when a brief of Innocent III empowered it to elect a proctor to be its representative at the papal court. With papal support Paris became the great transalpine centre of orthodox theological teaching. Successive pontiffs, down to the Great Schism of 1378, cultivated friendly relations with the university and systematically discouraged the formation of theological faculties at other centres. In 1231 Gregory IX, in the bull Parens scientiarum (“Mother of Learning”), gave full recognition to the right of the several faculties to regulate and modify the constitution of the university. The fully developed university was divided into four faculties: three superior, those of theology, canon law, and medicine; and one inferior, that of arts, which was divided into four student confederations, or nations (French, Picard, Norman, and English), which included both professors and scholars from the respective countries. The head of each faculty was the dean; of each nation, the proctor. The rector, in the first instance head of the faculty of arts, eventually became the head of the collective university.
After the close of the Middle Ages, Paris came to be virtually reduced to a federation of colleges, though at Paris the colleges were less independent of university authority than was often the case elsewhere. Other major French universities of the Middle Ages were Montpellier, Toulouse, Orléans, Angers, Avignon, Cahors, Grenoble, Orange, and Perpignan.
The English universities
The University of Paris became the model for French universities north of the Loire and for those of central Europe and England; Oxford would appear to have been the earliest. Certain schools, opened early in the 12th century within the precincts of the dissolved nunnery of St. Frideswide and of Oseney Abbey, are supposed to have been the nucleus around which it grew. But the beginning may have been a migration of English students from Paris about 1167 or 1168. Immediately after 1168, allusions to Oxford as a studium and a studium generale begin to multiply. In the 13th century, mention first occurs of university “chests,” which were benefactions designed for the assistance of poor students. Halls, or places of licensed residence for students, also began to be established. Against periodic vicissitudes such as student dispersions and plagues, the foundation of colleges proved the most effective remedy. The earliest colleges were University College, founded in 1249, Balliol College, founded about 1263, and Merton College, founded in 1264.
The University of Cambridge, although it came into existence somewhat later than Oxford, may reasonably be held to have had its origin in the same century. In 1112 the canons of St. Giles crossed the River Cam and took up their residence in the new priory in Barnwell, and their work of instruction acquired additional importance. In 1209 a body of students migrated there from Oxford. Then about 1224 the Franciscans established themselves in the town and, somewhat less than half a century later, were followed by the Dominicans. At both the English universities, as at Paris, the mendicants and other religious orders were admitted to degrees, a privilege that, until the year 1337, was extended to them at no other university. Their interest in and influence at these three centres were consequently proportionately great.
In 1231 and 1233 royal and papal letters afford satisfactory proof that the University of Cambridge was already an organized body, with a chancellor at its head.
Although both Oxford and Cambridge were modeled on Paris, their higher faculties never developed the same distinct organization; and, while the two proctors at Cambridge originally represented north and south, the nations are scarcely to be discerned. An important step was made, however, in 1276, when an ordinance was passed requiring that everyone who claimed to be recognized as a scholar should have a fixed master within 15 days after his entry into the university. The traditional constitution of the English universities was, in its origin, an imitation of the Parisian, modified by the absence of the cathedral chancellor. But the feature that most served to give permanence and cohesion to the entire community at Cambridge was, as at Oxford, the institution of colleges. The earliest of these was Peterhouse, in 1284. All the early colleges were expressly designed for the benefit of the secular clergy.
Universities elsewhere in Europe
From the 13th to the 15th centuries, studia generalia or universities proliferated in central and northern Europe and were usually modeled on the University of Paris. Although the earliest was Prague, which existed as a studium in the 13th century and was chartered by Pope Clement VI in 1348, perhaps no medieval university achieved a more rapid and permanent success than Heidelberg. The University of Heidelberg, the oldest in the German realm, received its charter in 1386 from Pope Urban VI as a studium generale and contained all the recognized faculties—theology, canon law, medicine, and the arts, as well as civil law. In the subsequent 100 years, universities were founded at Cologne, Erfurt, Leipzig, Rostock, Freiburg, Tübingen, Ofen (Budapest), Basel, Uppsala, and Copenhagen.
Spain was also an important scene of developments in higher education. Valladolid received its charter in 1346 and attained great celebrity after it obtained the rank of studium generale and a universitas theologiae by a decree of Pope Martin V in 1418. Salamanca was founded in 1243 by Ferdinand III of Castile with faculties of arts, medicine, and jurisprudence, to which theology was added through the efforts of Martin V. The College of St. Bartholomew, the earliest founded at Salamanca, was noted for its ancient library and valuable collection of manuscripts. Other important early Spanish and Portuguese schools were Sevilla, Alcalá, and Lisbon.
General characteristics of medieval universities
Generally speaking, the medieval universities were conservative. Alexander Hegius and Rudolf Agricola carried on their work as reformers at places such as Deventer, in the Netherlands, remote from university influences. A considerable amount of mental activity went on in the universities; but it was mostly of the kind that, while giving rise to endless controversy, turned upon questions in connection with which the implied postulates and the terminology employed rendered all scientific investigation hopeless. At almost every university the realists and nominalists represented two great parties occupied with an internecine struggle.
In Italian universities such controversies were considered endless and their effects pernicious. It was resolved, accordingly, to expel logic and allow its place to be filled by rhetoric, thereby effecting that important revolution in academic studies that constituted a new era in university learning and largely helped to pave the way for the Renaissance. The professorial body in the great Italian universities attained an almost unrivaled reputation throughout Europe. For each subject of importance there were always two, and sometimes three, rival chairs. While other universities became sectarian and local, those of Italy continued to be universal, and foreigners of all nations could be found among the professors.
The material life of the students was difficult. In order to aid the poorest, some colleges founded by clerical or lay benefactors offered board and lodging to a number of foundationers. Courses, too, could occasionally be difficult. The courses in theology were particularly long—eight years at the minimum (one could not be a teacher of theology in Paris before the age of 35). Many students preferred the more rapid and more lucrative paths of law and medicine. Others led the life of perpetual students, of vagabond clerics, disputatious goliards, the objects of repeated but ineffectual condemnation.
The methods of teaching are particularly well known in the case of Paris. The university year was divided into two terms: from St. Remi (October 1) to Lent and from Easter to St. Pierre (June 29). The courses consisted of lectures (collatio) but more often of explications of texts (lectio). There were also discussions and question periods. Examinations were given at the end of each term. The student could receive three degrees: the determinatio, or baccalaureate, gave him the right to teach under the supervision of a master; the licencia docendi was literally the “license to teach” and could be obtained at 21 years of age; then there was the doctorate, which marked his entrance into mastership and which involved a public examination.
Lay education and the lower schools
The founding of universities was naturally accompanied by a corresponding increase in schools of various kinds. In most parts of western Europe, there were soon grammar schools of some type available for boys. Not only were there grammar schools at cathedrals and collegiate churches, but many others were founded in connection with chantries and craft and merchant guilds and a few in connection with hospitals. It has been estimated, for example, that, toward the close of the Middle Ages, there were in England and Wales, for a population of about 2.5 million, approximately 400 grammar schools, although the number of their enrollments was generally quite small.
In fulfillment of its responsibility for education, the church from the 11th century onward made the establishment of an effective education system a central feature of ecclesiastical policy. During the papacy of Gregory VII (1073–85), all bishops had been asked to see that the art of grammar was taught in their churches, and a Lateran Council in 1215 decreed that grammar-school masters should be appointed not only in the cathedral church but also in others that could afford it. Solicitude at the centre for the advancement of education did not, however, result in centralized administration. It was the duty of bishops to carry out approved policy, but it was left to them to administer it, and they in turn allowed schools a large measure of autonomy. Such freedom as medieval schools enjoyed was, however, always subject to the absolute authority of the church, and the right to teach, as earlier noted, was restricted to those who held a bishop's license. This device was used to ensure that all teachers were loyal to the doctrines of the church.
Knowledge of the teaching provided in the grammar schools at this period is too slight to justify an attempt at a description. No doubt the curriculum varied, but religion was all-important, with Latin as a written and spoken language the other major element in the timetable. There might have been instruction in reading and writing in the vernacular, but, in addition to the grammar schools, there were writing and song schools and other schools of an elementary type. Elementary teaching was given in many churches and priests' houses, and children who did not receive formal scholastic instruction were given oral teaching by parish priests in the doctrines and duties of the faith. The evidence of accounts, bills, inventories, and the like suggests that there was some careful teaching of writing and of an arithmetic that covered the practical calculations required in ordinary life. Literacy, however, was limited by the lack of printed materials; until the 15th century (when typesetting developed) books were laboriously cut page by page on blocks (hence they were known as block books) and consequently were rare and expensive. From the mid-15th century on, literacy increased as typeset books became more widely available.
Educational provision for girls in medieval society was much more restricted. Wealthy families made some provision in the home, but the emphasis was primarily on piety and secondarily on skills of household management, along with artistic “accomplishments.” Neither girls nor boys of the lowest social ranks—peasants or unskilled urban dwellers—were likely to be literate. Nor were girls of the artisan classes until the 16th century, when female teaching congregations such as the Ursulines founded by Angela Merici began to appear. There were, however, provisions for boys of the artisan class to receive sufficient vernacular schooling to enable them to be apprenticed to various trades under the auspices of the guilds.
There was an entirely different training for boys of high rank, and this created a cultural cleavage. Instead of attending the grammar school and proceeding to a university, these boys served as pages and then as squires in the halls and castles of the nobility, there receiving prolonged instruction in chivalry. The training was designed to fit the noble youth to become a worthy knight, a just and prudent master, and a sensible manager of an estate. Much of this knowledge was gained from daily experience in the household, but, in addition, the page received direct instruction in reading and writing, courtly pastimes such as chess and playing the lute, singing and making verses, the rules and usages of courtesy, and the knightly conception of duty. As a squire he practiced more assiduously the knightly exercises of war and peace and acquired useful experience in leadership by managing large and small bodies of men. But this was a type of education that could flourish only in a feudal society; and, though some of its ideals survived, it was outmoded when feudalism was undermined by the growth of national feeling.
Pierre RichéJames Bowen
