Lectures for A Medieval Survey
Lynn H. Nelson
THE BIRTH OF THE UNIVERSITIES
THE GREAT TRADITION
As students at a university, you are part of a great tradition. Consider
the words you use: campus, tuition, classes, courses, lectures,
faculty,
students, administration, chancellor, dean, professor, sophomore, junior,
senior, fees, assignments, laboratory, dormitory, requirements,
prerequisites, examinations, texts, grades, convocation, graduation,
commencement,
procession, diploma, alumni association, donations, and so forth.
These
are the language of the university, and they are all derived from
Latin, almost unchanged from their medieval origins. The
organization
of this university, its activities and its traditions, are continuations of a
barroom brawl that took place in Paris almost 800 years ago.
CAROLINGIAN EDUCATIONAL REFORMS
Charlemagne (d. 814) realized that his empire needed a body of educated
people if it was to survive, and he turned to the Church as the only source
of such education. He issued a decretal the every cathedral and monastery was
to establish a school to provide a free education to every boy who had the
intelligence and the perseverance to follow a demanding course of study.
Since the aim was to create a large body of educated priests
upon
which both the empire and local communities could draw for leadership, girls
were ignored.
Charlemagne died, civil wars broke out, and the attacks of the Magyars,
Vikings, and Saracens began before his plan could be carried out
CATHEDRAL AND MONASTERY SCHOOLS
Some schools had been established, however, and continued through the
worst of the times that followed. Their object was to train priests, and
their curriculum was designed to do that and little more. They consisted of
two parts, the grammar school in which the
trivium (the "three- part curriculum," from which our word
"trivial" is derived), consisting of
grammar, rhetoric, and logic. Grammar trained the
student to
read, write, and speak Latin, the universal language of the European educated
classes; rhetoric taught the art of public speaking and served as an
introduction to literature; and logic provided means of demonstrating the
truth, as well as serving as an introduction to the quadrivium
(the
"four-part curriculum") of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and
music.
Arithmetic served as the basis for quantitative reasoning; geometry for
architecture, surveying, and calculating measurements -- all essential to
managing a church's property and income. Astronomy was necessary for
calculating the date of Easter, predicting eclipses, and marking the passing
of the seasons. For some time, about all the cathedral and monastery schools
could do was to train enough priests to provide the bare essential of
educated local leaders.
By the 1000's, this began to change as some schools began to develop their
education in the quadrivium beyond mere professional training. Some
integrated their curricula by the use of a standard text such as The
Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius, or books by
Cassidorus,
Martianus Capella, or Isidore of Seville. Others
developed a more
flexible approach and attempted to extend knowledge as well as impart it.
One of the latter was the cathedral school of Reims, where the
Spanish-trained Gerbert of Aurillac developed the mathematical
aspects of the quadrivium by introducing arabic numerical
notation, the use of the abacus for numerical
calculation, and the astrolabe for
astronomical observation. Under the leadership of one of Gerbert's students,
the nearby monastery school of Fleury continued this development. Other
schools developed in different directions, with Orleans specializing in
classical studies, and Chartres in the mathematical theory of music. Still
another was the little Norman monastery of Bec, which, under the leadership
of Lanfranc, and Anselm, became known throughout
northern Europe for the teaching of Law.
GREGORY VII AND THE GREAT REVIVAL OF
LEARNING
Most textbooks discuss Pope Gregory VII only in relation to the
Investiture Controversy, but he was very important in the
history of
the university. In 1079, he issued a papal decree ordering all cathedrals and
major monasteries to establish schools for the training of clergy. The result
was a great expansion of education, and some places in which there were a
number of monasteries concentrated, became centers of education. Nowhere was
this more true that in Paris.
PARIS
Paris was dominated by the cathedral of Notre Dame and the royal palace
facing it on the Ile de la Cite, the island in the Seine that
formed
the heart of the city. Notre Dame was the residence of the archbishop's
executive secretary, the chancellor, who had the sole power to
issue
the licenses necessary to preach and/or teach in the diocese. Naturally, the
cathedral and surrounding buildings housed and impressive number of teachers
and students attached to the cathedral school. The royal palace, across the
square from the cathedral, was the center from which the
provost of
the city worked. Leading his own police force, the provost was the royal
deputy charged with running the city. Since the king and archbishop had more
important affairs, the provost and chancellor were the heads of the secular
and ecclesiastical government of Paris, and generally worked together rather
closely.
On the left bank of the Seine, there were several monasteries, each with its
own school: Ste. Genevieve, St. Germain des Pres, and St.
Victor. Although each of these schools had a master, he was not the
only teacher there, as had been the case in many of the earlier cathedral and
monastery schools. Qualified teachers could apply to the chancellor or an
abbot for membership in their institutions and, having been granted that
membership, they formed part of the faculty of that
institution's school. Some instructors resided in the monastery itself and
some outside, providing the basis for a distinction that persists in the
professor and associate professor. The professors
hired assistants (assistant professors, who might someday
become professors themselves, while particularly able students might be hired
to teach basic subjects in the grammar school as instructors.
The professors usually offered a course, or series, of
lectures in which they would read from a text, a
work generally accepted as being important to know, so the students could
copy down the words, and then the lecturer would offer explanations of the
text, while the students made notes in the wide margins they
had left for that purpose (marginalia). As an aside, it was
customary for notes referring to other works relevant to the passage to be
put at the bottom, of foot, of the page, a practice that has survived as the
modern footnote. When the course of lectures was competed, the
student would have finished copying the text and his notes of the lecturer's
commentaries in his textbook. When the student felt ready he
could appear before the chancellor to be examined. If approved, he was given
a diploma, an official document that permitted him to preach or
tech in the diocese of Paris.
Students could attend any courses they wished from any of the faculty in any
of these schools, since all that really counted was whether they could
satisfy the chancellor that they were competent. So they tended to find rooms
in the district of the city between these centers and to pick and choose
which lectures they wished to hear on which books. The instructors began to
rent halls in the district in which to give their lectures, and this part of
Paris became a center of learning, being known as the Latin
Quarter, since the common language for the various people living and
studying there was Latin. The cathedral school of Notre Dame was the home
base of the most respected and well known teachers, and at first overshadowed
the schools of the Latin Quarter but that began to change. The chancellor of
Notre Dame considered the fact that all teachers (and all students, too) were
in "holy orders," that is, they were clergy although neither priests nor
monks. As the representative of the bishop, the chancellor felt that all
clergy in Paris owed him obedience and tried to tell the instructors not only
what to teach, but how they were to teach it.
This clash between the chancellor and masters was only the beginning of a
tension that continues to the present day. Just as the chancellor of Notre
Dame claimed the power to command the obedience of the masters in all things
because they were members of the Church, so too in many state universities
today, chancellors or presidents attempt to extend their authority over the
faculty because the faculty are state employees. In medieval Paris, this
conflict caused many masters (instructors) to move to the Latin Quarter and
join the "faculties" of the monastery schools there. The intellectual center
of the city moved to an area further from the chancellor's direct control,
and the masters began to consider the chancellor as an enemy rather than
their administrative head.
NEW MOVEMENTS IN THE LATIN QUARTER
By the early 1100's there was great intellectual ferment in the Latin
Quarter. Translations into Latin of Aristotle's Greek logical works were
arriving from translation centers in Spain and Sicily, and the scholars of
Paris found themselves with powerful new tools of reason. Peter
Abelard, a student in the Latin Quarter who had returned to become a
master in the school of Notre Dame, set both students and masters on their
ears with his books Sic et non (Yes and No),
demonstrated that the accepted authorities that everyone had been studying
contradicted one another on almost every basic point that one could think of.
He concluded that one had to collect the opinions of the authorities, but use
logic to determine which of these opinions were correct.
The manner of teaching soon changed. Instead of listening to their master
read and interpret, the students wanted to be taught how to reason. The
public debate soon replaced the lecture in attracting the student's
attention. They particularly like to hear their masters debate each other. At
the same time that the nobles were developing the man-to-man armed
confrontations of the tournament, scholars were developing the
logical combat of the public debate.
At the same time, the demand of both Church and princes for trained
administrators and lawyers was growing, and students found that skill in
argumentation was a surer key to success than being able to determine the
date of Easter or explain the mathematical proportions that were harmonic and
those that were not. An ex-student by the name of John of
Salisbury, commented that the study of the Liberal Arts
(the trivium and quadrivium) were being abandoned in favor of mere
professional training.
THE BIRTH OF THE UNIVERSITY
One day in the Autumn of 1200, a German student decided to throw a bit of a
party in his apartment for some of his friends and sent his servant, a ten-
year old boy, down to the corner tavern to get a large jugful of wine. The
tavern owner gave the boy sour wine and, when the boy complained, he and some
of the barflies beat the kid up and threw him out into the street along with
his broken jug. Why? I don't really know. Perhaps it was because the German
emperor had stirred up the English to start a long and bloody war with
France. Or maybe it was because the barkeep like the students' money, but not
the students.
In any event the boy dragged himself back to his master, and the student and
his friends went down to the tavern and beat up everybody before they went
home with a large jugful of decent wine. The barkeep asked the provost to
punish the students, and the provost gathered his men, together with a number
of volunteers, and blocked all of the streets into the Latin Quarter. They
then went hunting for the German student, slapping people around as they
went. A number of masters and students took to the streets, and a pitched
battle ensued. The provost and his men finally withdrew, but not before they
had killed five students, including the German student who had started it
all, and who happened to be the prince-bishop elect of Liege (in what is now
Belgium).
The chancellor refused to help the master and students of the Latin Quarter,
so, that night, they barricaded the streets, and the masters held a meeting.
They decided to organize themselves into a union, or, as it was called in the
Latin of the time, a universitas. Since their students were
studying in order to become masters themselves, the union included the
students as more or less junior members. The next day, representatives of the
union went to the king of France and announced themselves as spokesmen for
The University of the Masters and Students of Paris.
Much more happened in succeeding years. There were continuing struggles with
the chancellor and provost, and even among the students and masters
themselves, but in the end the union of masters and students was recognized
by all. They gained powers -- the right to establish the curriculum, the
requirements, and the standards of accomplishment; the right to debate any
subject and uphold in debate any subject; the right to choose their own
members; protection from local police; the right of each member to keep his
license to teach as soon as he had been admitted to full membership; and
others. These rights were often won in open battles in which people --
masters and students -- died, but they were rights which faculty still guard
jealously today.
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