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.