Lk 177 - H33 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library https://archive.org/details/riseofuniversitiOOhask BROWN UNIVERSITY. THE COLVER LECTURES, 1923 XvV’ V' ! MA v> \?£l 1 THE ^ i RISE OF UNIVERSITIES EY / CHARLES HOMER HASKINS GURNEY PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AND POLITICAL SCIENCE DEAN OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES HARVARD UNIVERSITY 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 Uni¬ versity 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 ac¬ companying the gift explain the purposes of the foundation: — 44 It is desired that, so far as possible, for these lectures only subjects of particular im¬ portance 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: 44 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 Gov¬ ernment , by Frank Johnson Goodnow, LL.D., President of Johns Hopkins Uni¬ versity. • • Vll S 1917 Medical Research and Human Welfare , by W. W. Keen, M.D., LL.D. (Brown), Emeri¬ tus Professor of Surgery, Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia. 1918 The Responsible State: A Reexamination of Fundamental Political Doctrines in the Light of World War and the Menace of Anarchism , by Franklin Henry Giddings, LL.D., Pro¬ fessor of Sociology and the History of Civilization in Columbia University; some¬ time 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. Has¬ kins, Ph.D., LL.D., Litt.D., Gurney Pro¬ fessor of History and Political Science, Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, in Harvard University. • • • Vlll 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.Ill Conclusion.120 Bibliographical Note .127-130 Index ..131-134 lx THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES I THE EARLIEST UNIVERSITIES Universities, like cathedrals and par¬ liaments, are a product of the Middle Ages. The Greeks and the Romans, strange as it may seem, had no univer¬ sities in the sense in which the word has been used for the past seven or eight cen¬ turies. They had higher education, but the terms are not synonymous. Much of their instruction in law, rhetoric, and phi¬ losophy it would be hard to surpass, but it was not organized into the form of per¬ manent 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 certifi- 3 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES cate, 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 in¬ struction represented by faculties and col¬ leges and courses of study, examinations and commencements and academic de¬ grees. 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 pe¬ riod of its origins the mediaeval univer¬ sity had no libraries, laboratories, or mu¬ seums, no endowment or buildings of its own; it could not possibly have met the re¬ quirements of the Carnegie Foundation! As an historical text-book 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 4 THE EARLIEST UNIVERSITIES material existence which with us are so self-evident.” The mediaeval university was, in the fine old phrase of Pasquier, “ built of men ” — batie en liommes. 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 stu¬ dents— no college journalism, no dra¬ matics, no athletics, none of those “ out¬ side 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 5 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES oldest, and which all college and univer¬ sity men should know and cherish. The origin and nature of these earliest uni¬ versities is the subject of these three lec¬ tures. The first will deal with university institutions, the second with university in¬ struction, the third with the life of uni¬ versity students. In recent years the early history of universities has begun to attract the se¬ rious 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 cel¬ ebration could properly ascribe to King Alfred; that Bologna did not go back to the Emperor Theodosius; that the Uni¬ versity of Paris did not exist in the time of Charlemagne, or for nearly four cen¬ turies afterward. It is hard, even for the modern world, to realize that many 6 THE EARLIEST UNIVERSITIES things had no founder or fixed date of beginning but instead “ just grew,” aris¬ ing 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 ap¬ plied, 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 knowl¬ edge 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 gram¬ mar, rhetoric, logic, and the still barer no¬ tions of arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, and music, which did duty for an academic 7 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES 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 arith¬ metic, 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 multiplica¬ tion or division with these characters — i 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, meta¬ physics, and ethics. In law and medicine men now possessed the fulness of ancient learning. This new knowledge burst the 8 THE EARLIEST UNIVERSITIES bonds of the cathedral and monastery schools and created the learned profes¬ sions; 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 aca¬ demic 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 Sa¬ lerno. Here, a day’s journey to the south of Naples, in territory at first Lombard and later Norman, but still in close con¬ tact with the Greek East, a school of med¬ icine 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 med¬ ical writings of the ancient Greeks were expounded and even developed on the side of anatomy and surgery, while its 9 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES teachings were condensed into pithy max¬ ims 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 de¬ grees Salerno had already been distanced by newer universities farther north. Im¬ portant 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 educa¬ tion. And while Salerno was known only as a school of medicine, Bologna was a many-sided institution, though most note¬ worthy as the centre of the revival of the Roman law. Contrary to a common im¬ pression, the Roman law did not disap¬ pear from the West in the early Middle Ages, but its influence was greatly dimin¬ ished as a result of the Germanic inva¬ sions. Side by side with the Germanic 10 THE EARLIEST UNIVERSITIES codes, Homan law survived as the cus¬ tomary 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 doc¬ uments, 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, fore¬ shadowing 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 geograph¬ ical reasons which, then as now, made this city the meeting-point of the chief routes of communication in northern Italy. 11 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES Some time before 1100 we hear of a pro¬ fessor named Pepo, 44 the bright and shin¬ ing light of Bologna by 1119 we meet with the phrase Bononia docta. At Bo¬ logna, as at Paris, a great teacher stands at the beginning of university develop¬ ment. 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 4 glossing ’ the law texts upon the basis of a comprehen¬ sive 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, com¬ posed the Decretum which became the standard text in canon law, thus marked off from theology as a distinct subject of higher study; and the preemi- 12 THE EARLIEST UNIVERSITIES nence of Bologna as a law school was fully assured. A student class had now appeared, ex¬ pressing 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 Em¬ peror Frederick Barbarossa, though no particular town or university is men¬ tioned. By this time Bologna had be¬ come the resort of some hundreds of stu¬ dents, not only from Italy but from beyond the Alps. Far from home and undefended, they united for mutual pro¬ tection and assistance, and this organiza¬ tion of foreign, or Transmontane, stu¬ dents 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 uni¬ versity means originally such a group or 1/ corporation in general, and only in time did it come to be limited to gilds of masters and students, universitas societas magistrorum discipulorumque. 13 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES Historically, the word university has no connection with the universe or the uni¬ versality of learning; it denotes only the totality of a group, whether of bar¬ bers, carpenters, or students did not matter. The students of Bologna organ¬ ized 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 stu¬ dent was helpless against such profiteer¬ ing. 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 ex¬ amples 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 repre¬ sentatives. Victorious over the townsmen, the stu¬ dents turned on ‘ their other enemies, the 14 THE EARLIEST UNIVERSITIES professors.’ Here the threat was a col¬ lective boycott, and as the masters lived at first wholly from the fees of their pu¬ pils, this threat was equally effective. The professor was put under bond to live up to a minute set of regulations which guar¬ anteed 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 audi¬ ence 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 com¬ mentary, 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 introduc¬ tion and bibliography! Coercion of this 15 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES sort presupposes an effective organization of the student body, and we hear of two and even four universities of students, each composed of 4 nations ’ and presided over by a rector. Emphatically Bologna was a student university, and Italian stu¬ dents are still quite apt to demand a voice in university affairs. When I first vis¬ ited 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 cer¬ emonies 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 4 universities ’ of students, the professors also formed a gild or 4 college,’ requiring for admission there¬ to certain qualifications which were ascer- 16 THE EARLIEST UNIVERSITIES tained by examination, so that no student could enter save by the gild’s consent. And, inasmuch as ability to teach a sub¬ ject 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 pre¬ serve this tradition in the words master ( magister) and doctor, originally synony¬ mous, while the French even have a licence . A Master of Arts was one quali¬ fied 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 con¬ tinuing 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 17 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES course of time, arts, medicine, and theol¬ ogy, but Bologna was preeminently a school of civil law, and as such it became the model of university organization for Italy, Spain, and southern France, coun¬ tries where the study of law has always had political and social as well as merely academic significance. Some of these uni¬ versities became Bologna’s competitors, like Montpellier and Orleans as well as the Italian schools nearer home. Fred¬ erick 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 cen¬ tre 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 an¬ niversary, I saw the ancient feud healed by the kiss of peace bestowed on Bologna’s rector amid the encores of ten thou¬ sand spectators. Padua, however, scarcely equalled Bologna in our period, even though at a later age Portia sent thither 18 THE EARLIEST UNIVERSITIES for legal authority, and though the uni¬ versity still shines with the glory of Galileo. In northern Europe the origin of uni¬ versities 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 Liege, 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 Hippoc¬ rates of Cos; while from the twelfth cen¬ tury John of Salisbury, the leading north¬ ern humanist of the age, has left us an 19 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES 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 uni¬ versity. The advantages of Paris were partly geographical, partly political as the cap¬ ital of the new French monarchy, but something must be set down to the influ¬ ence of a great teacher in the person of Abelard. This brilliant young radical, 20 THE EARLIEST UNIVERSITIES 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 wilder¬ ness. At Paris he was connected with the church of Mont-Sainte-Genevieve 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 institu¬ tional 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 uni¬ versity degrees, which here as at Bologna were originally teachers’ certificates. The early schools were within the cathedral precincts on the lie de la Cite, that tan¬ gled 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 — 21 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES 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 ca¬ thedral school and became a university, no one can say, though it was certainly be¬ fore the end of the twelfth century. Uni¬ versities, 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 prevot 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 gener¬ ally from its law. More specific was the first papal privilege, the bull Parens sci- entiarum of 1231, issued after a two 22 THE EARLIEST UNIVERSITIES i years’ cessation of lectures growing out of a riot in which a band of students, hav¬ ing found “ wine that was good and sweet to drink,” beat up the tavern keeper and his friends till they in turn suffered from the prevot 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 mas¬ ters’ funerals, the lectures of bachelors, necessarily more limited than those of fully fledged masters, the price of lodg¬ ings, and the coercion of members. Stu¬ dents must not carry arms, and only those who frequent the schools regularly are to enjoy the exemptions of students, the interpretation in practice being attend¬ ance at not less than two lectures a week. 23 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES While the word university does not ap¬ pear 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 de¬ veloped 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 ‘ na¬ tions ’: the French, including the Latin peoples; the Norman; the Picard, in¬ cluding 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 gener¬ ally 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 con- 24 THE EARLIEST UNIVERSITIES suming the fees collected from new mem¬ bers 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 me¬ diaeval Paris has been written from the records of the English nation alone. The artificial constitution of the nations seems to have encouraged rather than dimin¬ ished 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 be¬ tween the countries also caused dissen¬ sions, hatreds, and virulent animosities among them, and they impudently ut¬ tered all kinds of affronts and insults 1 As translated by Munro, The Mediaeval Student , p. 19. 25 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES 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 cow¬ ardly; the Romans, seditious, turbulent, and slanderous; the Sicilians, tyrannical and cruel; the inhabitants of Brabant, men of blood, incendiaries, brigands, and _ A ravishers; the Flemish, fickle, prodi¬ gal, 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 26 THE EARLIEST UNIVERSITIES early became an established unit of aca¬ demic 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 col¬ leges had buildings and endowments, if the university had not. There was a col¬ lege at Paris as early as 1180; there were sixty-eight by 1500, and the system sur¬ vived until the Revolution, to leave be¬ hind it only fragments of buildings or local names like the Sorbonne of today, sole memento of that College de la Sor¬ bonne founded for theologians by a con¬ fessor of St. Louis in the thirteenth cen¬ tury. Many other continental universi¬ ties 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 court¬ yard. But of course the ultimate home of 27 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES the college was Oxford and Cambridge, where it came to be the most character¬ istic feature of university life, arrogating to itself practically all teaching as well as direction of social life, until the univer¬ sity became merely an examining and de¬ gree-conferring body. Here the older colleges like Balliol, Merton, and Peter- house date from the thirteenth century. Paris was preeminent in the Middle Ages as a school of theology, and, as the¬ ology was the supreme subject of me¬ diaeval study, “ Madame la haute sci¬ ence ” it was called, this means that it was preeminent as a university. “ The Ital¬ ians have the Papacy, the Germans have the Empire, and the French have Learn¬ ing,” ran the old saying; and the chosen abode of learning was Paris. Quite natu¬ rally 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 uni- 28 THE EARLIEST UNIVERSITIES versities, none of them older than the fourteenth century, were confessed imi¬ tations of Paris. Thus the Elector Pala¬ tine, "Ruprecht, in founding the Univer¬ sity 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 ob¬ served 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 na¬ tions and a rector, exemptions for stu¬ dents and their servants, and even caps and gowns for the several faculties “ as has been observed at Paris. 5 ’ 1 By the end of the Middle Ages at least eighty universities had been founded in v different parts of Europe. 2 Some of 1 Translated in E. F. Henderson, Select Histor¬ ical Documents of the Middle Ages , pp. 262-266. 2 Table in Rashdall, Universities , I, p. xxviii; map at beginning of Vol. II and in Shepherd, His¬ torical Atlas (New York, 1911), p. 100. 29 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES 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 Sa¬ lamanca, Cracow and Louvain, have an unbroken history of many centuries of distinction. And the great European uni¬ versities of more recent foundation, like Berlin, Strasbourg, Edinburgh, Man¬ chester, and London, follow in their or¬ ganization the ancient models. In Amer¬ ica the earliest institutions of higher learn¬ ing reproduced the type of the contempo¬ rary English college at a time when the university in England was eclipsed by its constituent colleges; but in the crea¬ tion of universities in the later nineteenth century, America turned to the univer¬ sities 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 30 THE EARLIEST UNIVERSITIES 1764 grants “the same privileges, dig¬ nities, and immunities enjoyed by the American colleges, and European uni¬ versities.’’ What then is our inheritance from the oldest of universities? In the first place it is not buildings or a type of architec¬ ture, 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 Al¬ mighty God, and also for holding Com¬ mencement in ” ! Indeed one who seeks to reconstruct the life of ancient univer¬ sities will find little aid in their existing remains. Salerno retains no monuments of its university, though its rare old cathe¬ dral, where Hildebrand lies buried, must have seen the passing of many genera¬ tions of would-be physicians. In the halls and coats of arms of “ many-domed Padua proud ” we behold the Renais- 31 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES sance, not the Middle Ages. Even Bo¬ logna, 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 noth¬ ing from this period. Paris, too often careless of its storied past, can show to¬ day only the ancient church of Saint- Julien-le-Pauvre, where university meet¬ ings were often held, unless we count, as we should, the great cathedral in the Cite whence the university originally sprang. The oldest Cambridge college, Peter- house, has only a fragment of its earliest buildings; the finest Cambridge monu¬ ment, 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- 32 THE EARLIEST UNIVERSITIES 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 struc¬ tures 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 Tu¬ dors, 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 aca¬ demic form and ceremony, in spite of oc¬ casional 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 33 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES 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 re¬ semblance 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 Pres¬ ident Wilson received his honorary degree in 1918. It is, then, in institutions that the uni¬ versity 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 34 THE EARLIEST UNIVERSITIES 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, defi¬ nitely laid down as regards time and sub¬ jects, tested by an examination and lead¬ ing 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 chan¬ cellors 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 un¬ broken 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 singu¬ larly tough and persistent, suited to use and also to abuse, like Bryce’s university with a faculty “ consisting of Mrs. John- 35 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES son 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 de¬ votion 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 mainte¬ nance of the tradition of learning and in¬ vestigation. The glory of the mediaeval university, says Rashdall, was “ the con- j secration 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 mod¬ em spirit.” How the early universities performed this task will be the theme of the next lecture. 36 THE MEDIAEVAL PROFESSOR II ) THE MEDIAEVAL PROFESSOR In the last lecture we considered the mediaeval university as an institution. We come now to examine it as an intel¬ lectual centre. This involves some ac¬ count of its course of study, its methods of teaching, and the status and freedom of its teachers. The element of continu¬ ity, so clear in institutions, is often less evident in the content of learning, but even here the thread is unbroken, the con¬ trast 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 37 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES first group was the more rudimentary, but the second was rudimentary enough. The number was fixed and the content standardized during the decadence of an¬ cient 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 con¬ densing and desiccating knowledge for their own more limited intelligence, were also unconsciously preparing for later times those small and convenient pack¬ ages 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 af¬ fords an accurate index of the extent of its knowledge and the nature of its in¬ struction. It was a bookish age, with great reverence for standard authorities, 38 THE MEDIAEVAL PROFESSOR and its instruction followed closely the written word. In the monastic and cathedral schools of the earlier period the text-books were few and simple, chiefly the Latin grammars of Donatus and Priscian with some ele¬ mentary reading-books, the logical man¬ uals 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 stimu¬ lus 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 39 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES the spirit of a real humanism showed it¬ self in an enthusiastic study of ancient authors and in the production of Latin verse of a really remarkable quality. Cer¬ tain writings of one of these poets, Bishop Hildebert of Le Mans, were even mis¬ taken for “ real antiques ” by later hu¬ manists. 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 dis¬ appeared. 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. • •••••• 40 THE MEDIAEVAL PROFESSOR 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 stat¬ utes, 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 uni¬ versity — 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 it¬ self, it pervaded every other subject as a method and gave tone and character to the mediaeval mind. Syllogism, disputa¬ tion, the orderly marshalling of argu- 41 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES ments for and against specific theses, these became the intellectual habit of the age in law and medicine as well as in phi¬ losophy 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 grand¬ father of the commentator,” no other writer appealed so strongly as Aristotle to the mediaeval reverence for the text¬ book and the mediaeval habit of formal thought. Doctrines like the eternity of matter which seemed dangerous to faith were explained away, and great and au¬ thoritative systems of theology were built up by the methods of the pagan philos¬ opher. And all idea of literary form dis- 42 THE MEDIAEVAL PROFESSOR appeared when everything depended on argument alone. If the study of the classics became con¬ fined to examples and excerpts designed to illustrate the rules of grammar, rhetoric had a somewhat different fate by reason of its practical applications. The intel¬ lectual 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 43 / THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES tells us. By the thirteenth century such masters had found a place in certain uni¬ versities, 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 every¬ thing fresh and snappy and up-to-date, ready to be applied the same day if need be! Thus one professor at Bologna de¬ rides 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 de¬ manded 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 skil¬ ful 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 stu¬ dent at Paris is to write his mother for necessary expenses.” Would not every 44 « THE MEDIAEVAL PROFESSOR 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 teach¬ ing in the pulpits and preaching at the street corners, lawyers magnifying Jus¬ tinian and physicians Galen, professors of grammar and logic, and musicians with their organs, lectures on the books of natu¬ ral 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 vine¬ yards 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 at- 45 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES tention, 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. Lab¬ oratories 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 nor¬ mally 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, be¬ ing regularly required for theology and usual for intending lawyers and physi¬ cians. A sound tradition, to which the American world has given too little at¬ tention! Contrary to a common impression, there were relatively few students of the¬ ology in mediaeval universities, for a prescribed theological training for the priesthood came in only with the Counter- 46 THE MEDIAEVAL PROFESSOR Reformation. The requirements for ad¬ mission 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. In¬ deed Avicenna was still more firmly in¬ trenched in the East, for as late as 1887 a majority of the native physicians in the 47 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES Persian capital “ knew no medicine but that of Avicenna.” 1 Except for some advance in anatomy and surgery at cer¬ tain southern schools, like Bologna and Montpellier, the mediaeval universities made no contributions to medical knowl¬ edge, for no subject was less adapted to v' 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 medi¬ aeval Europe was never a subject of uni¬ versity study. The central book wa§ the Digest , summarizing the ripest fruits of Roman legal science, and it was their mastery of the Digest that gives pre¬ eminence 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 1 E. G. Browne, Arabian Medicine (1921), p. 93. 48 THE MEDIAEVAL PROFESSOR whereas the scholastic method in philoso¬ phy has lost hold on much of the modern world, the work of the glossators still survives. “ In many respects,” says Rash- dall , 1 “ 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 devel¬ opment 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 con¬ cerns 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 inter¬ preted, developed, and applied. . . . The works of these men are, perhaps, the only 1 Universities, I, pp. 254-255. 49 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES productions of mediaeval learning to which the modern Professor of any sci¬ ence 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 possibil¬ ity 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 stu¬ dents 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 . 1 No 1 Sic heredes Gratiani Student fieri decani, Abbates, pontifices. 50 / THE MEDIAEVAL PROFESSOR wonder canon law attracted the ambitious, the wealthy, even the idle, for at Paris we are told that the lazy students fre¬ quented 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, espe¬ cially 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 lit¬ erature of the later Middle Ages and the marginal glosses for which, according to Dante, “ the Gospel and the great doc¬ tors are deserted.” Of the textbooks needed in all these subjects the university undertook to se¬ cure 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, 51 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES 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 uni¬ versity had its supervisors and correctors who inspected periodically all the books for sale in the town. Moreover, at Bo¬ logna 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 station- 52 THE MEDIAEVAL PROFESSOR ers for publication. The principal books of law and theology were the natural outgrowth of university lectures. With demand and supply so largely concen¬ trated in the universities, it is not surpris¬ ing 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 li¬ braries 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 cat¬ alogue of the Sorbonne, the chief Paris library, lists 1722 volumes, many of them still to be seen in the Biblioth£que Na¬ tional, while many an Oxford college still preserves codices which belonged to its library in the Middle Ages. 53 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES Turning from books to professors, we should note at the outset that the Middle Ages produced many excellent and re¬ nowned 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 mov¬ ing spirit in the revival of education at the court of Charlemagne and the monas¬ tery school of Tours, and two centuries later Gerbert of Rheims roused the won¬ der 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.” 1 From the period of univer¬ sity origins we get a fairly clear impres¬ sion of Abelard as a teacher and ‘ class¬ room entertainer,’ bold, original, lucid, 1 Richer, I, cc. 45-54; extracts translated in Taylor, Mediaeval Mind (1919), I, pp. 289-293. 54 THE MEDIAEVAL PROFESSOR sharply polemical, always fresh and stim¬ ulating, 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 argu¬ ments for and against specific proposi¬ tions, a method which was soon imitated in Gratian’s Concord of Discordant Can¬ ons, and, reenforced 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 an¬ tagonism 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 55 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES 1147, chiefly at Paris and Chartres. 1 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, show¬ ing 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 un¬ taught 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, gram¬ mar taught by composition, imitation of excellent models but merciless exposure of borrowed finery, qualities which made Ber¬ nard “ the most copious source of letters 1 Translated in R. L. Poole, Illustrations of the History of Mediaeval Thought, pp. 203—212; A. O. Norton, Readings in the History of Educa¬ tion, pp. 28-34. What we know of these masters is analyzed by Poole in the English Historical Re¬ view, xxxv, pp. 321-342 (1920). 56 THE MEDIAEVAL PROFESSOR 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 ap¬ pear to have reached the goal in unravel¬ ling 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, ex¬ cept 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 Gar- lande at Paris, Ponce of Provence at Orleans, and Lorenzo of Aquileia at Naples and almost everywhere, but we 57 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES shall make sufficient acquaintance with their inflated writings in other connec¬ tions. 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 ob¬ serve: First, I shall give you summaries of each title before I proceed to the text; second, I shall give you as clear and ex¬ plicit 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 correct¬ ing it; fourth, I shall briefly repeat the contents of the law; fifth, I shall solve apparent contradictions, adding any gen¬ eral principles of law [to be extracted from the passage], commonly called 4 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 en¬ able me. And if any law shall seem de- 58 THE MEDIAEVAL PROFESSOR serving, by reason of its celebrity or diffi¬ culty, of a repetition, I shall reserve it for an evening repetition, for I shall dis¬ pute 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 ex¬ traordinary, 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 com¬ mon 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 59 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES 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 ob¬ served. 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 extraor- • linary lectures, for students are not good payers, wishing to learn but not to pay, 4s the saying is: All desire to know but 00 THE MEDIAEVAL PROFESSOR 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.” 1 Important as was the formal lecture in those days of few books and no labora¬ tories, 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 4 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 con- 1 Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, MS. Lat. 4489, f. 102; Savigny, Geschichte des romischen Rechts im Mittelalter (1834), III, pp. 264, 641, 663; cf. Rashdall, I, p. 219. 61 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES venient 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, appar¬ ently 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 Buon- compagno, 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 stat¬ ues 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 in¬ dividual rank and fame; but he adds sig¬ nificantly, “ I never had such a house my¬ self and do not believe any of this sort was ever built.” Our knowledge of the reali¬ ties of the Bolognese class-room is de¬ rived chiefly from the monuments and miniatures of the professors of the four¬ teenth and fifteenth centuries, in which the master is regularly seated at a desk 62 THE MEDIAEVAL PROFESSOR 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, regu¬ larly have an open volume before them. The nature of the final examination is best illustrated at Paris, where it is de¬ scribed in the De conscientia of that ge¬ nial 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 “ adver¬ sary 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, 63 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES 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 re¬ examined after a year, or it may be that, through the intercession of friends or by suitable gifts or services to the chancel¬ lor’s relatives or other examiners, the chancellor can be induced to change his de¬ cision; whereas at the Last Judgment the sentence will be final and there will be no help from wealth or influence or stout as¬ sertion 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 univer¬ sity ’ before the whole world. The chan¬ cellor, 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, 64 THE MEDIAEVAL PROFESSOR 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 ex¬ amination, 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 de¬ mands for examinations. In studying the book of our conscience we should imi¬ tate the candidates for the license, who eat and drink sparingly, conning steadily the one book they are preparing, search¬ ing 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 ex¬ amination. 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 65 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES years. At the examination the chancel¬ lor 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 dif¬ ference 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 mainte¬ nance of a thesis against all comers, an important final exercise which still sur¬ vives as a form in German universities. At Bologna there was first a “ rigorous and tremendous examination ” before doctors, each sworn to treat the candidate 66 THE MEDIAEVAL PROFESSOR “ as he would his own son.” Then fol¬ lowed 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 disputa¬ tion, which was attended by a great multi¬ tude of teachers and scholars. He an¬ swered all questions without a mistake, and no one could prevail against his argu¬ ments. 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 unsuccess¬ ful 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. 67 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES The social position of mediaeval pro¬ fessors must be seen against the back¬ ground 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 cardinal- ates. Among the theologians and phi¬ losophers those of highest distinction were regularly university professors: Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, Bonaven- tura, all the great array of doctors angelic, invincible, irrefragable, seraphic, subtle, and universal. That these were also Do¬ minicans or Franciscans withdrew them only partially from the world. If, as some reformers maintain, the social position and self-respect of profes¬ sors involve their management of univer¬ sity affairs, the Middle Ages were the great age of professorial control. The 68 THE MEDIAEVAL PROFESSOR 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 modem 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 re¬ gents 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 neigh¬ bor ” from which the world seems unable to escape. There remains the question of the pro- 69 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES fessor’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 some¬ thing 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 authorita¬ tive doctrine. Needless to say, the latter was the mediaeval conception of truth and its teaching. “ Faith,” it was held, “ pre¬ cedes science, fixes its boundaries, and prescribes its conditions.” 1 “ 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 stu¬ dents of Paris, says Gregory IX, “ show themselves philosophers, but let them strive to become God’s learned.” The dangers of intellectual pride and reliance 1 Alzog, Church History (1876), II, p. 783. 70 THE MEDIAEVAL PROFESSOR upon reason alone are illustrated by many characteristic stories of masters struck dumb in the midst of their boasting, like iStienne 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 sys¬ tem of courts known as the Inquisition. Such being the general conditions, what was the actual situation? In practice free¬ dom was general, save in philosophy and theology. In law, in medicine, in gram¬ mar 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 so¬ cial sciences as such, a fruitful source of 71 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES 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 pub¬ licly 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 the¬ ological questions, and all through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries there was an intermittent fight between Christian theology and pagan philos¬ ophy 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 Porree, di¬ rected still more of the Aristotelian logic toward theological speculation. By the end of the twelfth century, the New Logic 72 THE MEDIAEVAL PROFESSOR was pretty well assimilated, but then came Aristotle’s Metaphysics and natural philosophy, with their Arabic commenta¬ tors, the study of which at Paris was formally forbidden in 1210 and 1215. In 1231 the Pope requires them to be “ex¬ amined 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, empha¬ sizing the doctrine of the eternity of mat¬ ter and the determination of earthly acts by the heavenly bodies; and two hundred and nineteen errors of this party were con¬ demned 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 struc¬ ture of scholastic theology. Others re¬ served for themselves a wide range of 73 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES 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 the¬ ology, 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 re¬ sult is meagre. In 1241 a series of ten errors was examined and condemned by the chancellor and the professors of the¬ ology, a very abstract series of proposi¬ tions dealing with the visibility of the di¬ vine essence, angels, and the exact abid¬ ing-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 74 THE MEDIAEVAL PROFESSOR 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 4 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 hier¬ archy 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 heret¬ ical but as sufficient to cause the deposi¬ tion of the master teaching them; but when we find among them the abolition of the cases of Latin nouns and the per¬ sonal 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 re¬ minded of the modern definition of aca¬ demic freedom as 4 4 the right to say what ^ 75 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES one thinks without thinking what one says! ” With these as the only notable exam¬ ples of interference with free teaching at the storm centre of theological specula¬ tion in the most active period of its his¬ tory, 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 Cath¬ olic, 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 76 THE MEDIAEVAL PROFESSOR that would seem intolerable to a more sceptical age were not felt as barriers by the schoolmen. He is free who feels him¬ self 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 re¬ mind us, and the contests between differ¬ ent 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 turn¬ ing, 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, in¬ dependent of their individual embodi¬ ments? A bit arid it all sounds if we make it merely a matter of logic, but ex¬ citing enough as soon as it becomes a 77 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES question of life. The essence of the Ref¬ ormation lies implicit in whether we take a nominalist or a realist view of the church; the central problem of politics de¬ pends largely upon a nominalist or a real¬ ist 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 in¬ terest of the state above the interest of its members. In his own time and his own way the mediaeval professor often dealt with per¬ manent human interests as he sharpened men’s wits and kept alive the continuous tradition of learning. 78 THE MEDIAEVAL STUDENT 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 re- t garded as a necessary evil or as the main reason for the university’s existence, they certainly cannot be ignored. A mediae¬ val university was no regiment of colo¬ nels 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 elu¬ sive figure than his teachers, for he is individually less conspicuous and must generally be seen in the mass. Moreover 79 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES the mass is much diversified in time and space, so that generalization is difficult, what is true of one age and one univer¬ sity 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 cen¬ tury, 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 indiscrimi¬ nately from such disparate sources. Un¬ til the conditions at each university of the Middle Ages shall have been studied chronologically, no sound account of stu¬ dent 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 re¬ mains of mediaeval times, there has come 80 THE MEDIAEVAL STUDENT down to us a considerable body of ma¬ terial 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 coun¬ sel, saying, “ Give it to him, hit him,” and when the offence had been committed ran away. So the coroners’ rolls of Ox¬ ford 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 81 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES raising money by loans and by the sale of text-books. 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 weight¬ ier 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, 82 THE MEDIAEVAL STUDENT many of them also professors, whose ser¬ mons contain frequent allusions to stu¬ dent customs; indeed if further evidence were needed to dispel the illusion that the mediaeval university was devoted to bib¬ lical 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 liti¬ gious 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 univer¬ sity.” 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 com- 83 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES patriots 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 84 THE MEDIAEVAL STUDENT 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 ex¬ pense 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 mat¬ tress 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 85 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES 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 lec¬ tures 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 to¬ gether 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 knowl¬ edge 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 86 THE MEDIAEVAL STUDENT 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 pro¬ longed their stay unduly and lamented their departure in phrases which are some¬ thing more than rhetorical commonplace. Then the student is not unknown to the poets of the period, among whom Ru- tebeuf gives a picture of thirteenth- century Paris not unlike that of the sermonizers, while in the preceding cen¬ tury Jean de Hauteville shows the misery of the poor and diligent scholar falling asleep over his books, and Nigel “ Wire- ker ” satirizes the English students at Paris in the person of an ass, Brunellus, — “ Daun Burnell ” in Chaucer — who 87 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES studies there seven years without learning a word, braying at the end as at the be¬ ginning of his course, and leaving at last with the resolve to become a monk or a bishop. Best of all is Chaucer’s incom¬ parable portrait of the clerk of Oxen- ford, 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 them¬ selves, 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 con¬ sider them in this order. 88 THE MEDIAEVAL STUDENT The manuals of general advice and counsel addressed to the mediaeval scholar do not call for extended con¬ sideration. 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 con¬ tain is apt to be of a very general sort, applicable to one age as well as an¬ other and lacking in those concrete illus¬ trations 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 educa¬ tion. Text-books 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 89 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES yellow-beak, as he was termed in mediae¬ val parlance, might find himself but ill equipped for making himself understood in his new community. For his con¬ venience a master in the University of Paris in the thirteenth century, John of Garlande, prepared a descriptive vocabu¬ lary, 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 con¬ ducted 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 omit¬ ting the classes of ouvrieres whose ac¬ quaintance 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 90 THE MEDIAEVAL STUDENT 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 ser¬ vants. There were the hawkers of wine, crying their samples of different quali¬ ties 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 patissiers had also more substantial wares suited to the cler¬ ical taste, tarts filled with eggs and cheese and well-peppered pies of pork, chicken, and eels. To the rotissiers scholars’ ser¬ vants resorted, not only for the pigeons, geese, and other fowl roasted on their spits, but also for uncooked beef, pork, 91 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES 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 study¬ ing foreign languages is old, as survivals from ancient Egypt testify, and it still spreads its snares for the unwary travel¬ ler who prepares to conquer Europe a la Ollendorff. To the writers of the later Middle Ages it seemed to offer an ex¬ ceptional 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 univer¬ sities of students and to profit therein/’ 92 THE MEDIAEVAL STUDENT 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. “ Hollo at Heidelberg,’’ we might call it. Its eighteen chapters con¬ duct 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 candi¬ date as an unclean beast with horns and tusks which must be removed by officious fellow-students, who also hear his con¬ fession 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 93 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES 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 Philoso¬ phers’ 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 94 THE MEDIAEVAL STUDENT of many professors; his master discour¬ ages 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 man¬ ners, 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 95 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES 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 at¬ tendance 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 care¬ ful not to play with dice or break stones from the wall or throw anything over the 96 THE MEDIAEVAL STUDENT 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 manu¬ script of the Bibliotheque Nationale at Paris . 1 “ 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 expres¬ sions 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 1 MS. Lat. n. a. 619, ff. 28-35. 97 r THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES must be ready, not only to plead the inevi¬ table 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 refec¬ tion ” 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, 98 THE MEDIAEVAL STUDENT 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 dis¬ putations 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 mas¬ ter’s quiz on Latin grammar, when every one was questioned in turn (auditio cir - culi ). The pupils rehearse their declen¬ sions and conjugations and the idle begin 99 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES 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 pahniterium” 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 (dur¬ ing Lent), and a kind of counting 100 THE MEDIAEVAL STUDENT 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 oc¬ cupied by another type of mediaeval handbook, the manual of manners, which under such titles as “ The Book of Ur¬ banity,” “ 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 elaborate¬ ness 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 read¬ ers 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 101 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES fingers, and don’t gorge; don’t be boister¬ ous 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 con¬ ditions. 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 writ¬ ing of a letter was less an expression of individual feeling and experience than it was the laborious copying of a letter of 102 THE MEDIAEVAL STUDENT some one else, altered where necessary to suit the new conditions. And if some¬ thing 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 care¬ less of the single ” letter, history seems. The result is that the hundreds of student letters which have reached us in the manu¬ scripts 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 cor¬ respondence of mediaeval students con¬ sists 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 103 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES life was doubtless one of the most im¬ portant problems that confronted the mediaeval scholar, and many were the models which the rhetoricians placed be¬ fore him in proof of the practical advan¬ tages of their art. The letters are gener¬ ally 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 ex¬ penses. Here is a specimen from Oxford, somewhat more individual than the aver¬ age and written in uncommonly bad Latin: “ B. to his venerable master A., greet¬ ing. 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 104 THE MEDIAEVAL STUDENT of what you sent me. The city is ex¬ pensive and makes many demands; I have to rent lodgings, buy necessaries, and provide for many other things which I cannot now specify. Wherefore I re¬ spectfully 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 ex¬ ceptionally 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 mov¬ ing language, with many appeals to paternal vanity and affection. At Bo¬ logna we hear of the terrible mud through 105 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES 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 tournoiSj 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 de¬ sired 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 106 THE MEDIAEVAL STUDENT 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 stu¬ dent, 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 re¬ lating to Franche-Comte: “ To his son G. residing at Orleans P. of Besan^on sends greetings with pater¬ nal zeal. It is written, ‘ He also that is slothful in his work is brother to him that is a great waster.’ I have recently dis¬ covered 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 in¬ dustrious companions have read several. 107 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES Wherefore I have decided to exhort you herewith to repent utterly of your dis¬ solute 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 admo¬ nition. 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. 108 THE MEDIAEVAL STUDENT 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, 4 To know anything is praiseworthy.’ We occupy a good dwell¬ ing, 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, 4 With an upright man thou wilt show thyself upright.’ ” Such youths were slow to quit academic life. Again and again they ask permis¬ sion to have their term of study extended; war might break out, parents or brothers die, an inheritance have to be divided, 109 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES 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 an¬ swers 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 recov¬ ered.” The time to leave, however, must come at last, and then the great problem is money for the expenses of commence¬ ment, 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 incep¬ tion 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 110 THE MEDIAEVAL STUDENT and on its completion will be able to pass to his licentiate provided they send him a hundred livres for the necessary ex¬ penses. An account of the inception at Bologna was quoted in the preceding chapter. 1 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 con¬ nected with the classical phase of the twelfth-century renaissance. It is largely the work of the wandering clerks of the period — students, ex-students, profes¬ sors even — moving from town to town in search of learning and still more of ad¬ venture, 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 1 Supra, p. 67. Ill THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES ran a free, disreputable course.” 44 They are wont,” writes a monk of the twelfth century, 4 4 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 medi¬ cine, at Toledo magic, but nowhere man¬ ners 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 po¬ etry. 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 genera¬ tions as 44 an admirable improviser, who if he had but turned his heart to the love of God would have had a great place in di- 112 THE MEDIAEVAL STUDENT vine 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 arch¬ bishop of Cologne. Ordered to compose an epic for the emperor in a week, he re¬ plies 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 con¬ tains 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; 113 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES That will make the angels cry, With glad elocution, u Grant this toper, God on high, Grace and absolution ! 99 Though written in Latin, the Goliardic verse has abandoned the ancient metrical system for the rhyme and accent of mod^ ern poetry, but even the best of modem versions, such as those of John Addington Symonds, from which I am quoting, fail to render the swing, the lilt, the rhyth¬ mical 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 114 THE MEDIAEVAL STUDENT 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 wor¬ shipful 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. 115 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES 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. 116 THE MEDIAEVAL STUDENT 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. 117 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES 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 de¬ parted in the faith, and so on to the thir¬ teenth 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 5 age. Often bibulous and erotic, the Goli- ardic verse contains a large amount of parody and satire. Appealing to a pub¬ lic 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 Pa¬ pacy 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 gen¬ eral is that of the lower clergy, especially 118 THE MEDIAEVAL STUDENT the looser, wandering, undisciplined ele¬ ment which frequented the schools and the roads, the jongleurs of the clerical world, familiar subjects of ecclesiastical legisla¬ tion 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 affini¬ ties 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 human¬ ists 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 119 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES been supposed. If the authors are more secular, even more earthy, than we should expect clerks to be, we must learn to ex¬ pect something different. In lyric poetry, as in the epic and the drama, we are now learning more of the close interpenetra¬ tion of the lay and ecclesiastical worlds, no longer separated by the air-tight parti¬ tions which the imagination of a later day interposed. And whether their spirit was lay or ecclesiastical, the Goliardi were cer¬ tainly 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 ,” 1 and in all ages he has been less conspicuous than his more dashing fel¬ lows. Thus the ideal scholar of the ser¬ mons is a bit colorless but obedient, re¬ spectful, eager to learn, assiduous at lectures, and bold in debate, pondering his 1 Universities, II, p. 692. 120 THE MEDIAEVAL STUDENT lessons even during his evening prom¬ enades by the river. The ideal student of the manuals is he who practices their pre¬ cepts. 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,” 1 but much of it was, and we must not look here for the more serious side of academic life. Jean de Haute- ville’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 assi¬ duity best seen in his note-books and dis¬ putations. 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 rec¬ ollections of student escapades than of 1 Jb., II, p. 686, note. 121 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES 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 contem¬ porary universities knows that the se¬ rious 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 Bo¬ logna insisted on their money’s worth of teaching from their professors. The ex¬ aminations described by Robert de Sor- bon required serious preparation. Not only was the vocational motive a strong incentive to study in the mediaeval uni¬ versity, but there was much enthusiasm for knowledge and much discussion of in¬ tellectual subjects. The greater univer¬ sities, at least, were intellectually very much alive, with something of that ‘ re¬ ligion of learning ’ which had earlier called Abelard’s pupils into the wilder- 122 THE MEDIAEVAL STUDENT ness, 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 lit¬ erature 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 univer¬ sities 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 ex¬ pression of feeling, have the generic char¬ acter of most mediaeval poetry; they are for the most part the voice of a class, not of individuals. 123 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES At the same time it must be remem¬ bered that this characteristic of the stu¬ dent productions, if it robs them of some¬ thing of their interest, increases their historical value. The historian deals with the general rather than the par¬ ticular, 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, how¬ ever, that labor has already been per¬ formed 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 ex¬ perience 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 124 THE MEDIAEVAL STUDENT form, many of them are almost as repre¬ sentative 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 an¬ tiquity, 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 develop¬ ment remain much the same from age to age and must so remain as long as human nature and physical environment continue 125 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES 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 environ¬ ment was different, his problems were much the same; if his morals were per¬ haps worse, his ambition was as active, his rivalries as intense, his desire for learn¬ ing quite as keen. And for him as for us, intellectual achievement meant mem¬ bership in that city of letters not made with hands, “ the ancient and universal company of scholars.’’ * 126 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE i The standard work on mediaeval universities is Hastings Rashdall, The Universities of Eu¬ rope in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1895; new edition in preparation), to which my indebted¬ ness will be apparent throughout. The later literature can be most easily found in L. J. Paetow, Guide to the Study of Mediaeval His¬ tory (Berkeley, 1917). Important materials are conveniently accessible in translation in D. C. Munro, The Mediaeval Student (Phila¬ delphia, 1895) ; and A. O. Norton, Readings in the History of Education: Mediaeval Uni¬ versities (Cambridge, Mass., 1909). Bologna now has a cartulary and a special series of Studi e Memorie (both since 1907) ; while the municipal history of the early period has been studied by A. Hessel, Geschichte der Stadt Bo¬ logna von 1116 his 1880 (Berlin, 1910). Light has recently been thrown on Salerno by the studies of Giacosa and Sudhoff and the dis¬ sertations of SudhofPs pupils; its most popular product, The School of Salernum , can be read 127 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES in the quaint English version of Sir John Har¬ rington, 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, supple¬ mented, as in the case of Cambridge, by the histories of the several colleges. n 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 Mediae¬ val Thought and Learning (second edition, London, 1920) ; M. Grabmann, Geschichte der scholastischen Methode (Freiburg, 1909-11) ; Sir J. E. Sandys, History of Classical Scholar¬ ship, I (third edition, Cambridge, 1921) ; Lynn Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimen¬ tal Science (New York, 1923) ; Pierre Duhem, Le systeme du monde de Platon a Copernic , II- V (Paris, 1914-17); Charles H. Haskins, Studies in the History of Mediaeval Science (in press, Harvard University Press) ; the stand¬ ard histories of philosophy, mathematics, law, 128 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE and medicine; and the more special literature in Paetow’s Guide , including his own study of the Arts Course (Urbana, 1910) and his edi¬ tion 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 Beitrage zur Geschichte der Philosopliie des Mittalalters, XXI (Munster, 1919 ff.). The best account of the class-rooms of a mediaeval university is F. Cavazza, Le scuole delV antico studio bolognese (Milan, 1896). Robert de Sorbon’s De conscientia is edited by Chambon (Paris, 1903). m 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 Re¬ view , in, P p. 203-229) and from one on the Paris sermons (ib., X, pp. 1-27). John of Garlande’s Dictionary will be found most con¬ veniently in T. Wright, A Volume of Vocabu¬ laries (London, 1882), pp. 120-138; he also 129 THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES wrote a Morale Scolarium of which Paetow is preparing an edition. The Manuale Schola - rium 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 fiir deutsche Erziehungs- und Schulgeschichte, III, pp. 129-145 (1893). The latest dis¬ cussion of mediaeval manuals of man¬ ners 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 individu¬ alized, the Primate by Leopold Delisle and W. Meyer, the Archpoet by B. Schmeidler and M. Manitius. For an introduction to the vast lit¬ erature of Goliardic poetry, see Paetow’s Guide, pp. 449 f.; P. S. Allen, in Modern Phi¬ lology, V, VI; and H. Siissmilch, Lateinische Vagantenpoesie (Leipzig, 1917). On the origin of the word 4 Goliardi,’ see James West- fall Thompson, in the Studies in Philology, published by the University of North Carolina, XX, pp. 83-98 (1923). 130 INDEX 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. Averroes, 73, 74. Avicenna, 47. Bede, 39. Berlin, 30. Bernard of Chartres, 19, 56. Besangon, 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. Etienne de Tournay, 71. Euclid, 8, 39. Examinations, 17,63-67,122 131 INDEX 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 Porree, 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. Li&ge, 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. 132 INDEX 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 cen¬ tury, 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; stu¬ dents, letters by, 102-111; students, manuals for, 89- 102; students, poems con¬ cerning, 87, 88, 111-120; students, sermons concern¬ ing, 82-87. Sudhoff, K., 127. Sussmilch, H., 130. Symonds, J. A., Ill, 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. 133 INDEX Thompson. J. W., 130. Thorndike, L., 128. Toledo, 112. Toulouse, 45. Tours, 54, 110. Trivium, 7, 37. United States, university tra¬ dition 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. 134