Medieval Universities

11 Key excerpts on "Medieval Universities"

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  Intellectual Life in the Middle Ages

  Essays Presented to Margaret Gibson

  • Lesley Smith(Author)
  • 1992(Publication Date)
  • Hambledon Continuum

    (Publisher)

  Ker, ed. M.B. Parkes and A.G. Watson, (London, 1978), pp. 145ff. 15 See e.g. Cobban, The Medieval English Universities, pp. 243-56; J.M. Fletcher, 'Change and Resistance to Change: A Consideration of the Development of English and German Universities during the Sixteenth Century', History of Universities, 1 (1981), pp. Iff.; J.K. McConica, 'Humanism and Aristotle in Tudor Oxford', E.H.R., 94 (1979, pp. 291ff. 16 See e.g. H. Rashdall, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages 3 vols., 2nd ed., ed. P.M. Powicke and A.B. Emden (Oxford, 1936), hi, pp. 453-54; M.H. Curtis, Oxford and Cambridge in Transition 1558-1642 (Oxford, 1959), pp. 21-22, 65ff. 232 Intellectual Life in the Middle Ages society. In a legally-orientated society of competing rights and privileges conferred by a hierarchy of authorities, there was unlimited scope for the application of that exactitude of mind which was shaped and refined by logical training. As vocational academies, the Medieval Universities appear to have suc-ceeded fairly well in supplying the trained personnel for the manifold needs of secular and ecclesiastical government. University graduates are found at all levels within the hierarchies of state and church. 17 They held the principal offices of government, and served as royal councillors and king's clerks, and they were prominent among Europe's bishops, deans of cathedrals and head of religious houses. They also found careers as diplomats, as judges in both secular and ecclesiastical courts, as members of parliamentary institutions, as senior officials, canons and prebendaries of cathedrals, as the officials of bishops and archdeacons, and as the holders of offices within aristocratic households. On a lesser plane, university graduates became schoolmasters, notaries public, parish clergy, chantry priests and domestic chaplains.

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  Higher Education and the Growth of Knowledge

  A Historical Outline of Aims and Tensions

  • Michael Segre(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The 12th and 13th centuries saw the introduction of new works by Aristotle and fundamentals of Greco-Arab science. Albertus Magnus (c. 1200–1280) and his pupil Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), who taught in several European universities, reconciled in their summae (“sum up” of knowledge—a medieval textbook) Christianity with Aristotelian philosophy into a relatively rigid learning. The development of knowledge, including that knowledge at the roots of modern science, was thus subject to religion in addition to corporatism. More in general, there was little or no awareness of the growth of knowledge, which was conceived as static and complete. Madkdisi (1981), as seen, points out many similarities between madrasa s and European Medieval Universities, in particular university colleges: structures, methods of learning, license to teach, and so forth. I would add the similarity between Jewish yeshivot and universities. Of course, there were many types of yeshivot, madrasa s, and European colleges, and there is no evidence of direct influence. Yet, to paraphrase Makdisi (1981, 286), it is inconceivable that three cultures developed side by side for centuries without being aware of developments on either side. Over time, medieval studia, with the teaching of the liberal arts, law, medicine, and theology, embraced virtually the totality of higher knowledge in the Middle Ages. The universities came to monopolize a large part of the knowledge, which was still circumscribed, in a society in which the majority of the population was illiterate. Only medicine could claim relative independence from religion, yet all the teachings, including medicine, were basically dogmatic. For a long time, medicine remained mainly a theoretical subject, separate from surgery, a practice that was considered less prestigious and was taught outside the university because it was a “trade” belonging to a lower social level

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  Medieval Science and Technology

  • Elspeth Whitney(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  These first universities provided the models for virtually all later universities. The northern and southern universities differed in several ways. Paris and Oxford were governed by teachers in the liberal arts, most of whom were members of religious orders, and took the lead in the sciences, medicine, and mathematics during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. At Paris and Oxford, as well as the universities modeled after them, masters re- ceived support and time off from preaching and other religious duties in order to teach and pursue their own studies. Bologna and Padua, on the other hand, were run by the students and initially specialized in law and medicine, as well as the liberal arts. At these universities many of the masters were laymen and received a salary for teaching from the students as well as fees from their own practices in medicine and law. By the late Middle Ages from the late fourteenth through the sixteenth century, the northern universities had declined and the Italian universities had become the most important centers for scientific learning. By the end of the Middle Ages, there were over seventy universities in Europe and at least one in almost every major region. The curriculum and teaching methods of the university had important effects on medieval ideas about the nature of science and scientific method. Knowledge was organized in a hierarchical fashion. Students pursuing a “bachelor of arts” degree followed a planned program covering first the seven liberal arts, then philosophy and natural philosophy (in- cluding metaphysics, physics, psychology, and biology), and finally moral philosophy (politics, economics, and ethics). This course of study was largely based on Aristotle and some other Greek texts, especially Ptol- emy’s Almagest and Euclid’s Elements of Geometry, but gradually more contemporary textbooks were added.

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  The Cambridge History of Science: Volume 2, Medieval Science

  • David C. Lindberg, Michael H. Shank(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  THE EXPANSION OF THE UNIVERSITY The late-Medieval Universities were remarkable for both their diffusion and their internal growth. The mobility of students and masters greatly 65 Lynn Thorndike, University Records and Life in the Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), pp. 32–5. 66 Gordon Leff, Paris and Oxford Universities in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries: An Intellectual and Institutional History (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1968), pp. 140–1. 67 J. M. M. H. Thijssen, Censure and Heresy at the University of Paris, 1200–1400 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998); and John E. Murdoch, “1277 and Late Medieval Natural Philosophy,” in Was Ist Philosophie im Mittelalter? ed. Jan Aertsen and Andreas Speer (Miscellanea Mediaevalia, 26) (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1998), pp. 111–21, especially p. 121. 68 McLaughlin, Intellectual Freedom and Its Limitations in the Universities of Paris in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries, pp. 85ff, 306. Schools and Universities in Medieval Latin Science 229 facilitated the proliferation of the institution during the fourteenth and fif- teenth centuries and helps to explain the diffusion of customs, texts, and legal privileges to far-flung universities. The masters’ “right of teaching any- where” (ius ubique docendi) was sometimes empty. 69 The utility of their common language was not. Far from being the dead language of a bygone empire, Latin was the lingua franca of working intellectuals, peppered with neologisms and imports from Arabic, Greek, and the vernaculars. The sheer number of its specimens soon made the university as a species impossible to extinguish. Unlike their spontaneous predecessors, dozens of later universities began at the initiative of a city or a ruler.

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  Readings in the History of Education

  Mediaeval Universities

  • Arthur O. Norton(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Perlego

    (Publisher)

  3. Between the latter part of the twelfth century and 1500 A.D. at least seventy-nine universities were established in western Europe. There may have been others of which no trace remains. Several of them were short-lived, some lasting but a few years; ten disappeared before 1500. Since that date twenty others have become extinct. The forty-nine European universities of to-day which were founded before 1500 have all passed through many changes in character and various periods of prosperity and decline, but we still recognize in them the characteristic features mentioned above, and the same features reappear in the "most modern, most practical, most unpicturesque of the institutions which now bear the name of 'University.'" This is one illustration of the statement on page 2 that the daily and hourly conduct of university affairs in the twentieth century is to a surprising degree influenced by what universities did seven centuries ago.

  4. The term "University" has always been difficult to define. In the Middle Ages its meaning varied in different places, and changed somewhat in the centuries between 1200 and 1500 A.D. In these pages it signifies in general an institution for higher education; and "institution" means, not a group of buildings, but a society of teachers or students organized, and ultimately incorporated, for mutual aid and protection, and for the purpose of imparting or securing higher education. Originally, universities were merely guilds of Masters or Scholars; as such they were imitations of the numerous guilds of artisans and tradesmen already in existence. Out of the simple organization and customs of these guilds grew the elaborate organization and ceremonials of later universities.

  There were two main types of university organization,—the University of Masters, and the University of Students. In the former,—which is the type of all modern universities,—the government and instruction of students were regulated by the Masters or Doctors. In the latter, these matters were controlled by the students, who also prescribed rules for the conduct of the Masters. Paris and Bologna were, respectively, the original representatives of these types. Paris was the original University of Masters; its pattern was copied, with some modifications, by the universities of England, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and Scotland. Bologna was the archetypal University of Students; its organization was imitated, also with variations, by the universities Italy, France (except Paris), Spain, and Portugal.

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  The Idea of the Public University

  Discovering and Teaching Knowledge in a Confused World

  • Allan Patience(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Jayapalan, 2005 ).

  Conclusion

  This growth of universities around the world in the nineteenth centuries drew from long history of sanctuaries of scholarship that had sheltered men and women of contemplation, thoughtfulness and intellectual curiosity all down the ages and across much of the globe. As Marcia Colish concludes in her excellent study of the Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition: “[T]he central lesson every field conveyed to later ages is that it is possible, and desirable, to invent and to reinvent ideas and aesthetic forms of expression, maintaining an organic connection with tradition while using it to fuel a continuous process of intellectual self-fashioning” (1997 : 359). Well before medieval times, in Asia and Africa and across Europe, thinkers had been questioning conventional beliefs and orthodox dogmas about their societies and their place in the world – wondering about how they came into being, and why. Communities were formed providing sanctuary for these people, allowing them time, resources, and space for nurturing their questioning and imagining.

  The earliest idea of a university, then, is of a place of sanctuary, a place where it is safe to think deeply and seriously, reverentially, and critically, a place where original thought could flourish. It was also a place where truth – however subtly expressed – could be spoken to power. In Oxford, in the nineteenth century, John Henry Newman was one of the beneficiaries of this great scholarly tradition. Building on ideas that had already been fermenting in the eighteenth century through the writings of thinkers such as Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant, he began re-imagining the idea of a university in ways that would influence the development of the modern liberal university into the twentieth century. Though increasingly under critical scrutiny, his thinking is still relevant for defending a culture of liberal learning in the university of today.

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  The First Universities

  Studium Generale and the Origins of University Education in Europe

  • Olaf Pedersen, Richard North(Authors)
  • 1998(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 5 From school to studium generale The strong economic and political changes in medieval society following the first millennium were accompanied by a rapid trans- formation within higher education. 1 To a great extent this develop- ment can be attributed to the steadily increasing contact with 'Arab 5 culture, mediated by the hard industry of translators. Through these efforts Latin Europe came into possession of a scholarly literature of great extent for the first time since antiquity. Some of this literature was of high quality and comprised crucial parts of the best literary legacy of Greek scholarship, along with the works of many great thinkers and men of learning who had worked within Islam. In reality this was a true explosion of information that would clearly mean an enormous intellectual challenge for twelfth-century teach- ing and science. Later ages have often cherished an image of medieval polymaths, people capable of cultivating all subjects with equal competence. But this view is exaggerated. There is no doubt that after these translations appeared, the collected literature became too copious for any single teacher to cope with. An Alcuin or a Gerbert was no longer thinkable, and in no previous time had the situation seemed so hard to grasp for a teacher who wished to be universally oriented. In this context it can be understood that the schools of the twelfth century reacted to this challenge in the most logical way, namely by specialising. Everywhere we can spot a tendency to divide the work up by subject. This had the most far- reaching consequences for the whole system of education. Let us begin with the developments in Salerno in southern Italy, where an important centre for medical training and the healing arts grew up. 2 In Italy, during the whole medieval period, the situation in 1 The main sources for this chapter are Denifle; Chartularium; Rashdall.

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  The Global University

  Past, Present, and Future Perspectives

  • A. Nelson, I. Wei, A. Nelson, I. Wei(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  14–28, 65–115; Leff, Paris and Oxford Universities, pp. 51–60; O. Pedersen, The First Universities: Studium Generale and the Origins of University Education in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 194–195; H. Rashdall, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, revised and ed. F. M. Powicke and A. B. Emden, 3 vols. (1936; repr. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), vol. 1, pp. 311–320, 408, 414–415, 420–421; H. de Ridder- Symoens, “Mobility,” in Ridder-Symoens (ed.), Universities in the Middle Ages, pp. 280–304 at 282–285; R. C. Schwinges, “Student education, student life,” in Ridder-Symoens (ed.), Universities in the Middle Ages, pp. 195–243 at 211. 12. J. A. Brundage, The Medieval Origins of the Legal Profession: Canonists, Civilians, and Courts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), pp. 246–247; Cobban, Medieval Universities, pp. 84–86; Gieysztor, “Management and resources,” in Ridder- Symoens (ed.), Universities in the Middle Ages, pp. 109–113; Leff, Paris and Oxford Universities, pp. 52, 60–67; Pedersen, The First Universities, pp. 191–194, 196–198, 200–204; Rashdall, Universities, vol. 1, 321–334, 408–414; N. Siraisi, “The faculty of medicine,” in Ridder-Symoens (ed.), Universities in the Middle Ages, pp. 360–387 at 367–368; Verger, “Patterns,” in Ridder-Symoens (ed.), Universities in the Middle Ages, pp. 38, 52. 13. L. Thorndike, University Records and Life in the Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), Document no. 36, p. 76. 14. A. B. Cobban, “The role of colleges in the Medieval Universities of northern Europe, with special reference to France and England,” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 71 (1989): 49–70 at 51–53; Gieysztor, “Management and resources,” in Ridder-Symoens (ed.), Universities in the Middle Ages, pp. 116–119; P. Glorieux, Les Origines du Collège de Sorbonne (Notre Dame, IN: Mediaeval Institute, University of Notre Dame, 1959), pp.

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  American Higher Education, Second Edition

  A History

  • Christopher J. Lucas(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  The university at Cracow was chartered in 1364; Buda followed shortly thereafter, in 1389. Upsala and Copenhagen hosted the two most important Medieval Universities in Scandinavia. In the late 1400s new universities appeared in Scotland, including St. Andrews, Aberdeen, and 48 AMERICAN HIGHER EDUCATION Glasgow. The two most important institutions in England, of course, were Oxford and Cambridge. APPRENTICE SCHOLARS AND MASTERS Inasmuch as Latin was the exclusive language of instruction in Medieval Universities, minimal proficiency in the ancient tongue of Cicero and Virgil was prerequisite to admission for higher studies. One directive of the period stipulated that anyone seeking university admission had to be able to "read, sing and construe well and also compose twenty-four verses on one subject in one day" in Latin. Sometimes towns and cities themselves sponsored public grammar schools where preparatory studies could be undertaken. In other places, as in Germany, universities often seem to have operated their own ancillary schools in which youths might seek necessary tutelage. Again, most collegiate or parish church schools in smaller towns and villages could supply the essentials of ecclesiastical Latin, which usually sufficed for a student's immediate needs. 18 The average age of an entering student was probably no more than fifteen or sixteen. The first challenge awaiting him upon arrival in the city was to find suitable lodgings-in a comfortable suite of rooms if he were affluent, more likely a tiny garret in some wretched inn if he were poor. Selecting a place to live was likely to pose a significant problem for any youth without friends or compatriots to offer counsel, particularly since the university offered entering students little more than facilities for lectures and practically no oflicial guidance whatsoever as to how to get settled into its routines.

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  Education Materialised

  Reconstructing Teaching and Learning Contexts through Manuscripts

  • Stefanie Brinkmann, Giovanni Ciotti, Stefano Valente, Eva Maria Wilden, Stefanie Brinkmann, Giovanni Ciotti, Stefano Valente, Eva Maria Wilden(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  The close connection between devotion and studium in the monastic culture up to the twelfth century has been pointed out emphatically by Illich 1991, 15–66, who Producing, Distributing and Using Manuscripts for Teaching Purposes bar.two seven.tfthree.tf A modern observer would expect universities to face the new requirement for providing manuscripts, the rising number of scholars, 7 the large amount of texts required and the new range of subjects to be covered by a central library for the whole universitas magistrorum et scholarum . But although central libraries at or near universities can be considered ‘die fortschrittlichste Bibliotheksgattung des späten Mittelalters’ (‘the most advanced type of library of the late Middle Ages’), 8 they more or less remained ‘klein und wissenschaftlich unbedeutend’ (‘small and scientifically unimportant’) up to the eighteenth century. 9 Libraries belonging to colleges – of which Paris, the most important city in Europe with a university, had about 70 at the end of the Middle Ages – and those belonging to individual faculties were of far more importance in structural terms. They were only comple-mented slowly by central libraries. In England, following French examples, they arose ‘gradually’. 10 At the University of Prague, established in 1348, the Collegium Carolinum, founded 1366 by Emperor Charles IV, was richly provided with manu-scripts. Heidelberg had a university library right from the start. In contrast, Oxford did not obtain a central library until 1412, Leipzig, founded in 1409, pos-sessed no library at all in the fifteenth century, and in Rostock, founded in 1419, only collections belonging to the faculties were available initially. So expecting a central library to exist is evidently a fairly modern idea. On the other hand, university statutes sometimes required new students to possess key texts upon enrolment, especially students of law and theology.

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  The History of Medical Education

  An International Symposium Held February 5–9, 1968

  • C. D. O'Malley(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  MEDICAL EDUCATION IN THE MIDDLE AGES CHARLES TALBOT Wellcome Institute of the History of Medicine London, England The medieval period in the history of medicine, particularly that section of it usually called "Monastic Medicine" has been described by many scholars as a bookish one. By this they mean to imply that medical texts were copied into manuscripts in a more or less haphazard fashion, that the copyists did not understand what they were writing, and that there was no rational pur- pose behind it. They were, to use Singer's phrase, the result of "scribal acci- dent" or "monastic stupidity" (1). Furthermore, these medical texts (so they say), even when copied down, were seldom if ever studied; they were merely collected and stored away and rarely put to practical use. Anyone who pauses for a moment to consider these two statements will realise immediately how misleading they are. In the first place, book pro- duction was not simply a matter of scribbling something down on parch- ment. There was an economic problem involved, for sheep and cattle had to be present to provide the skins. There was a highly technical process in- volved in transforming the skins into parchment. There was a difficulty, owing to the distances between monasteries or intellectual centres, in pro- curing texts to copy from. And finally there was the physical labour de- manded by the mere act of transcription. No one, not even a monk, could do all this in a fit of absent-mindedness, by scribal accident or sheer stupidity. In the second place, an examination of these texts proves that they were not simply meant to lie on library shelves unread, but intended for the use of pupils and teachers. The dialogue form in which many of them are couched, a form employed in the teaching of the trivium and qtiadrivium by such celebrate masters as Donatus, Victorinus, Augustine and Alcuin, is a clear indication of this.

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