204. Intellectual life of the

CHAPTER X

THE CULTURE OF THE MIDDLE AGES

A. UNIVERSITIES AND LEARNING

EXCEPT for the "Dark Age" comprised in the period of the Germanic invasions, the Middle Ages were far from being a time of intellectual and artistic stagnation. From the tenth century to the close of the medieval period there was an Middle Ages active and vigorous intellectual life, which manifested itself in many ways. It may be seen in the schools and universities of the period, in the highly developed scholastic philosophy with which the universities were largely concerned, and in the study of the civil and canon law. The methods of thought and the subject matter of this intellectual life were different in many ways from those of to-day, but the reality and activity of it cannot be questioned.

205. Mo

nastic and cathedral schools

The universities of to-day, which throughout the world are the chief agencies in promoting higher education and advancing knowledge, are largely an inheritance from the Middle Ages. They first arose as an outgrowth of the earlier monastic and cathedral schools, maintained for the education of the clergy. In these schools were taught the "seven liberal arts" bequeathed to the Middle Ages by dying Greece and Rome. The liberal arts included Latin grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics (the art of formal reasoning), which formed the triv'ium; and the four sciences of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music, constituting the quadriv'ium. The sum of the instruction given in any one of these subjects was very small, and it was based almost entirely on scanty textbooks made in the sixth century. "In arithmetic the students were taught to

keep simple accounts; in music, what was necessary for the church services; in geometry, a few problems; in as- Munro, tronomy, enough to calculate the date of Easter." The Middle method of instruction was for the teacher to dictate dry Ages, 162 summaries in Latin, which his students copied word for word. There was no inquiry or investigation, and little criticism. In spite of Charlemagne's efforts to improve education, little advance was made until the eleventh century. With the settling down of Europe after the period of the invasions there then came a dawn of better things. From the Arabian schools of Spain and Alexandria, and from the Greek schools of Constantinople, new influences made themselves felt. Here and there teachers began to give instruction in new subjects, -in philosophy, theology, medicine, and law. There followed what has sometimes been called the "twelfth-century Renaissance." It manifested itself especially in the rise of the universities, and in the formation of the scholastic philosophy.

206. Peter

Abelard

(d. 1142)

A teacher whose work contributed very largely to these two developments was Peter Ab'elard. He was born of a noble family in Brittany, shortly before the First Crusade; he died in 1142, just before the Second Crusade. Abelard early showed a preference for learning over the life of a knight, and attended the lectures given by a master of the cathedral school of Paris. He soon surpassed his teacher in eloquence and reasoning, and was acknowledged by him to be his superior. At the early age of twenty-two, .Abelard himself began to give lectures, and was soon renowned as the foremost scholar of his time. Students flocked in thousands to his lectures at Paris, and his writings were read by all learned men. But his success brought him enemies; his life was saddened by a romantic love affair which had a most unhappy ending; and his teachings encountered bitter opposition.

The earlier scholars of the tenth and eleventh centuries were ready to accept as true almost everything which was written. Abelard departed from this practice and insisted upon questioning the correctness of the information handed down by earlier

writers. In a famous work called Sic et Non (Yes and No) he showed that the early church fathers often gave contradictory reports of historical facts and of theological teachings. The whole tendency of his life and work was to teach that nothing was to be accepted as true which could not be proved to be so. He showed a spirit of freedom of thought which after ages were long in obtaining. This at last brought about his own downfall. Saint Bernard, the great abbot of the monastery of Clairvaux (clâr-vō'), bitterly opposed Abelard. "He stood for the principle of authority; to the doubts of reason, which seeks truth, he opposed faith, which solves all difficulties in the name of authority." In the end Bernard triumphed, and Abelard was condemned for heresy by a church council. He retired broken in health to the monastery of Cluny, where he died soon afterwards.

the University of

Paris

As a result of the fame of Abelard's teaching, Paris became the chief center of learning in Europe. But the masters and students 207. Rise of who flocked thither were strangers in the city, and were often subjected to mistreatment and extortion. It became necessary for them to organize in defense of their rights, and the model which they naturally chose was that of the guilds. The masters (or university professors) corresponded to the master workmen of the guilds; the bachelors of arts, who were licensed to teach the elementary subjects, may be compared to the journeymen workmen; the students took the place of the apprentices. The organization of the university was at first purely voluntary, without authorization from either church or state. Quarrels were frequent between the students and the townsmen, often on frivolous grounds, and at times resulted in bloodshed. In 1200, in such a quarrel, the townspeople supported by the city officers killed five of the students. The masters supported the students, and threatened to suspend their lectures and to remove from Paris. To appease them, King Philip Augustus ordered that the university should thenceforth be a corporation, and that its students, in criminal cases, should be tried only by the university itself, and not by the city officers. This may be taken as the date of the legal recognition of the Uni

versity of Paris. By subsequent grants from Pope and king alike it gained larger and larger privileges.

At various points in western Europe, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, other universities arose. Usually they grew in ways similar to those which produced the univer- 208. Other sity at Paris. As a rule they began first by an informal universities grouping together of masters and students. Conflicts between townsmen and students are everywhere met with. Then, to

define and regulate the rights of students and masters, charters were obtained from the king or Pope giving to the university a legal organization. At a later date enlightened rulers founded universities outright, just as they founded new towns. The accompanying map shows the spread of the movement and the chief places at which universities sprang up.

The University of Paris was the most renowned school for

philosophy and theology. The University of Bologna became the chief center for the study of law. The University of Salerno, in the kingdom of Naples and Sicily, was renowned as the chief center of instruction in medicine. This university was in existence as early as the ninth century, and hence ranks as the oldest university in Europe. Its rise at so early a date is to be ascribed to the persistence of Greek influence in southern Italy. In all the universities the "arts" course, based on the ancient trivium and quadrivium, was required before students could take up the higher subjects, and the great majority of students never advanced beyond this elementary course.

Owing to the scarcity of books, which at that time were all hand-written, the instruction was almost entirely by means of lectures. The 209. Life of

tured from a desk.
The students sat or
squatted on the straw
or rushes with which
the floor was strewn.
The language used was
naturally Latin, since
that was the official
language of the
church. From about the sixth century, the knowledge of
the Greek tongue had practically disappeared from western
Europe. The universal use of Latin had one advantage, for it
made it easy for students to pass from the universities of one
country to those of another. The extent to which the students
wandered about, seeking instruction now from one noted teacher
and now from another, was remarkable. Having no books
and few possessions, and living often by begging, they were free
to come and go at will.

The universities often possessed no buildings of their own.