The late medieval university

The university is a medieval European invention, and it is one of the most durable. The first generation of universities — Bologna in 1088, Paris in the second half of the twelfth century, Oxford before 1200, Cambridge in 1209, Padua as a secession from Bologna in 1222, Salamanca in 1218, Montpellier in 1220, Toulouse in 1229, Prague in 1347, Vienna in 1365, Heidelberg in 1386, Leipzig in 1409, Louvain in 1425, Erfurt in 1379, Krakow in 1400, St Andrews in 1413, Turin in 1404, Catania in 1434, Sassari in 1562, Salamanca in 1218 — formed a network of institutions in which the Latin reading of the Bible, the Aristotelian natural philosophy, the ius civile of the Digest, the ius canonicum of the Decretum, and the medical teaching of Galen and Hippocrates were the working inheritance of the European learned class for the next three hundred years. The Renaissance was born inside the medieval university, and the university, in its medieval form, was the institutional context in which the humanists of the Quattrocento, the natural philosophers of the long sixteenth century, and the philologists of the Reformation learned their craft.

The corporate form: studium and universitas

The university was, in its medieval form, neither a place nor a curriculum, but a corporation: a universitas of masters and students, with a written charter, with a system of governance, with a programme of study, with a system of examinations and degrees, and with a privilege of iurisdictio under which the scholars were subject only to the courts of the Church or of the corporation itself. The earliest of these corporations were the Bolognese universitas scholarium, a guild of students who had migrated to Bologna in the eleventh and twelfth centuries for the teaching of the ars of Irnerius and the new teaching of the ius civile of the Digest of Justinian, and the Parisian universitas magistrorum, a guild of masters who had taught in the cathedral school of Notre-Dame and the dependent schools of the Left Bank. The Bolognese pattern of a student-run corporation was exported to the south of Europe (to Padua, to Salamanca, to Montpellier, to Siena, to Pisa, to Florence, to Perugia), the Parisian pattern of a master-run corporation to the north (to Oxford, to Cambridge, to Prague, to Vienna, to Heidelberg, to Cologne, to Louvain, to Erfurt, to Leipzig, to Krakow).

The corporate form was the source of the university’s long historical stability. The universitas could sue and be sued, make and break contracts, and legislate for its own members; it could discipline its members; it could raise money from the collecta and the denarius; it could administer its own property; it could make and revoke academic degrees. The universitas was, in this sense, the medieval equivalent of the modern chartered corporation, and the same model was, in the long thirteenth century, exported to the cathedral chapter, the confraternity, the mendicant order, the craft guild, and the city commune. The institutional logic is the same in all of them.

The curriculum: trivium and quadrivium

The curriculum of the late medieval university was, in its first phase, the seven liberal arts of the trivium and the quadrivium. The trivium was the study of language: grammar (the reading of the classical Latin texts of Donatus, Priscian, and the late antique grammarians); logic or dialectic (the Organon of Aristotle, in the new translations of Boethius and the logica modernorum of the thirteenth century); and rhetoric (the De inventione and the Rhetorica ad Herennium of the pseudo-Cicero, the Institutio oratoria of Quintilian, and the Ciceronian letter of the late Quattrocento). The quadrivium was the study of number: arithmetic (Boethius’s De arithmetica); geometry (the Elements of Euclid in the translation of Campanus of Novara); astronomy (the Almagest of Ptolemy in the translation of Gerard of Cremona and Gherardo da Sabbioneta); and music (Boethius’s De musica).

The trivium and the quadrivium were the basic curriculum of the facultas artium, the lowest of the four faculties of the Parisian model, and they prepared the student for one of the three higher faculties of the medieval university: theology, law, or medicine. Theology was, in the Parisian model, the regina facultatum, the queen of the sciences, and the theologate of Paris was the highest of the theology faculties of Latin Christendom; the Sorbonne, founded in 1253 by Robert de Sorbon for the support of sixteen poor theology students, was the most famous of the colleges that supported the theology faculty, and the Biblia Parisiensis of the 1230s and the Glossa Ordinaria of the late eleventh century were its working texts. Law was, in the Bolognese model, the studium’s primum subject, and the teaching of the Digest, of the Codex, of the Authenticum, of the glossae of Accursius, and of the consilia of Bartolus of Sassoferrato and Baldo degli Ubaldi was the core of the curriculum; the ius canonicum of the Decretum Gratiani of c. 1140 and the Decretales of Gregory IX of 1234 was a parallel tradition taught alongside the civil law. Medicine was, in the Bolognese model, the third higher faculty, and the teaching of the Articella of the Hippocratic and Galenic texts, of the Canon of Avicenna, and of the Colliget of Averroes was the basic curriculum; Mondino de’ Liuzzi’s Anathomia of 1316, written in the Bolognese tradition, was the basic anatomical text of the next two hundred years.

The scholastic method

The most distinctive feature of the late medieval university was the scholastic method: the way in which the masters of the Parisian facultas artium and the facultas theologiae treated the text they were reading as the object of a long, slow, and methodically structured question. The quaestio of the sic et non tradition — the yes and no of the Peter Abelard’s Sic et non of c. 1120 — was the basic unit of the scholastic text: a proposition drawn from a scriptural, patristic, or philosophical authority, a series of objections to the proposition, a statement of the proposition’s sed contra (the contrary authority, often from Aristotle or Peter Lombard), a respondeo in which the master gave his own view, and a respondeo ad objectiones in which the master answered each of the objections in turn. The method was, on its own terms, an attempt to make the reading of the auctoritates a piece of rigorous philosophical work: the auctoritas is cited, the objections are listed, the master thinks, the master answers, and the quaestio is closed.

The most ambitious of the scholastic systems was the Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), the Dominican master of the theology faculty at Paris and the founder of the Thomistic tradition. The Summa, in three parts, written in the 1260s and 1270s and unfinished at Aquinas’s death, was the largest single attempt to construct a complete Christian philosophical system in the Latin West, and it was, in the words of the late medieval historians, the most catholic of the medieval syntheses. The other great scholastic systems were the Summa theologiae of Albertus Magnus, the Ordinatio of John Duns Scotus, the Quaestiones of William of Ockham, and the Sermons of Meister Eckhart. The scholastic method, in its late medieval form, was the working method of every learned corporation of the West, and it was the basic intellectual discipline of the humanists, the natural philosophers, the philologists, and the theologians of the Renaissance.

The studia humanitatis

The most significant development in the curriculum of the late medieval university was the rise of the studia humanitatis, the new programme of study that Petrarch and Boccaccio had read out of the auctoritates of classical antiquity and that the humanist schoolmasters of the Quattrocento had turned into a curriculum. The studia was a programme of five subjects: grammar (with the De linguae Latinae usu of Lorenzo Valla and the Rudimenta grammatices of Niccolò Perotti as the basic textbooks); rhetoric (with Cicero, Quintilian, and the Institutio oratoria as the basic texts); history (with Livy, Sallust, Tacitus, Caesar, Herodotus, and Thucydides as the basic texts); poetry (with Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Lucan, Statius, and the Greek and Latin lyrics as the basic texts); and moral philosophy (with the Ciceronian De officiis and the Platonic and Aristotelian ethica as the basic texts). The studia was, in its mature form, a five-year curriculum that began with grammar, moved into rhetoric, and culminated in history, poetry, and moral philosophy; it was taught by the convictores of the paedagogium and the studium, the praeceptores of the school, and the magistri of the university.

The relationship between the studia humanitatis and the older trivium and quadrivium was the central intellectual problem of the Quattrocento. Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406), the chancellor of Florence, had been one of the first humanists to argue for the studia as a Christian paideia. Pier Paolo Vergerio (c. 1370–1444), in his De ingenuis moribus et liberalibus adolescentiae studiis (c. 1402), had set out the first coherent defence of the studia as a programme of humanitas. Leon Battista Alberti’s De studiis et litteris (c. 1450s), Maffeo Vegio’s De educatione liberorum (c. 1451), Guarino da Verona’s curriculum at the court of Ferrara, and Vittorino da Feltre’s school at Mantua were the working models of the studia in the mid-Quattrocento. The humanist curriculum was, in the end, to be the model of the grammar school and the gymnasium of the early modern state, and the humanitas of the studia was the model of the litterae of the European school tradition for the next four hundred years.

Padua, Bologna, and the Italian studia

The Italian universities were the most important institutional context of the Italian Renaissance. The University of Bologna, founded in 1088 and the oldest in the world, was the centre of the new ius civile and ius canonicum of the twelfth-century recovery of the Digest of Justinian, and it remained the centre of the European legal tradition for the next four hundred years; the Bartolists and the Baldists of the fourteenth century were the most influential jurists of Latin Christendom, and the Bolognese tradition of the consilium, the quaestio, and the allegatio was the working method of every court in Europe. The University of Padua, founded as a secession from Bologna in 1222, was the centre of the new Galenic medicine of the early fifteenth century, the centre of the Aristotelian natural philosophy of the Studio padovano, and, in the long sixteenth century, the centre of the new anatomy of Vesalius and Fabricius ab Aquapendente; the Anatomical Theatre of Padua, built in 1594, is the oldest surviving theatre of the new anatomy. The University of Florence, the University of Pisa, the University of Siena, the University of Pavia, the University of Turin, the University of Naples, and the University of Rome (the Sapienza) were the working institutions of the studia in the Italian peninsula, and they were, in the period of the Italian Wars, the most important intellectual centre of Catholic Europe.

The University of Paris was, in the long thirteenth and the long fourteenth centuries, the centre of the quaestio of the theologate of the Sorbonne and the scholarium of the Faculty of Arts; the University of Oxford was, in the long fourteenth century, the centre of the calculators of Merton College and of William of Ockham’s new way of the nominalism; the University of Heidelberg, the University of Leipzig, the University of Louvain, the University of Krakow, and the University of Prague were, in the long fifteenth century, the centres of the new humanist, nominalist, and Thomistic traditions. The studia of the Black Friars, the White Friars, the Augustinians, and the Carmelites were the mendicant schools that the studia of the humanists were to inherit, and the studia of the Jesuits of the 1540s and 1550s was the late Renaissance inheritance of the studia humanitatis of the humanist school.

The university in the long Renaissance

The long sixteenth century was the moment in which the medieval university was, throughout Europe, transformed by the new studia humanitatis and by the new Aristotelian and Galenic sciences. The Collegium Trilingue founded by Erasmus and Jean de Pins at Louvain in 1517, the College of France founded by Francis I in 1530, the Trinity College of Cambridge founded by Henry VIII in 1546, the Jesuit colleges of the 1540s, the Gymnasium of the Wittenberg university of 1502, the Gymnasium illustre of Lauingen of 1563, the Collegium Romanum of the Jesuits of 1556, the Gymnasium of Buda of 1537, and the Collegium of Trnava of 1585 were the new institutions of the studia humanitatis of the long Renaissance. The university, in its medieval form, was the institutional context in which the Renaissance was born; the university, in its early modern form, was the institutional context in which the studia of the humanist school was the working method of the early modern state. Paul F. Grendler’s Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1250–1600 (1989) and Robert Black’s Humanism and Education in Renaissance Italy: Tradition and Innovation in Latin Schools from the Late Middle Ages to the Early Republic (2001) are the basic studies of the studia of the Italian peninsula; Hastings Rashdall’s The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages (3 vols., 1895, revised by F. M. Powicke and A. B. Emden in 1936) is the basic study of the medieval university in the European tradition.