Will Durant
The Age Of Faith
CHAPTER XXXIV
The Transmission of Knowledge
1000-1300
I. THE RISE OF THE VERNACULARS
As the Church had preserved in some measure that political unity of western Europe that the Roman Empire had achieved, so her ritual, her sermons, and her schools maintained a Roman heritage now lost—an international language intelligible to all the literate population of Italy, Spain, France, England, Scandinavia, the Lowlands, Germany, Poland, Hungary, and the western Balkans. Educated men in these countries used Latin for correspondence, business records, diplomacy, law, government, science, philosophy, and nearly all literature before the thirteenth century. They spoke Latin as a living language, which almost daily developed a new word or phrase to denote the new or changing realities or ideas of their lives. They wrote their love letters in Latin, from the simplest billets-doux to the classic epistles of Heloise and Abelard. A book was written not for a nation but for the continent; it needed no translation, and passed from country to country with a speed and freedom unknown today. Students went from one university to another with no thought of linguistic embarrassments; scholars could lecture in the same language at Bologna, Salamanca, Paris, Oxford, Uppsala, and Cologne. They did not hesitate to import new words into Latin, sometimes to the horror of the Petrarcan-Ciceronian ear; so Magna Carta ruled that no freeman should be dissaisiatus or imprisonatus. Such words make us wince, but they kept Latin alive. Many modern English terms—for instance instance, substantive, essence, entity—descended from medieval additions to the Latin tongue.
Nevertheless the disruption of international intercourse by the collapse of Rome, the introverting poverty of the Dark Ages, the decay of roads and the decline of commerce, developed in speech those variations which segregation soon expands. Even in its heyday Latin had suffered national modifications from diversities of climate and oral physiology. In its very homeland the old language had been changed. The abdication of literature had left the field to the vocabulary and sentence structure of the common man, which had always been different from those of the poets and orators. The influx of Germans, Gauls, Greeks, and Asiatics into Italy brought a multiformity of pronunciation; and the natural laziness of tongue and mind sloughed off the precise inflections and terminations of careful speech. H became silent in late Latin; V, classically pronounced like the English W, acquired the sound of the English V; N before S dropped away—mensa (table) was pronounced mesa-, the diphthongs AE and OE, classically pronounced like the English / and OI, were now like long English A or French E. As final consonants were slurred and forgotten (portus, porto, porte; rex, re, roi; coelum, cielo, del), case endings had to be replaced by prepositions, conjugational endings by auxiliary verbs. The old demonstrative pronouns Me and ilia became definite articles—il, el, lo, le, la; and the Latin unus (one) was shortened to form the indefinite article un. As declensions disappeared, it sometimes became difficult to tell whether a noun was the subject before, or the object after, the predicate. Viewing this continuous process of change over twenty centuries, we may think of Latin as the still living and literary language of Italy, France, and Spain, no more transformed from the speech of Cicero than his from that of Romulus, or ours from Chaucer's.
Spain had begun to speak Latin as early as 200 b.c; by Cicero's time its dialect had diverged so far from the usage of Rome that Cicero was shocked by what seemed to him the barbarisms of Corduba. Contact with Iberian dialects softened the Latin consonants in Spain: T into D, P into B, K into G; totum into todo, operam into obra, ecclesia into iglesia. French also softened the Latin consonants, and while often keeping them in writing, frequently dropped them in speech: tout, oeuvre, Sglise, est. The oath taken at Strasbourg in 842 by Louis the German and Charles the Bald was sworn in two languages—German and French *—a French still so Latin that it was called lingua romana; not till the tenth century was it sufficiently distinct to receive the name lingua gallica. The lingua romana in turn divided into what France called two languages: the langue d'oc of France south of the Loire, and the langue d'oil of northern France. It was a medieval custom to differentiate dialects by their way of saying yes: South France said it with oc from the Latin hoc, this; the North used oil, a fusion of the Latin hoc Me, this-that. Southeastern France had a dialect of the langue d'oc called Provencal; it became a polished literary language in the hands of the troubadours, and was almost snuffed out by the Albigensian Crusades.
Italy formed her vernacular more slowly than Spain or France. Latin was her native speech; the clergy, who spoke Latin, were especially numerous in Italy; and the continuity of her culture and her schools kept the language from changing so freely as in lands with broken traditions. As late as 1230
* The first three lines will indicate how slowly French and German evolved: "Pro Deo amur et pro Christian poblo et nostro commun salvament, dist di in avant, in quant Deus savir et podir me dunat."
"In Gedes minna ind in these Christianes folches ind unser bedhero gcaltnissi, fon thesemo dagc frammordes, so fram so mir Got gcwizci indi madh furgibit."
English translation: "For the love of God, and for the Christian people and our common salvation, from this day forth, as God may give me wisdom and strength." *
St. Anthony of Padua preached to the common people in Latin; however, a Latin sermon delivered at Padua in 1189 by a visiting prelate had to be translated by the local bishop into the popular tongue.2 Italian hardly existed as a language at the beginning of the thirteenth century; there were merely some fourteen dialects continued and variously corrupted from the ancient Latin of the market place, each barely intelligible to the rest, and cherishing its differences with passionate atomism; sometimes different quarters of the same city, as at Bologna, had distinct dialects. The predecessors of Dante had to create a language as well as a literature. The poet, in a pleasant fancy, thought that the Tuscan troubadours chose Italian as their medium because they wrote of love, and the ladies they addressed might not understand Latin.8 Even so, about 1300, he hesitated between Latin and the Tuscan dialect as the language of The Divine Comedy. By the narrow margin of this choice he escaped oblivion.
While Latin was dividing reproductively into the Romance languages, Old German was splitting into Middle German, Frisian, Dutch, Flemish, English, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Icelandic. "Old German" is merely a convenient phrase to cover the many dialects that exercised their tribal or provincial sovereignty in Germany before 1050: Flemish, Dutch, Westphalian, Eastphalian, Alemannic, Bavarian, Franconian, Thuringian, Saxon, Silesian. .. . Old German passed into Middle German (1050-1500) partly through the influx of new words with the coming of Christianity. Monks from Ireland, England, France, and Italy labored to invent terms to translate Latin. Sometimes they appropriated Latin words bodily into German— Kaiser, Prinz, Legende. This was legitimate thievery; tragic, however, was the influence of Latin sentence structure—keeping the verb to the end-in changing the once simple syntax of the German people into the stiff, inverted, and breath-taking periods of the later German style.4 Perhaps the finest German was the Middle High German written by the great poets of the thirteenth century—Walter von der Vogelweide, Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried of Strasbourg, Wolfram von Esehenbach. Never again, except in Heine and the young Goethe, was German so simple, flexible, direct, clear.
The Teutonic speech of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes went with them to England in the fifth century, and laid the foundations of the English language—gave it almost all its short and racy words. French flooded the land with the Normans, and ruled the court, the courts, and the aristocracy from 1066 to 1362, while Latin continued to preside over religion and education, and (till 1731) remained de rigueur in official documents. Thousands of French words entered into English, above all in costume, cookery, and law; half the terminology of English law is French.5 For three centuries the literatures of France and England were one; and as late as Chaucer(1340-1400) the spirit and language of English letters were half French. After the loss of her French possessions England was thrown back upon herself, and the
Anglo-Saxon elements in English speech triumphed. When the French domination passed, the English language had been immeasurably enriched. By adding French and Latin to its German base, English could triply express any one of a thousand ideas (kingly, royal, regal; twofold, double, duplex; daily, journal, diurnal,...); to this it owes its wealth of discriminating synonyms and verbal nuances. He who should know the history of words would know all history.
II. THE WORLD OF BOOKS
How were these diverse languages written? After the fall of Rome in 476 the conquering barbarians adopted the Latin alphabet, and wrote it with a "cursive" or running hand that bound the letters together and gave most of them a curved form instead of the straight lines that had been found convenient in writing upon hard surfaces like stone or wood. The Church preferred in those centuries a "majuscule," or large-letter writing, to facilitate the reading of missals and books of hours. When the copyists of Charlemagne's time preserved Latin literature by making many copies of the classics, they saved costly parchment by adopting a "minuscule," or small-letter writing; they agreed on set forms for the letters, and created the "set minuscule" lettering that became for four centuries the usual medium of medieval books. In the twelfth century, as if in accord with the exuberant decoration then developing in Gothic architecture, the letters acquired flourishes, hairlines, and hooks, and became the "Gothic" lettering that prevailed in Europe till the Renaissance, and in Germany till our time. Very few medieval manuscripts were punctuated; this breath-guiding device, known to the Hellenistic Greeks, had been lost in the barbarian upheaval; it reappeared in the thirteenth century, but was not generally adopted till printing established it in the fifteenth century. Printing was in some measure prepared as early as 1147 by the use of woodcuts, in Rhenish monasteries, for printing initial letters or patterns upon textiles.0 Divers forms of shorthand were practiced, much inferior to the "Tironian notes" developed by Cicero's slave.
Writing was upon parchment, papyrus, vellum, or paper, with quill or reed pens using black or colored inks. Papyrus disappeared from common use in Europe after the Islamic conquest of Egypt. Vellum, prepared from the skin of young lambs, was expensive, and was reserved for luxurious manuscripts. Parchment, made from coarse sheepskin, was the usual medium of medieval writing. Till the twelfth century paper was a costly import from Islam; but in 1190 paper mills were set up in Germany and France, and in the thirteenth century Europe began to make paper from linen.
Many parchments were scraped to erase an old manuscript and receive a second composition ("palimpsest"). Old works were lost by such erasures, by misplacement of manuscripts, by war and pillage, by fire or decay. Huns sacked monastic libraries in Bavaria, Northmen in France, Saracens in Italy.
Many Greek classics perished in the plunder of Constantinople in 1204. The Church had at first discountenanced the reading of the pagan classics; in nearly every century some fearful voice—Gregory I, Isidore of Seville, Peter Damian—was raised against them; Theophilus, Archbishop of Alexandria, destroyed all pagan manuscripts that he could find; and Greek priests, according to Demetrius Chalcondylas,7 persuaded Greek emperors to burn the works of the Greek erotic poets, including Sappho and Anacreon. But in those same centuries there were many ecclesiastics who cherished a fondness for the old pagans, and saw to it that their works were preserved. In some cases, to disarm censure, they read the most Christian sentiments into pagan poetry, and by genial allegory turned even Ovid's amatory art into moral verse. An abundant heritage of classical literature was preserved by monastic copyists.8 Tired monks were told that God would forgive one of their sins for every line they copied; Ordericus Vitalis informs us that one monk escaped hell by the margin of a single letter.9 Second only to the monks as copyists were private or professional scribes, who were engaged by rich men, or by booksellers, or by monasteries. Their labor was wearisome, and evoked from them strange requests on the final page:
Explicit hoc totum;
Pro Christo da mihi potum.
This completes the whole;
For Christ's sake give me a drink.10
Another scribe thought he deserved more, and wrote, as his colophon: Detur pro penna scriptori pulchra puella—"For the [work of the] pen let the writer receive a beautiful girl." 11
The medieval Church exercised no regular censorship over the publication of books. If a book proved both heretical and influential, like Abelard's on the Trinity, it would be denounced by a Church council. But books were then too few to be a prime peril to orthodoxy. Even the Bible was rare outside of monasteries; a year was required to copy it, a year's income of a parish priest to buy it; few clergymen had a full copy.12 The New Testament, and special books of the Old, had a wider circulation. Bibles of great size, magnificently decorated, were produced in the twelfth century; they could be handled only on a reading desk, usually in a monastic library, and might be chained to the desk for better preservation. The Church took fright when she found that the Waldensians and Albigensians were making and disseminating their own translations of scriptural books; and a Church council at Narbonne (1227), as we have seen, forbade laymen to possess any portion of the Scriptures.18 But in general, before the fourteenth century, the Church was not opposed to Bible reading on the part of the laity. She did not encourage it, for she distrusted popular interpretations of scriptural mysteries.
The size of a book and its pages was determined by the size of the available skins, each of which was folded to make a "folio." After the fifth century books were no longer issued in rolls as in antiquity;* the skins were cut in rectangular sizes to make four ("quarto"), eight ("octavo"), twelve ("duodecimo"), or sixteen ("sextodecimo") sheets to a folio. Some sextodecimos, written in a "fine Italian hand," crowded long works into small compass to fit into the pocket or be a convenient manual. The binding might be of heavy parchment, cloth, leather, or board. Leather covers might be decorated by "blind tooling" - i.e., stamping uncolored designs into them with hot metal dies. Moslem artists settled in Venice introduced into Europe the technique of filling in such depressed parts with gold tints. Wood covers might be decorated with enamel or carved ivory, or inlaid with gold, silver, or gems. St. Jerome rebuked the Romans: "Your books are carved with precious stones, and Christ died naked!"14 Few modern volumes rival the sumptuous bindings of medieval books.
Even simple books were a luxury. An ordinary volume cost between $160 and $200 in the currency of the United States of America in 1949.la Bernard of Chartres, a leader in the twelfth-century revival of the ancient classics, left a library of only twenty-four volumes. Italy was richer than France, and its famous jurist, the elder Accursius, collected sixty-three books. We hear of a great Bible being sold for ten talents—at least $10,000; of a missal exchanged for a vineyard; of two volumes of Priscian, the fifth-century grammarian, being paid for with a house and lot." The cost of books delayed the rise of a booksellers' trade till the twelfth century; then the university towns engaged men as stationarii and librarii to organize corps of copyists to transcribe books for teachers and students; and these men sold copies to all who cared to pay. They seem never to have dreamed of paying a live author. If a man insisted on writing a new book, he had to pay its costs, or find a king or lord or magnate to grace his palm for a dedication or a laud. He could not advertise his book except by word of mouth. He could not publish it—make it public—except by getting it used in a school, or having it recited before whatever audience he could collect. So Gerald of Wales, on returning from Ireland in 1200, read his Topography of that country before an assemblage at Oxford.
The cost of books, and the dearth of funds for schools, produced a degree of illiteracy which would have seemed shameful to ancient Greece or Rome. North of the Alps, before 1100, literacy was almost confined to "clerics"— clergymen, accountants, scribes, governmental officials, and professional men. In the twelfth century the business classes must have been literate, for they kept elaborate accounts. In a household a book was a precious thing. Usually it was read aloud to several listeners; many later rules of punctuation and style were determined by convenience for oral reading. Books were carefully exchanged from family to family, monastery to monastery, country to country.
• Many government records continued to be written on rolls; such "pipe rolls" were used in England from 1131 to 1833. The keeper of these archives was "Master of the Rolls."
Libraries, though small, were numerous. St. Benedict had ruled that every Benedictine monastery should have a library. Carthusian and Cistercian houses, despite St. Bernard's aversion to learning, became sedulous collectors of books. Many cathedrals—Toledo, Barcelona, Bamberg, Hildesheim—had substantial libraries; Canterbury had 5000 books in 1300. But this was exceptional;17 most libraries had less than a hundred; Cluny, one of the best, had 570 volumes.18 Manfred, King of the Sicilies, had a valuable collection, which passed to the papacy and became the nucleus of the Greek collections in the Vatican. The papal library began with Pope Damasus (366-84); its precious manuscripts and archives were mostly lost in the turmoil of the thirteenth century; the present Vatican Library dates from the fifteenth century. The universities—or, rather, their college halls—began to have libraries in the twelfth century. St. Louis founded the library of Sainte Chapelle in Paris, and enriched it with books copied for him from a hundred monasteries. Many libraries, like those of Notre Dame, St. Germain des Pres, and the Sorbonne, were open to responsible students, and volumes might be taken out on adequate security. The student of today can hardly appreciate the literary wealth that city and college libraries lay freely at his feet.
There were, here and there, private libraries. Even in the darkness of the tenth century we find Gerbert collecting books with true bibliophile passion. Some other churchmen, like John of Salisbury, had their own collections, and a few nobles had small libraries in their chateaux. Frederick Barbarossa and Frederick II had considerable collections. Henry of Aragon, lord of Villena in Spain, gathered a great library, which was publicly burned on the charge that he had intercourse with the Devil.19 About 1200 Daniel of Morley brought to England from Spain "a precious multitude of books."20 In the twelfth century Europe discovered the wealth of Spain in books; scholars descended upon Toledo, Cordova, and Seville; and a flood of new learning poured up over the Pyrenees to revolutionize the intellectual life of the adolescent North.
III. THE TRANSLATORS
Medieval Europe, partly united by a common language, was still divided into Latin and Greek halves, mutually hostile and ignorant. The Latin heritage, except of law, was forgotten in the Greek East; the Greek heritage, except in the Sicilies, was forgotten in the West. Part of the Greek heritage was hidden beyond the walls of Christendom -- 4n Moslem Jerusalem, Alexandria, Cairo, Tunis, Sicily, and Spain. As for the vast and distant world of India, China, and Japan, long rich in literature, philosophy, and art, Christians, before the thirteenth century, knew almost nothing.
Some of the work of linking the diverse cultures was performed by the Jews, who moved among them like fertilizing subterranean streams. As more and more Jews migrated from Moslem realms into Christendom, and lost knowledge of Arabic, their scholars found it desirable to translate Arabic works (many written by Jews) into the only language generally understood by the savants of the scattered race—Hebrew. So Joseph Kimchi (c. 1105-c. 1170), at Narbonne, translated the Jewish philosopher Bahya's Guide to the Duties of the Heart. Joseph was the father of brilliant sons; but even more important, as translators, were the progeny of Judah ben Saul ibn Tibbon (c. 1120-c. 1100). He too, like Kimchi, had moved from Moslem Spain to southern France; and though he was one of the most successful physicians of his time, he found energy to translate into Hebrew the Judeo-Arabic works of Saadia Gaon, Ibn Gabirol, and Jehuda Halevi. His son Samuel (c. 1150-c. 1232) stirred the Jewish world by translating into Hebrew Maimonides' Guide to the Perplexed. Samuel's son Moses ibn Tibbon translated from the Arabic Euclid's Elements, Avicenna's smaller Canon, al-Razi's Anti-dotary, three works of Maimonides, and Averroës' shorter commentaries on Aristotle. Samuel's grandson Jacob ibn Tibbon, besides leading the fight for Maimonides in Montpellier, and earning fame as an astronomer, translated several Arabic treatises into Hebrew, and some into Latin. Samuel's daughter married a still more famous scholar, Jacob Anatoli. Born in Marseille about 1194, Jacob was invited by Frederick II to teach Hebrew at the University of Naples; there he translated into Hebrew the larger commentaries of Averroës, profoundly affecting Jewish philosophy. A like stimulus was given to Hebrew medicine through the translation of al-Razi's Kitab al-Mansuri by the physician and philosopher Shem Tob at Marseille (1264).
Many Hebrew translations from the Arabic were rendered into Latin; so a Hebrew version of Avenzoar's Taysir, or Aid to Health, was turned into Latin at Padua (1280). Early in the thirteenth century a Jew translated the entire Old Testament directly and literally into Latin. The devious routes of cultural migration are exemplified by the Fables of Bidpai, which were translated into English from a Spanish translation of a Latin translation of a Hebrew translation of an Arabic translation of a Pahlavi translation of the supposedly original Sanskrit.21
The main stream whereby the riches of Islamic thought were poured into the Christian West was by translation from Arabic into Latin. About 1060 Constantine the African translated into Latin al-Razi's Liber Experimentorum, the Arabic medical works of Isaac Judaeus, and Hunain's Arabic version of Hippocrates' Aphorisms and Galen's Commentary. At Toledo, soon after its conquest from the Moors, the enlightened and tolerant Archbishop Raymond (c. 1130) organized a corps of translators under Dominico Gundisalvi, and commissioned them to translate Arabic works of science and philosophy. Most of the translators were Jews who knew Arabic, Hebrew, and Spanish, sometimes also Latin. The busiest member of the group was a converted Jew, John of Spain, (or "of Seville"), whose Arabic patronymic, ibn Daud (son of David), was remodeled by the Schoolmen into Avendeath. John translated a veritable library of Arabic and Jewish works by Avicenna, al-Ghazali, al-Farabi, and al-Khwarizmi; through this last work he introduced the Hindu-Arabic numerals to the West.22 Almost as influential was his rendering of a pseudo-Aristotelian book of philosophy and occultism, the Secretum Secretorum, whose wide circulation is indicated by the survival of 200 manuscripts. Some of these translations were made directly from Arabic into Latin; some were made into Castilian and then translated into Latin by Gundisalvi. In this way the two scholars transformed Ibn Gabirol's Mekor Hayim into that Fons Vitae, or Fountain of Life, which made "Avice-bron" into one of the most famous philosophers in the Scholastic ken.
Minor tributaries fed the Arabic-Latin current. Adelard of Bath, having learned Arabic in Antioch, Tarsus, and Toledo, made from an Arabic version the first Latin rendering of Euclid (1120), and introduced Moslem trigonometry to the West by translating the astronomical tables of al-Khwarizmi (1126).23 In 1141 Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny, with the aid of three Christian scholars and an Arab, turned the Koran into Latin. Moslem alchemy and chemistry entered the Latin world through a translation of an Arabic text by Robert of Chester in 1144. A year later an Italian, Plato of Tivoli, translated the epochal treatise Hibbur ha-meshihah of the Jewish mathematician Abraham bar Hiyya.
The greatest of the translators was Gerard of Cremona. Arriving in Toledo about 1165, he was impressed by the wealth of Arabic literature in science and philosophy. He resolved to translate the best of it into Latin, and spent the remaining nine years of his life in the task. He learned Arabic, and apparently had the help of a native Christian and a Jew;24 it seems incredible that he should have made his seventy-one translations unaided. To him the West owed Latin versions of Arabic versions of Aristotle's Posterior Analytics, On the Heavens and the Earth, On Generation and Corruption, and Meteorology; several commentaries by Alexander of Aphrodisias; Euclid's Elements and Data; Archimedes' On the Measurement of the Circle; Apollonius of Perga's Conics; eleven works ascribed to Galen; several works of Greek astronomy; four volumes of Greco-Arabic physics; eleven books of Arabic medicine, including the largest works of al-Razi and Avicenna; al-Farabi On the Syllogism; three works by al-Kindi, and two by Isaac Israeli; fourteen works of Arabic mathematics and astronomy; three sets of astronomical tables; and seven Arabic works on geomancy and astrology. No other man in history has ever done so much to enrich one culture with another. We can only compare Gerard's industry with that of Hunain ibn Ishaq and al-Mamun's "House of Wisdom," which in the ninth century had poured Greek science and philosophy into an Arabic mold.
Next to Spain as donor in this transfusion of culture was the Norman kingdom of the Sicilies. Soon after their conquest of the island (1091) the Norman rulers employed translators to turn into Latin the Arabic or Greek works on mathematics and astronomy then current in Palermo. Frederick II, at Foggia, carried on the work, and partly for that purpose brought to his court one of the strangest and most active minds of the early thirteenth century. Michael Scot derived his cognomen from his native Scotland. We find him at Toledo in 1217, in Bologna in 1220, in Rome in 1224-7, thereafter at Foggia or Naples. His first important translation was al-Bitruji's Spherics, a critique of Ptolemy. Fascinated by discovering the scope and freedom of Aristotle's thought, Scot translated into Latin, from Arabic versions, the History of Animals, including On the Parts of Animals and On the Generation of Animals; and an unverified tradition ascribed to him translations of the Metaphysics, the Physics, On the Soul, On the Heavens, perhaps also the Ethics. Michael's versions of Aristotle reached Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon, and stirred the development of science in the thirteenth century. Charles of Anjou continued the royal patronage of translators in southern Italy; the Jewish savant Moses of Salerno worked for him, and it was probably Charles who financed the Latin translation (1274) of al-Razi's medical leviathan, the Liber Continens, by the Jewish scholar Faraj ben Salim of Girgenti.
All the Latin translations, so far mentioned, of Greek science and philosophy were made from Arabic versions—sometimes from Arabic versions of Syriac versions—of the already obscure originals. They were not as inaccurate as Roger Bacon charged, but there was clearly need of more direct renderings. Among the earliest such versions were those made of Aristotle's Topics, Elenchi, and Posterior Analytics by James, known to us only as "a clerk of Venice," at some time before 1128. In 1154 Eugene "the Emir" of Palermo translated the Optics of Ptolemy; and in 1160 he shared in a Latin translation of the Almagest directly from the Greek. Meanwhile Aristippus of Catania had translated (c. 1156) The Lives of the Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius, and the Mena and Phaedo of Plato. The capture of Constantinople by the Crusaders had less result in translations than might have been expected; we hear only of a partial version of Aristotle's Metaphysics (1209). A fallow interval ensued; then, about 1260, William of Moerbeke, Flemish Archbishop of Corinth, began, probably with aides, a series of direct translations from the Greek whose number and importance rank him only next to Gerard of Cremona among the heroes of cultural transmission. It was partly at the request of his friend and fellow Dominican Thomas Aquinas that he translated so many of Aristotle's works: the History of Animals, On the Generation of Animals, Politics, and Rhetoric, and completed or revised earlier direct versions of the Metaphysics, the Meteorology, and On the Soul. For St. Thomas he translated several Greek commentaries on Aristotle or Plato. For good measure he added versions of Hippocrates' Prognostics, Galen On Foods, and divers works in physics by Hero of Alexandria and Archimedes. Perhaps we owe to him also a translation—formerly ascribed to Robert Grosseteste—of Aristotle's Ethics. These translations provided part of the material from which St. Thomas built his magistral Summa Theologica. By 1280 Aristotle had been almost completely transmitted to the Western mind.
The effects of all these translations upon Latin Europe were revolutionary. The influx of texts from Islam and Greece profoundly stirred the reawakening world of scholarship, compelled new developments in grammar and philology, enlarged the curriculum of the schools, and shared in the astonishing growth of universities in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It was merely an incident that, through the inability of the translators to find Latin equivalents, many Arabic words were now introduced into the languages of Europe. It was more important that algebra, the zero, and the decimal systern entered the Christian West through these versions; that the theory and practice of medicine were powerfully advanced by the translation of the Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Jewish masters; and that the importation of Greek and Arabic astronomy compelled an expansion of theology, and a reconception of deity, prefacing the greater change that would follow Copernicus. The frequent references of Roger Bacon to Averroës, Avicenna, and "Alfarabius" give one measure of the new influence and stimulation; "philosophy," said Bacon, "has come down to us from the Arabs";25 and we shall see that Thomas Aquinas was led to write his Summas to halt the threatened liquidation of Christian theology by Arabic interpretations of Aristotle. Islam had now repaid to Europe the learning that it had borrowed through Syria from Greece. And as that learning had aroused the great age of Arabic science and philosophy, so now it would excite the European mind to inquiry and speculation, would force it to build the intellectual cathedral of Scholastic philosophy, and would crack stone after stone of that majestic edifice to bring the collapse of the medieval system in the fourteenth century, and the beginnings of modern philosophy in the ardor of the Renaissance.
IV. THE SCHOOLS
The transmission of culture from generation to generation was undertaken by the family, the Church, and the school. Moral education was stressed in the Middle Ages at the expense of intellectual enlightenment, as intellectual education is today stressed at the expense of moral discipline. In England it was not unusual, in the middle and upper classes, to send a boy of seven or so to be brought up for a time in another home, partly to cement family friendships, partly to offset the laxity of parental love.26 The splendid school system of the Roman Empire had decayed in the tumult of invasion and the depopulation of the towns. When the tidal wave of migration subsided in the sixth century a few lay schools survived in Italy; the rest were mostly schools for training converts and prospective priests. For some time (500-800) the Church gave all her attention to moral training, and did not reckon the transmission of secular knowledge as one of her functions. But under the prodding of Charlemagne cathedrals, monasteries, parish churches, and convents opened schools for the general education of boys and girls.
At first the monastic schools bore nearly all this burden. A schola interior provided instruction for novices or oblates, and a schola exterior offered education to boys, apparently without charge.27 In Germany these monastic schools survived the disorders of the ninth century, and shared productively in the Ottonian Renaissance; in the ninth and tenth centuries Germany led France in the graces of the mind. In France the disintegration of the Carolingian house, and the raids of the Northmen, struck cruel blows at the monastic schools. The palace school that Charlemagne had established at the Frank court did not long outlive Charles the Bald (d. 877). The French episcopacy grew stronger as the kings grew weaker; when the Norse raids subsided the bishops and secular clergy were richer than the abbots and the monasteries; and while the monastic schools declined in the tenth century, cathedral schools rose at Paris, Chartres, Orleans, Tours, Laon, Reims, Liege, and Cologne. When the good and great Fulbert died at Chartres, Bishop Ivo (1040?-1116) maintained the standards and renown of its cathedral school in classical studies; and this fine tradition was carried on by Ivo's successor Bernard of Chartres, whom John of Salisbury, in the twelfth century, described as "in modern times the most astounding spring of letters in Gaul."28 In England the cathedral school of York was famous even before it gave Alcuin to Charlemagne. The school of Canterbury became almost a university, with an abundant library, and no less a man as secretary than the aforesaid John of Salisbury, one of the sanest scholars and philosophers of the Middle Ages. In such schools those students who were preparing for the priesthood were apparently supported by cathedral funds, while others paid a modest fee. The Third Lateran Council (1179) decreed that "in order that the opportunity of reading and making progress may not be taken away from poor children... let some sufficient benefice be assigned in every cathedral church for a master who shall teach gratis the clerks of the same church, and poor scholars." 29 The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) required the establishment of a chair of grammar in every cathedral of the Christian world, and instructed each archbishop to maintain also chairs of philosophy and canon law.80 The decretals of Pope Gregory IX (1227-41) directed every parish church to organize a school of elementary instruction; and recent researches indicate that such parochial schools—chiefly devoted to religious instruction—were common throughout Christendom.81
What proportion of the adolescent population went to school? Of girls apparently only the well-to-do. Most convents maintained schools for girls, like that which at Argenteuil gave such excellent classical training to Heloise (c. 1110); but these schools probably reached only a modest percentage of girls. Some cathedral schools admitted girls; Abelard speaks of the "women of noble birth" who attended his school at Notre Dame in Paris in 1114.82 Boys had a better chance, but it was presumably difficult for the son of a serf to get an education;83 however, we hear of serfs who managed to get sons into Oxford.84 Much that is now taught in schools was then learned at home or through apprenticeship in shops; certainly the spread and excellence of medieval art suggest wide opportunities for training in arts and crafts. One calculation reckons the number of boys in elementary schools in England in 1530 at 26,000 in an estimated population of 5,000,000—about one thirtieth of the proportion in 1931 ;85 but a recent study concludes that "the thirteenth century made a closer approach to popular and social education than the sixteenth."38
Normally the cathedral school was directed by a canon of the cathedral chapter, variously called archiscola, scolarius, or scholasticus. The teachers were clerks in minor orders. All instruction was in Latin. Discipline was severe; flogging was considered as necessary in education as hell in religion; Winchester School greeted its students with a frank hexameter: Aut disce out discede; manet sors tertia caedi— "Learn or depart; a third alternative is to be flogged."37 The curriculum began with the "trivium"—grammar, rhetoric, logic—and passed on to the "quadrivium"—arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy; these were the "seven liberal arts." These terms did not then bear quite their modern meaning. Trivium, of course, meant three ways. Liberal arts were those that Aristotle had defined as the proper subjects for freemen who sought not practical skills (which were left to apprentices) but intellectual and moral excellence.38 Varro (116-27 B.C.) had written Nine Books of Disciplines, listing nine studies as constituting the Greco-Roman curriculum; Martianus Capella, a North African scholar of the fifth century a.d., in a widely used pedagogical allegory On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury, had barred medicine and architecture as too practical; and the famous seven remained. "Grammar" was not the dull study that loses the soul of a language in studying its bones; it was the art of writing (grapho, gramma); Cassiodorus defined it as such study of great poetry and oratory as would enable one to write with correctness and elegance. In medieval schools it began with the Psalms, passed to other books of the Bible, then to the Latin Fathers, then to the Latin classics—Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Statius, Ovid. Rhetoric continued to mean the art of speaking, but again included considerable study of literature. Logic seems a rather advanced subject for the trivium, but perhaps it was good that students should learn to reason as early as they loved to argue.
The economic revolution brought some changes in the educational scene. Cities that lived by commerce and industry felt a need for employees with practical training; and against much ecclesiastical opposition they established secular schools in which lay teachers gave instruction in return for fees paid by the parents of the pupils. In 1300 the fee for a year in a private grammar school in Oxford was four or five pence ($4.50). Villani in 1283 reckoned 9000 boys and girls in the church schools of Florence, 1100 in six "abacus" schools that prepared them for a business career, and 575 pupils in secondary schools. Secular schools appeared in Flanders in the twelfth century; by the second half of the thirteenth the movement had spread to Liibeck and the Baltic cities. In 1292 we hear of a schoolmistress keeping a private school in Paris; soon she was one of many.39 The secularization of education was on its way.
V. UNIVERSITIES OF THE SOUTH
Secular schools were especially numerous in Italy; teachers there were usually laymen, not clerics as beyond the Alps. In general the spirit and culture of Italy were less ecclesiastical than elsewhere; indeed, about the year 970, one Vilgardus organized at Ravenna a movement for the restoration of paganism.40 There were, of course, many cathedral schools; those of Milan, Pavia, Aosta, and Parma were particularly competent, as we may judge from such graduates as Lanfranc and Anselm; and Monte Cassino under Desiderius was almost a university. The survival of municipal institutions, the successful resistance of the Lombard cities to Barbarossa (1176), and the rising demand for legal and commercial knowledge worked together to give Italy the honor of establishing the first medieval university.
In 1925 the University of Pavia celebrated the eleven hundredth anniversary of its foundation by Lothair I. Probably this was a school of law rather than a university; it was not till 1361 that it received its charter as a studium generate—the medieval name for a university uniting diverse faculties. It was one of many schools that from the ninth century onward revived the study of Roman law: Rome, Ravenna, and Orleans in the ninth century, Milan, Narbonne, and Lyons in the tenth, Verona, Mantua, and Angers in the eleventh. Bologna was apparently the first of the West European cities to enlarge its school into a studium generate. In 1076, says the chronicler Odofredus, a "certain master Pepo began by his own authority to lecture on the laws ... at Bologna, and he was a man of the greatest renown."41 Other teachers joined him; and by the time of Irnerius the Bologna school of law was by common consent the best in Europe.
Irnerius began to teach law at Bologna in 1088. Whether his studies of Roman law convinced him of the historical and practical arguments for the supremacy of the imperial over the ecclesiastical power, or whether the rewards of imperial service attracted him, he turned from the Guelf to the Ghibelline side, and interpreted the revived jurisprudence to favor imperial claims. Appreciative emperors contributed funds to the school, and a swarm of German students came down to Bologna. Irnerius composed a volume of glosses, or comments, on the Corpus iuris of Justinian, and applied scientific method to the organization of law. The Summa codicis Irnerii, compiled by him or from his lectures, is a masterpiece of exposition and argument.
With Irnerius began the golden age of medieval jurisprudence. Men from every country in Latin Europe came to Bologna to learn the rejuvenated science of the law. Irnerius' pupil Gratian applied the new methods to ecclesiastical legislation, and published the first code of canon law (1139). After Irnerius the "Four Doctors"—Bulgarus, Martinus, Iacobus, and Hugo—in a series of famous glosses, applied the Justinian Code to the legal problems of the twelfth century, and secured the adoption of Roman law in an ever-widening sphere. Early in the thirteenth century the elder Accursius (1185?-1260), the greatest of the "glossators," summed up their work and his own in a Glossa ordinaria, which became the standard authority by which kings and communes broke the sway of feudal law, and fought the power of the popes. The papacy did what it could to halt this exhumation of a code that made religion a function and servant of the state; but the new study fed and expressed the bold rationalism and secularization of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and raised a proliferating class of lawyers who labored to reduce the role of the Church in government, and to extend the authority of the state. St. Bernard complained that the courts of Europe rang with the laws of Justinian and no longer heard the laws of God.42 The spread of the new jurisprudence was as strong a stimulus as the Arabic and Greek translations in generating that respect and passion for reason which was to beget and bedevil Scholasticism.
We do not know when a school of arts—i.e., the seven liberal arts—arose in Bologna, nor when was founded its celebrated school of medicine. So far as we know, the only connection among the three schools was in the fact that the graduates of any of them received their degrees from the archdeacon of Bologna. The professors organized themselves into a collegium or guild. About 1215 the students, in whatever faculty, associated themselves into two groups: a universitas citramontanorum or union of students from south of the Alps, and a universitas ultramontanorum or union of students from beyond the Alps. From the beginning of the thirteenth century there were women students in these "universities," and in the fourteenth century there were women professors on the Bologna faculties.43
The student guilds, originated to provide mutual protection and self-government, came in the thirteenth century to exercise extraordinary power over the teaching staffs. By organized boycotts of unsatisfactory teachers, the students could end the pedagogical career of any man at Bologna. In many cases the salaries of the professors were paid by the student "universities," and the professors were compelled to swear obedience to the "rectors" of the "universities"—i.e., to the head officers of the student guilds.44 A teacher desiring leave of absence, even for a day, was obliged to obtain permission from his pupils through their rectors, and he was expressly forbidden to "create holidays at his pleasure."45 Regulations established by the student guilds determined at what minute the teacher should begin his lecture, when he should end it, and what penalties he should pay for deviations from these rules. If he overtalked his hour the students were instructed by the guild statutes to leave. Other guild regulations fined a teacher for skipping a chapter or decretal in his exposition of the laws, and determined how much of the course was to be given to each part of the texts. At the outset of each academic year the professor was required to deposit ten pounds with a Bologna bank; from this sum the fines laid upon him by the rectors were deducted; and the remainder was refunded to him at the close of the year on instruction from the rectors. Committees of students were appointed to observe the conduct of each teacher, and report irregularities or deficiencies to the rectors.46 If these arrangements seem to the modern student unusually sensible, it should be remembered that the law students at Bologna were men between seventeen and forty years of age, old enough to provide their own discipline; that they came to study, not to play; that the professor was not the employee of trustees, but a free-lance lecturer whom the students in effect engaged to instruct them. The teacher's salary at Bologna consisted of fees paid him by his students and fixed by agreement with them. This system of payment was changed toward the end of the thirteenth century when Italian cities eager to have universities of their own offered municipal salaries to certain Bolognese professors; the city of Bologna thereupon (1289) promised to pay two professors an annual stipend; but the choice of professors was still left to the students. Gradually the number of these municipal salaria increased; and in the fourteenth century the selection of professors passed, with their payment, to the city. When Bologna became part of the Papal States in 1506 the appointment of the teachers became a function of the ecclesiastical authorities.
In the thirteenth century, however, the University of Bologna, and in less degree the other universities of Italy, were marked by a lay spirit, almost an anticlericalism, hardly to be found in other centers of European education. Whereas in these others the chief faculty was theology, there was at Bologna no theological faculty at all before 1364; theology there was replaced by canon law. Even rhetoric took the form of law, and the art of writing became—at Bologna, Paris, Orleans, Montpellier, Tours — the ars dictaminis or ars notaria, the art of writing legal, business, or official documents; and special degrees were given in this art.47 It was a common saying that the most realistic education obtainable was to be had in Bologna; a favorite story told how a Parisian pedagogue unlearned at Bologna what he had taught at Paris, and then came back to Paris and untaught it.48 In the twelfth century Bologna led the movement of the European mind; in the thirteenth it allowed its teaching to stiffen into a stagnant scholasticism of law; the Accursian gloss became a sacred and almost unchangeable text, impeding the progressive adaptation of law to the flux of life. The spirit of inquiry fled to freer fields.
Italy broke out into universities in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Some of them were spawned by Bologna through the emigration of professors or students; so in 1182 Pillius left to set up a school in Modena; in 1188 Iacobus de Mandra went to Reggio Emilia and brought his pupils with him; in 1204 another migration, probably from Bologna, established a studium generate, or union of several faculties, at Vicenza; in 1215 Roffredus left the University of Bologna to open a law school at Arezzo; in 1222 a large secession of teachers and students from Bologna expanded an old school at Padua. Faculties of medicine and the arts were added to this school of law at Padua; Venice sent her students there, and contributed to the professorial salaries paid by the city; and in the fourteenth century Padua became one of the most vigorous centers of European thought. In 1224 Frederick II founded the University of Naples to keep the students of South Italy from flocking north. Perhaps for like reasons, as well as to train men for ecclesiastical diplomacy, Innocent IV established the University of the Court of Rome (1244), which followed the papal court in its migration, even to Avignon. In 1303 Boniface VIII founded the University of Rome, which rose to glory under Nicholas V and Leo X, and won the name of Sapienza under Paul III. Siena inaugurated its municipal university in 1246, Piacenza in 1248. By the end of the thirteenth century schools of law and the arts, and sometimes schools of medicine too, were to be found in every major city of Italy.
The universities of Spain were unique in being founded and chartered by the kings, serving them, and submitting to governmental control. Castile developed a royal university at Palencia (1208), later at Valladolid (1304); Leon had one at Salamanca (1227), the Baleares at Palma (1280), Catalonia at Lerida (1300). Despite this royal connection the Spanish universities accepted ecclesiastical supervision and funds, and some, like Palencia, grew out of cathedral schools. The University of Salamanca was richly endowed in the thirteenth century by San Fernando and Alfonso the Wise, and soon stood on an equal footing of fame and learning with Bologna and Paris. Most of these institutions gave instruction in Latin, mathematics, astronomy, theology, and law; Some in medicine, Hebrew, or Greek. A School of Oriental Studies was opened at Toledo in 1250 by Dominican monks to teach Arabic and Hebrew; good work must have been done there, for one of its graduates, Raymond Martin (c. 1260), showed familiarity with all major philosophers and theologians of Islam. Arabic studies were prominent also at the University of Seville, founded by Alfonso the Wise in 1254. At Lisbon, in 1290, the poet-king Diniz gave a university to Portugal.
VI. UNIVERSITIES OF FRANCE
The unquestioned leader of the European mind, in the medieval meridian of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, was France. Its cathedral schools had from the early eleventh century achieved international renown. If these schools flowered into a great university at Paris, rather than at Chartres, Laon, or Reims, it was probably because the thriving commerce of the Seine, and the business of a capital, had brought to die city the wealth that lures the intellect and finances, science, philosophy, and art.
The first known master of the cathedral school of Notre Dame was William of Champeaux (1070? - 1121); it was his lectures, given in the cloisters of Notre Dame, that stirred up the intellectual movement out of which the University of Paris grew. When (c. 1103) Abelard came out of Brittany, slew William with a syllogism, and began the most famous lectures in French history, students flocked to hear him. The schools of Paris swelled their ranks, and masters multiplied. A master (magister), in the educational world of twelfth-century Paris, was a man licensed to teach by the chancellor of the Cathedral of Notre Dame. The University of Paris rose by now un-traceabk steps from the church schools of the city, and derived its first unity from this single source of pedagogical licensing. Normally the license was given gratis to anyone who had been for an adequate period the pupil of an authorized master, and whose application was approved by that master. It was one of the charges made against Abelard that he had set himstlf up as a teacher without having served such an approved apprenticeship.
This conception of the teaching art in terms of master and apprentice shared in the idea and origin of the university. As the masters multiplied, they naturally formed a guild. The word universitas had for centuries been applied to any collectivity, including guilds. In 1214 Matthew Paris described a "fellowship of the elect masters" at Paris as an institution of long standing. We may assume, but cannot prove, that the "university" took form toward 1170, rather as a guild of teachers than as a union of faculties. About 1210 a bull of Innocent III—himself a graduate of Paris—recognized and approved the written statutes of this teachers' guild; and another bull of the same Pope empowered the guild to choose | proctor to represent it at the papal court.
By the middle of the thirteenth century the Parisian masters were divided into four faculties or powers: theology, canon law, medicine, and "arts." In contrast with Bologna, civil law had, after 1219, no place in the University of Paris; the curriculum began with the seven arts, advanced to philosophy, and culminated in theology. The arts students (who were called artistae, art-ists) corresponded to our "undergraduates." As they constituted by far the greatest part of the academic population in Paris, they divided, probably for mutual aid, sociability, and discipline, into four "nations" according to their place of birth (natio) or origin: "France" (i.e., the narrow realm directly subject to the French king), Picardy, Normandy, and England. Students from southern France, Italy, and Spain were taken into the French "nation," students from the Low Countries into "Picardy," students from central and eastern Europe into "England." So many students came from Germany that that country was delayed in establishing its own universities until 1347. Each "nation" was governed by a procurator or proctor, each faculty by a decanus or dean. The students—and perhaps also the masters— in the faculty of arts chose a rector as their head; gradually his functions widened until by 1255 he had become the rector of the university.
We hear of no special university buildings. Apparently, in the twelfth century, the lectures were given in the cloisters of Notre Dame, St. Gene-vieve, St. Victor, or other ecclesiastic structures; but in the thirteenth century we find teachers hiring private rooms for their classes. The masters, who came to be called also professores, proclaimers, were tonsured clerics, who, before the fifteenth century, lost their position if they married. Teaching was by lectures, largely for the reason that not every student could afford to buy all the texts to be studied, and could not always secure copies from the libraries. The students sat on pavement or floor, and took many notes. The burden on their memories was so severe that many mnemonic devices were contrived, usually in the form of verses pregnant with meaning and repulsive in form. University regulations forbade the teacher to read his lecture; he was required to speak extempore; he was even forbidden to "drawl."49 Students graciously warned newcomers not to pay for a course until they had attended three lectures. William of Conches, in the twelfth century, complained that teachers gave easy courses to gain popularity, students, and fees; and that the elective system by which each student had a wide choice among teachers and subjects was lowering the standard of education.50
The teaching was occasionally enlivened by public disputations among the masters, advanced students, and distinguished visitors. Usually the discussion followed a set form, the scholastic a disputatio: the question was stated; a negative answer was given, and was defended by scriptural and patristic quotations, and by reasoning in the form of objections; a positive answer followed, defended by quotations from the Bible and the Fathers of the Church, and by reasoned replies to the objections. This scholastica disputatio determined the finished form of the Scholastic philosophy in St. Thomas Aquinas. In addition to such formal quaestiones disputatae there were informal discussions called quodlibeta— "whatever you please"—where the disputants took up any question that might be propounded at the moment. These looser debates also created a literary form, as in the minor writings of St. Thomas. Such debates, formal or informal, sharpened the medieval mind, and gave scope for much freedom of thought and speech; in some men, however, they tended to promote a cleverness that could prove anything, or a logorrhea that piled mountains of argument on trivial points.
Most of the students lived in hospicia or guesthouses hired by organized student groups. Sometimes a hospital would board poor students at a nominal fee; so the Hotel-Dieu, adjoining Notre Dame, set aside a room for "poor clerks." In 1180 Jocius of London bought this apartment, and thereafter shared with the hospital in providing lodging and meals for eighteen students in it. By 1231 this group of students had taken larger quarters, but they still called themselves the College des dix-huit—the College of Eighteen. Other hospicia or residence halls were established by monastic orders, or churches, or philanthropists, with endowments (bursae) or annuities that reduced the cost of living for the student. In 1257 Robert de Sorbon, chaplain to St. Louis, endowed the "House of Sorbonne" for sixteen theological students; additional benefactions from Louis and others provided more accommodations, and raised the number of scholarships to thirty-six; out of this "house" grew the College of the Sorbonne.* Further "colleges"—collegia in the old sense of associations—were founded after 1300; masters came to live in them, served as tutors, heard recitations, and "read" texts with the students. In the fifteenth century the masters gave courses in the residence halls; such courses increased in number, courses given outside decreased, and the college became a hall of education as well as a student dwelling place. A similar evolution of the college out of the hospicium occurred at Oxford, Montpellier, and Toulouse. The university began as an association of teachers dealing with associations of students, and became an association of faculties and colleges.
Among the residence halls at Paris were two designed for student members or novices of the Dominican or the Franciscan Order. The Dominicans had from their inception stressed education as a means of combating heresy; they established their own system of schools, of which the Dominican studium generale at Cologne was the most renowned; and they had similar institutions at Bologna and Oxford. Many friars became masters, and taught in the halls of their orders. In 1232 Alexander of Hales, one of the ablest teachers in Paris, joined the Franciscans, and continued his public courses in their Convent of the Cordeliers. Year by year the number of friars lecturing at Paris increased, and their nonmonastic audiences grew. The secular masters mourned that they were left sitting at their desks "like lonely sparrows on the housetops"; to which the friars replied that the secular masters ate and drank too much, and became lazy and dull.81 In 1253 a student was killed in a street brawl; the city authorities arrested several students, and ignored their right and demand to be tried by the University masters or the bishop; the masters, in protest, ordered a cessation of lectures. Two Dominican teachers and one Franciscan, all members of the masters' association, refused to obey the order to cease talk; the association suspended them from membership; they appealed to Alexander IV, who (1255) ordered the university of masters to readmit them. To avoid compliance, the masters disbanded; the Pope excommunicated them; students and populace attacked the friars in the streets. After six years of controversy a compromise was reached: the reorganized masters admitted the monastic masters, who pledged full obedience to "university" statutes thereafter; but the faculty of arts permanently excluded all monks from membership. The University of Paris, once a favorite of the popes, became hostile to the papacy, supported the kings against the pontiffs, and formed in later days the center of the "Gallican" movement that sought to separate the French Church from Rome.
• In the sixteenth century the Sorbonne became the theological faculty of the University; in 1792 it was closed by the Revolution; it was restored by Napoleon, and is now the seat of public courses in science and letters at the University of Paris.
No educational institution since Aristotle has rivaled the influence of the University of Paris. For three centuries it drew to itself not only the largest number of students, but the greatest dynasty of intellectually distinguished men. Abelard, John of Salisbury, Albertus Magnus, Siger of Brabant, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventura, Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus, William of Occam—these are almost the history of philosophy from 1100 to 1400. There must have been great teachers at Paris to produce these greater ones, and an atmosphere of mental exhilaration that comes only to the peaks of human history. Furthermore, through those centuries, the University of Paris was a power in both Church and state. It was an influential organ of opinion; in the fourteenth century a hotbed of free speculation; in the fifteenth a citadel of orthodoxy and conservatism. It cannot be said to have played "no mean role" in the condemnation of Joan of Arc.
Other universities shared in giving France the cultural leadership of Europe. Orleans had had a school of law as far back as the ninth century; in the twelfth it rivaled Chartres as a center of classical and literary studies; in the thirteenth it was second only to Bologna in the teaching of civil and canon law. Hardly less famous was the school of law at Angers, which in 1432 became one of the major universities of France. Toulouse owed its university to its heresies: in 1229 Gregory IX compelled Count Raymond to pledge himself to pay the salaries of fourteen professors—in theology, canon law, and the arts—who should be sent from Paris to Toulouse to combat the Albigensian heresy by their influence on Aquitanian youth.
The most renowned of the French universities outside of Paris was at Montpellier. Situated on the Mediterranean halfway between Marseille and Spain, that city enjoyed a stirring mixture of French, Greek, Spanish, and Jewish blood and culture, with a sprinkling of Italian merchants, and some remnants of the Moorish colony that had once held the town. Commerce was active there. Whether through the influence of Salernian or Arabic or Jewish medicine, Montpellier, at an unknown date, established a school of medicine that soon outshone Salerno; schools of law, theology, and the "arts" were added; and though these colleges were independent, their propinquity and co-operation earned for Montpellier a high repute. The university declined in the fourteenth century, but the school of medicine revived in the Renaissance; and in 1537 one Francois Rabelais gave there, in Greek, a course of lectures on Hippocrates.
VII. UNIVERSITIES OF ENGLAND
Oxford, like the equivalently named Bosporus, developed as a cattle crossing; the Thames narrowed and grew shallow at that point; a fortress was built there in 912, a market formed, and Kings Cnut and Harold held gemots there long before the University arose. Presumably there were schools at Oxford in Cnut's days, but we hear of no cathedral school. About 1117 we find mention of a "master at Oxenford." In 1133 Robert Pullen, a theologian, came from Paris and lectured at Oxford on theology.52 By steps now lost to history, the schools of Oxford became in the twelfth century a stadium generate or university—"no man can say when."53 In 1209, according to a contemporary estimate, there were 3000 students and teachers at Oxford.84 As at Paris there were four faculties: arts, theology, medicine, and canon law. In England the teaching of civil law escaped the universities, and lodged at the Inns of Court in London. Lincoln's Inn, Gray's Inn, the Inner and the Middle Temple were the fourteenth-century descendants of the homes or chambers in which judges and teachers of the law, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, received students as apprentices.
At Oxford, as at Paris and Cambridge, the colleges began as endowed residence halls for poor students. At an early date they became also lecture halls; masters dwelt in them with the students; and by the end of the thirteenth century the aulae or halls had become the physical and pedagogical constituents of the University. About 1260 Sir John de Balliol of Scotland (father of the Scotch king of 1292), as penance for an unknown crime, established at Oxford a "House of Balliol" to maintain, by a grant of eight pence ($8) a week, certain poor scholars called socii, "fellows," Three years later Walter de Merton founded and endowed the "House of the Scholars of Merton," first at Maiden, soon at Oxford, to care for as many students as its income could support. These revenues were repeatedly doubled by the rise of land values, so that Archbishop Peckham in 1284 complained that the "poor scholars" were receiving additional allowances for "delicate living."56 In general the English colleges grew wealthy not only by fellowship grants and other gifts, but through the rise in the value of the estates with which they were endowed. About 1280 a bequest by William of Durham, Archbishop of Rouen, established University Hall, now University College; the modest beginnings of these famous colleges is shown in the terms of foundation, which provided for four masters and such scholars as might care to board with them. The masters chose one of their number as "senior fellow" to manage the hall; in time he or his successors appropriated those titles of "master" or "principal" by which the heads of the English colleges are known today. The University of Oxford in the thirteenth century was the association of these colleges under a "university" or guild of masters, themselves governed by regents and a chancellor of their own choosing, who in turn was subject to the bishop of Lincoln and the king.
By 1300 Oxford ranked next to Paris as a center of intellectual activity and influence. Its most famous graduate was Roger Bacon; other Franciscan monks, including Adam Marsh, Thomas of York, John Peckham, formed with him there a distinguished group of learned men. Their leader and inspiration, Robert Grosseteste (1175? - 1253), was the finest figure in the life of Oxford in the thirteenth century. He studied law, medicine, and natural science there, graduated in 1179, took his divinity degree in 1189, and soon afterward was chosen "Master of the Oxford Schools"—the earlier form of the title of chancellor. In 1235, while still remaining head of Oxford, he became Bishop of Lincoln, and superintended the completion of the great cathedral. He energetically promoted the study of Greek and of Aristotle, and shared in the heroic effort of the thirteenth-century mind to reconcile Aristotle's philosophy with the Christian faith. He wrote commentaries on Aristotle's Physics and Posterior Analytics, summarized the science of his time in a Compendium Scientiarum, and worked for a reform of the calendar. He understood the principles of the microscope and the telescope, and opened many paths for Roger Bacon in mathematics and physics; it was probably he who acquainted Bacon with the magnifying property of the lens.66 Many ideas that we ascribe to Bacon—on perspective, the rainbow, tides, the calendar, the desirability of experiment—were apparently suggested to him by Grosseteste; above all, the notion that all science must be based upon mathematics, since all force, in its passage through space, follows geometrical forms and rules.57 He wrote French poetry and a treatise on husbandry, and was a lawyer and a physician as well as a theologian and a scientist. He encouraged the study of Hebrew with a view to converting the Jews; meanwhile he behaved toward them in an anomalously Christian way, and protected them as well as he could from the sadism of the mob. He was an active social reformer, always loyal to the Church, but daring to lay before Pope Innocent IV (1250) a written memorial in which he ascribed the shortcomings of the Church to the practices of the Papal Curia.68 At Oxford he established the first "chest" to make gratuitous loans to scholars.59 He was the first of a thousand brilliant minds whose achievements created the magnificent prestige of Oxford in the educational and intellectual world.
Today Oxford is a manufacturing center as well as a university, and makes automobiles as well as dons. But Cambridge is still a city of colleges, a medieval jewel brightened with modern wealth and British good taste; everything in it pertains to its colleges, and the medieval peace of mind survives in this loveliest of university towns. Apparently its intellectual eminence must be dated from a murder at Oxford. In 1209 a woman was killed there by a student; the townspeople raided a residence hall, and hanged two or three students. The university—i.e., the association of masters—suspended operations in protest against the action of the townsfolk; and, if we may believe the usually trustworthy Matthew Paris, 3000 students, and presumably many masters, left Oxford. A large number of them, we are told, went to Cambridge and set up halls and faculties; this is the first mention we have of anything higher there than an elementary school. A second migration— of Parisian students in 1228—swelled the ranks of the student body. Monks mendicant or Benedictine came and established colleges. In 1281 the Bishop of Ely organized the first secular college in Cambridge—St. Peter's College, now Peterhouse. The fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries saw the foundation and embellishment of additional colleges, some of them among the masterpieces of medieval architecture. All of them together, embraced by the quiet winding Cam, constitute with their campuses one of the fairest works of man.