10 - The universities and scholasticism

Summary

DURING the twelfth century, most countries of the west had experienced a true ‘scholastic revolution’. Cathedral schools of the traditional type and new schools were spreading at that time, attracting an ever increasing number of students. This growth was evidently a response to an increasing social demand for accomplished learned men, but it was also a concrete manifestation of the considerable expansion of the field of erudite culture, and the new curiosities this culture aroused. Even if the global perspectives remained those which had been established in the patristic era (subordination of profane knowledge to the more proper goal of the sacra pagina, and rejection of the ‘mechanical arts’), the very great expansion of the stock in trade of the ‘authorities’ which was then accessible (texts translated from Greek and Arabic, Roman law) gave true autonomy to the teaching of certain secular disciplines, such as law or medicine. The revival of grammar and especially the rapid success of dialectics had established a new form of pedagogy in which the compilation of ‘sentences’ and the formulation of ‘theoretical questions’ supplanted traditional exegesis. Even theology, from Anselm of Canterbury and Abelard onwards, had not escaped profound re-examination.

This rapid and spectacular growth hardly ever happened in a controlled manner. Particular historical circumstances or simple chance meant that certain centres — Paris, Bologna, Salerno, Montpellier, Oxford — became exceptionally influential. Around these cities, the first student migrations began to take shape. The Church’s monopoly over teaching, which had been the norm since the early Middle Ages, saw itself challenged once again. In the Mediterranean countries, the mainly lay schools of law (Bologna) or medicine (Salerno and Montpellier) developed outside the Church’s control.