Universities
Of the legacies of medieval Europe to world civilization, the university ranks as one of the most permanent. Its significance for the histories of science and medicine is difficult to overestimate; it even occupies a modest place in the history of the mechanical arts. The university gave the disciplines associated with the study of nature a new institutional home, which not only proliferated but also endured. Eight centuries later, the earliest universities (e.g., Bologna, Oxford, Paris, Montpellier, Salamanca) are still thriving, as are a host of later foundations. More importantly, this institutional model has spread throughout the world and continues to cultivate the sciences and medicine successfully (most Nobel Prizes go to university professors).
The universities gradually emerged in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries against a background of intense intellectual ferment. Trends toward naturalism (in philosophy, sculpture, and literature, for example) and rationalization (in administration, theology, and especially law) permeate the era. By the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the law regulated almost every aspect of life in European lands. For the first time, various bodies of law became systematic and principle-based: legal scholars appreciated existing logical tools, were eager for more, and gave much thought to the interaction of deduction and empirical consequences. Logic was not an esoteric discipline but an indispensable tool of thought, which leading *cathedral schools taught, along with the natural philosophy of *Plato’s Timaeus and a new theology guided by rational principles.
An additional intellectual stimulus came from the translation of many Greek and Arabic scientific and philosophical texts into Latin (primarily from Arabic). Already well underway with medical works in eleventh-century Salerno, this trickle became a flood by the later twelfth century and extended to almost every field of learning. The influx included most of the Aristotelian corpus (with its logical, methodological, natural philosophical, ethical, political, and literary writings), a host of other works from the ancient mathematical and medical traditions (*Euclid’s Elements and Optics, *Ptolemy’s Almagest and Tetrabiblos, parts of the Archimedean corpus, *Galen, and *Hippocrates), and a vast library of Arabic scholarship that extended this work in new directions. Arabic scholars (mentioned here in their Latinized names) thus played a crucial role in the development of European science: Alhacen in optics and astronomy; in astronomy and astrology: Thebit, Alcabitius, Albumasar, Alfraganus, Alpetragius; in medicine: Rasis, and especially Avicenna’s Canon; in natural philosophy: the numerous commentaries by Avicenna and Averroes on Aristotle’s books. The emerging universities were poised to take advantage of this deluge of scientific material and to channel the intellectual excitement it generated.
The first universities were not founded, nor did they grow out of cathedral schools (Paris being the notable exception). They crystallized during the twelfth century in towns renowned for teaching in specific areas: law in Bologna and Oxford, the liberal arts and theology in Paris, medicine in Montpellier. Masters and students organized themselves into guilds or corporations—the original legal meaning of universitas, which quickly acquired academic connotations. The universitas of masters of arts at Paris and the universitates of the various nations of law students at Bologna were self-governing associations that used their bargaining power both to negotiate concessions from local authorities and to obtain “universal” privileges from the emperor or the pope.
The institutional variation among the first universities is consistent with their springing out of local circumstances rather than an archetype, whether indigenous or, more controversially, Islamic (as George Makdisi has argued). Paris was unusual in the early thirteenth century in that intense conflicts pitted the bishop and his chancellor against the masters of arts, who successfully appealed to the papacy over the bishop’s head. These conflicts led to legal solutions that set precedents on which later universities would draw. In these struggles for self-determination, the masters often won with the aid of the papacy (against the bishop of Paris or the commune of Bologna, for example). This is an important point, for while the northern universities were officially clerical institutions under the jurisdiction of the church, in fact they were also largely autonomous and self-regulating bodies. They worked hard to ensure their control over their own affairs: at its foundation in 1425, the university of Louvain obtained privileges that put it largely beyond the reach of both the bishop of Liège and the duke of Brabant.
By the mid-thirteenth century, when they had secured full legal standing, the universities were doing something novel. They were certifying an individual’s competence in various domains by awarding degrees for completing a sequence of prescribed courses to the satisfaction of the masters. Thanks to the pope’s or the emperor’s recognition of them as studia generalia, they had the legal power of conferring licenses “to teach everywhere.” The universities had effectively created formal criteria for membership in a European-wide elite of Latin learning whose training included significant exposure to Aristotelian natural philosophy and, to a lesser extent, the mathematical sciences. Since these disciplines encompassed some thirty percent of the “arts” curriculum, they were prerequisites for study in the faculties of law, medicine, and theology, on which they had a notable impact.
In most early universities, this curricular emphasis evolved smoothly. Although exceptional, the conflicts at Paris illustrate the dramatic character of the transformation. Aristotle had long been admired for his logic, but in early-thirteenth-century Paris his newly translated natural philosophy proved controversial. His universe was eternal, not created; his doctrine of the soul stressed its physiological functions and left the immortality of the rational soul in doubt. Local ecclesiastical authorities therefore reacted defensively by prohibiting the teaching of Aristotle’s natural philosophy in 1210 and 1215. Within a generation, however, the ban on Aristotle had been turned on its head. The 1255 statutes of the Parisian arts faculty placed Aristotelian natural philosophy at the core of the curriculum. At Oxford, another early university with a faculty of theology but with a more distant bishop, Aristotle entered the curriculum smoothly, a situation for which the theologian and Aristotelian commentator *Robert Grosseteste, deserves credit. Within this framework, no one could earn a bachelor’s or a master’s degree in arts without thorough immersion in the Aristotelian corpus and exposure to his Arabic commentators. When the universities multiplied in the fourteenth century and their enrollments expanded in the fifteenth, the study of natural philosophy, the mathematical sciences, and medicine diffused with them.
The Mob Quad at Merton College, Oxford. Construction was begun soon after the foundation of the college in 1264 and completed before the middle of the fourteenth century. (Topham)
In a rough century-by-century schema, the thirteenth century was a transnational era of institutional consolidation and intellectual exploration and assimilation; the fourteenth was a century of institutional spread and of logical development and criticism, while the fifteenth century witnessed some unprecedented university enrollments and a more regional or national outlook, even as the intellectual life of the more than sixty universities in existence by 1500 remains a scholarly frontier.
Blurring Old Distinctions
The term “arts” in the eponymous faculty derives from the late-antique category of the liberal arts: the verbal trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic) and the mathematical *quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy). While these disciplines were taught in most medieval universities, the seven liberal arts no longer structured nor circumscribed their curriculum, which sometimes blurred the old categories. Logic, which dwarfed grammar and rhetoric in importance, was also the language of natural philosophy. It would develop spectacularly in the fourteenth century, blossoming into a host of technical subspecialties that impressed, if not the humanists, at least everyone who has tried to understand them, from Leibniz through Peirce to the present. Many of these logical developments were directly stimulated by the analysis of natural philosophical problems, actual as well as imaginary (issues of change/motion, such as the beginnings and ends of processes, rates of change, etc.), and some took on a strongly mathematical cast. Indeed, in the most sophisticated works of the genre (e.g., those of *Thomas Bradwardine, *William of Heytesbury, John Dumbleton, or *Richard Swineshead), logic, mathematics, and natural philosophy are so tightly intertwined as to be inseparable.
The four traditional mathematical disciplines of the old quadrivium also continued to be taught in most universities, sometimes from long-available textbooks, increasingly from new ones. In the thirteenth century, *John of Sacrobosco wrote introductions to arithmetic (Algorismus) and the reference frames of astronomy (Tractatus de sphaera), which the anonymous Theorica planetarum supplemented with a non-quantitative overview of Ptolemaic theory sufficient for understanding astronomical tables. Texts such as these have survived in hundreds of manuscripts. In contrast, the typical student read only excerpts of complex works such as Euclid’s Elements or Ptolemy’s Almagest, which only a small minority studied in detail, probably informally.
But the traditional liberal arts did not include natural philosophy, which had become the dominant category of scientific study in the arts faculty. Among these works were Aristotle’s Physics, On Generation and corruption, Meteorology, On the Generation of animals, On the Heavens, On the Soul (the vegetable, animal, and rational souls), and On Sense and sensation. New mathematical sciences outside the quadrivium also made their way into the curriculum: in the thirteenth century, “perspectiva” (optics); and in the later fourteenth, courses on “the proportions of velocities in motions” and the *“latitude of forms,” inspired by the mathematical natural philosophy of Merton College, Oxford.
Many more students were exposed to the arts curriculum than completed degrees. With attrition rates of eighty to ninety percent, only a minority went on to study in a higher faculty. Overall, law faculties produced by far the largest number of graduates, who staffed the growing bureaucracies of cities and courts, both secular and ecclesiastical. Medicine and theology were much smaller faculties. Universities organized on the Parisian model separated the arts faculty from those of law, medicine, and (after the mid-fourteenth century) theology. Universities organized on the Bolognese model retained a separate law faculty but joined arts and medicine into one faculty, recognizing the relationship, however contentious, between natural philosophy and medicine. Both theology and medicine show the strong imprint of this scientific curriculum. The place of medicine among the higher university faculties deserves emphasis. Whereas some earlier classifications of knowledge had treated medicine as a mechanical art, the university made it an academic subject, for which philosophical studies were a prerequisite, a striking inversion of some earlier priorities (but not of Galen, who believed that the good physician had to be a good philosopher).
The study of medicine usually presupposed a thorough familiarity with the core of the curriculum in arts, on which medicine built. At Bologna and Padua in particular, the masters’ double degrees in arts and medicine are well documented, as is the crossover of their teaching. The theoretical connections between *astronomy and medicine were close, with *astrology providing the causal physical link between the stars and the body. Universities with leading medical faculties would continue to offer a strong stimulus to the teaching of astrology and its prerequisites (elementary planetary theory, the use of astronomical tables). In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, building on this legitimate foundation and on the availability of practitioners, judicial astrology, which was more controversial, seems to have been on the rise. The most lavish memorabilia of this growing interest, from noble horoscopes to decorative art and instruments, are associated with princely and ecclesiastical courts, but cities also used astrologers, which universities were in the business of supplying. Reflecting a growing demand, Bologna and Kraków each started with one chair in astrology, eventually adding a second in the fifteenth century.
Although university medicine included an important theoretical component, its purpose was the treatment of the sick. This focus on practice distinguished medicine from the other faculties and may have fostered more openness to hands-on instruction. Bologna inaugurated the dissection of human cadavers in the early fourteenth century, Montpellier at mid-century, and Vienna in the early fifteenth century.
The impact of medieval university medicine went beyond the classroom. Whereas other degree holders faced little external competition, university-trained physicians were a minority among healers. The universities thus thrust their graduates into the competitive world of healing, where they evidently did well, and sometimes good. With their criteria of medical adequacy and the legal power to grant licenses to practice, the medical faculties lay the groundwork for proto-professional standards and introduced a sharp division into health care, creating a class of learned physicians that used the law, sometimes heavy-handedly, to curtail the activities of competing healers.
Since all aspiring theologians who were not in religious orders had degrees in arts, they often retained their love of natural philosophy and its standards of knowledge when doing theology. *Thomas Aquinas’s theological use of Aristotle is merely the best-known example of this trend, which blossomed in later centuries, from discussions of the created world, through the frequent question “Is theology is a *scientia?” to inquiry into the validity of Aristotelian logic in Trinitarian doctrine. Some of the best summaries of late medieval natural philosophy appear in Biblical commentaries (e.g., Henry of Langenstein’s Lectures on Genesis, c. 1386–1392) while excellent natural philosophy and logic appear in the commentaries on *Peter Lombard’s Sentences that marked the apex of study in theology.
The university formalized several characteristic approaches to the teaching of texts. Eventually surpassing the lecturae and commentaries, the quaestio (derived from the disputation required for the bachelor of arts degree) eventually came to dominate the format of natural philosophical and theological writing.
In addition to their task of transmitting received knowledge, the universities also played a role in both creating and diffusing new advances in various areas. The late-thirteenth-century astronomical tables originally produced for *Alfonso X of Castile have not survived. We know the Alfonsine Tables only in the version produced at the university of Paris with a new format and pedagogically appropriate instructions; it is the reworked university version that spread throughout Europe. The universities also created new knowledge. One of the most striking characteristics of the fourteenth century is the extent to which logical sophistication, often extensively tested in a scientific context, grew and influenced the way scholars pursued natural philosophy, medicine, and theology.
This development is noteworthy because logic was the chief tool of thought, including natural philosophy. In the fourteenth century, Merton was the institutional base for exciting developments at the interface between logic, mathematics, and natural philosophy. The “calculatores,” as they were called, developed new analytical and logical tools to quantify and “measure” theoretically various qualities (speed, heat, whiteness, charity, etc.) These “languages of measurement” (Murdoch) characterize the intellectual outlook of the period. They spread into theology and medicine, without regard to differences in philosophical outlook (e.g., “nominalist” and “realist”). One approach, “the latitude of forms,” probably derived from attempts to quantify both the “virtues” of medical compounds and the “just price” in economic theory at Montpellier. It assigned an extension (the latitude, literally “breadth”) to a quality (the form), and analyzed various changes in the latter as a function of time (also treated as an extension or length). These and similar approaches to natural philosophical problems quickly spread from Oxford to mid-fourteenth-century Paris, to the new late-fourteenth-century universities in Germanic lands, and eventually to those of fifteenth-century Italy, where many texts from this tradition were copied and eventually printed. The fact that several universities eventually added these new approaches to the requirements for their degrees shows that the curricula were indeed responsive to new developments.
From the mid-fourteenth century onward, this diffusion took place on the heels of significant growth in the number of universities, in the territories of the Holy Roman Empire and beyond (Prague, Kraków, Vienna, Heidelberg, Erfurt, and Cologne, for example). Several of these foundations built on the diaspora of Germanic students and masters who were forced to leave Paris owing to the polarizations associated with of the Great Schism of the papacy, an incident that helps to explain the growing regionalism of the universities in the later Middle Ages.
The later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries proved difficult for Paris and Oxford but, as the preceding episode suggests, it is dangerous to generalize their institutional decline to include other universities. Remarkably, those of the Holy Roman Empire that have survived to our own day witnessed mid-fifteenth-century enrollment peaks unsurpassed until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Much of the intellectual life of these fifteenth-century universities, including their scientific activities, still remains to be explored.
Although the university excluded the mechanical arts from its curriculum, enough masters evinced manual skills to suggest that the academic environment was not inherently hostile to the enterprise. The inroads of surgery—a mechanical art—into Italian medical faculties in particular point to de facto accommodation, as does the appearance of human dissection. Instruction in the use of astronomical instruments was included in regular astronomical courses, while entire courses were sometimes devoted to instruments (e.g., at Vienna in the 1420s and 1430s). The invention of mechanical clockwork was perhaps the most striking example. It is a university text, Robertus Anglicus’s 1271 commentary on Sacrobosco’s Tractatus de sphaera, that first mentions intense research on the problem of the escapement, the eventual solution to which led two university-trained sons of artisans to construct the most sophisticated machines thus far devised—the astronomical clock of the St. Albans abbot Richard of Wallingford (d. 1336) and the astrarium of the Padua physician Giovanni Dondi (d. 1389). Not least, masters of arts were well represented among the first two generations of printers, including the astronomer *Johannes Regiomontanus (d. 1476), who specialized in printing mathematical and astronomical works.
From the thirteenth century onward, contemporaries noted that the universities had established themselves as a third power in their own right, alongside the church and the secular rulers. Although restricted to Christian men literate in Latin, the universities constituted a new socio-intellectual phenomenon of the first order, one that affected several hundred thousand individuals directly, and many more indirectly. Widely recognized as arbiters of competence, the medieval universities gave the scientific enterprise a semi-autonomous, permanent home and anchored it in European intellectual life.
See also Aristotelianism; Ibn al-Haytham; Ibn Rushd; Ibn Sina; Optics and catoptrics
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MICHAEL SHANK