Dictionary and Thesaurus
As students at a university, you are part of a great tradition. Consider
the words you use: campus, tuition, classes, courses, lectures,
faculty, students, administration, chancellor, dean, professor, sophomore,
junior, senior, fees, assignments, laboratory, dormitory, requirements,
prerequisites, examinations, texts, grades, convocation, graduation,
commencement, procession, diploma, alumni association, donations,
and so forth. These are the language of the university, and they are all
derived from Latin, almost unchanged from their medieval
origins. The organization of this university, its activities and its
traditions, are continuations of a barroom brawl that took place in Paris almost 800 years ago.
CAROLINGIAN EDUCATIONAL REFORMS
Charlemagne (d. 814) realized that his empire needed a body of educated
people if it was to survive, and he turned to the Church as the only
source of such education. He issued a decree that every cathedral and
monastery was to establish a school to provide a free education to every
boy who had the intelligence and the perseverance to follow a demanding
course of study. Since the aim was to create a large body of educated
priests upon which both the empire and local communities
could draw for leadership, girls were ignored.
Charlemagne died, civil wars broke out, and the attacks of the Magyars,
Vikings, and Saracens began before his plan could be carried out
CATHEDRAL AND MONASTERY SCHOOLS
Some schools had been established, however, and continued through the
worst of the times that followed. Their object was to train priests, and
their curriculum was designed to do that and little more. The course of
study consisted of two parts, the grammar school in which
the trivium (the "three- part curriculum," from which our
word "trivial" is derived), consisting of grammar, rhetoric,
and logic. Grammar trained the student to read, write, and
speak Latin, the universal language of the European educated classes;
rhetoric taught the art of public speaking and served as an introduction
to literature; and logic provided means of demonstrating the validity of
propositions, as well as serving as an introduction to the
quadrivium (the "four-part curriculum") of arithmetic,
geometry, astronomy, and music.
Arithmetic served as the basis for quantitative reasoning; geometry for
architecture, surveying, and calculating measurements -- all essential to
managing a church's property and income. Astronomy was necessary for
calculating the date of Easter, predicting eclipses, and marking the
passing of the seasons. For some time, about all the cathedral and
monastery schools could manage was to train enough priests to provide the
bare essential of educated local leaders.
By the 1000's, this began to change as some schools began to develop
elements of their quadrivium beyond the requirements of mere priestly
training. Some integrated their curricula by adopting a standard text such
as The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius,
or some other compendium of knowledge, the most famous being those written
by Cassidorus, Martianus Capella, or Isidore of
Seville. The masters at some other schools developed a more
flexible approach to the concept of education and attempted to extend
knowledge as well as impart it to their students.
One of the latter was the cathedral school of Reims, where
the Spanish-trained Gerbert of Aurillac developed the
mathematical aspects of the quadrivium by introducing Arabic
numerical notation, the use of the abacus for
numerical calculation, and the astrolabe for astronomical
observation. Under the leadership of one of Gerbert's students, the nearby
monastery school of Fleury continued this development. Other schools
developed in different directions, with Orleans specializing in classical
studies, and Chartres in the mathematical theory of music. Still another
such center of specialized learning was the little Norman monastery of
Bec, which, under the leadership of Lanfranc, and
Anselm, became known throughout northern Europe for the
teaching of Law.
GREGORY VII AND THE GREAT REVIVAL OF LEARNING
Most textbooks discuss Pope Gregory VII only in relation to the
Investiture Controversy, but he was very important in the
history of the university. In 1079, he issued a papal decree ordering all
cathedrals and major monasteries to establish schools for the training of
clergy. The result was a great expansion of education, and some places in
which there were a number of monasteries concentrated, became centers of
education. Nowhere was this more true that in Paris.
PARIS
Medieval Paris was dominated by the cathedral of Notre Dame and the royal
palace facing it on the Ile de la Cite, the island in the Seine
that formed the heart of the city. Notre Dame was the residence of the
![[map of medieval paris]](images/nelson/med-paris.gif) archbishop's executive
secretary, the chancellor, who had the sole power to issue
the licenses necessary to preach and/or teach in the diocese. Naturally,
the cathedral and surrounding buildings housed and impressive number of
teachers and students attached to the cathedral school. The royal palace,
across the square from the cathedral, was the center from which the
provost of the city worked. Leading his own police force,
the provost was the royal deputy charged with running the city. Since the
king and archbishop had more important affairs, the provost and chancellor
were the heads of the secular and ecclesiastical government of Paris, and
generally worked together rather closely.
On the left bank of the Seine, there were several monasteries, each with
its own school: Ste. Genevieve, St. Germain des Pres, and
St. Victor. Although each of these schools had a master, he
was not the only teacher there, as had been the case in many of the
earlier cathedral and monastery schools. Qualified teachers could apply to
the chancellor or an abbot for membership in their institutions and,
having been granted that membership, they formed part of the
faculty of that institution's school. Some instructors
resided in the monastery itself and some outside, providing the basis for
a distinction that persists in the professor and
associate professor. The professors hired assistants
(assistant professors), who might someday become professors
themselves, while particularly able students might be hired to teach basic
subjects in the grammar school as instructors. The
professors usually offered a course, or series, of
lectures in which they would read from a text,
a work generally accepted as being important to know, so the students
could copy down the words, and then the lecturer would offer explanations
of the text, while the students made notes in the wide
margins they had left for that purpose (marginalia). As an
aside, it was customary for notes referring to other works relevant to the
passage to be put at the bottom, of foot, of the page, a practice that has
survived as the modern footnote. When the course of lectures
was competed, the student would have finished copying the text and his
notes of the lecturer's commentaries in his textbook. When
the student felt ready he could appear before the chancellor to be
examined. If approved, he was given a diploma, an official
document that permitted him to preach or teach in the diocese of Paris.
Students could attend any courses they wished from any of the faculty in
any of these schools, since all that really counted was whether they could
satisfy the chancellor that they were competent. So they tended to find
rooms in the district of the city between these centers and to pick and
choose which lectures they wished to hear on which books. The instructors
began to rent halls in the district in which to give their lectures, and
this part of Paris became a center of learning, being known as the
Latin Quarter, since the common language for the various
people living and studying there was Latin. The cathedral school of Notre
Dame was the home base of the most respected and well known teachers, and
at first overshadowed the schools of the Latin Quarter but that began to
change. The chancellor of Notre Dame considered the fact that all teachers
(and all students, too) were in "holy orders," that is, they were clergy
although neither priests nor monks. As the representative of the bishop,
the chancellor felt that all clergy in Paris owed him obedience and tried
to tell the instructors not only what to teach, but how they were to teach
it.
This clash between the chancellor and masters was only the beginning of a
tension that continues to the present day. Just as the chancellor of Notre
Dame claimed the power to command the obedience of the masters in all
things because they were members of the Church, so too in many state
universities today, chancellors or presidents attempt to extend their
authority over the faculty because the faculty are state employees. In
medieval Paris, this conflict caused many masters (instructors) to move to
the Latin Quarter and join the "faculties" of the monastery schools there.
The intellectual center of the city moved to an area further from the
chancellor's direct control, and the masters began to consider the
chancellor as an enemy rather than their administrative head.
NEW MOVEMENTS IN THE LATIN QUARTER
By the early 1100's there was great intellectual ferment in the Latin
Quarter. Translations into Latin of Aristotle's Greek logical works were
arriving from translation centers in Spain and Sicily, and the scholars of
Paris found themselves with powerful new tools of reason. Peter
Abelard, a student in the Latin Quarter who had returned to become
a master in the school of Notre Dame, set both students and masters on
their ears with his book entitled Sic et non (Yes and
No), in which he demonstrated that the accepted authorities that
everyone had been studying contradicted one another on almost every basic
point that one could think of. He concluded that one had to collect the
opinions of the authorities, but use logic to determine which of these
opinions were correct.
The manner of teaching soon changed. Instead of listening to their master
read and interpret, the students wanted to be taught how to reason. The
public debate soon replaced the lecture in attracting the student's
attention. They particularly like to hear their masters debate each other.
At the same time that the nobles were developing the man-to-man armed
confrontations of the tournament, scholars were developing
the logical combat of the public debate.
At the same time, the demand of both Church and princes for trained
administrators and lawyers was growing, and students found that skill in
argumentation was a surer key to success than being able to determine the
date of Easter or explain the mathematical proportions that were harmonic
and those that were not. An ex-student by the name of John of
Salisbury, commented that the study of the Liberal
Arts (the trivium and quadrivium) were being abandoned in favor of
mere professional training.
THE BIRTH OF THE UNIVERSITY
One day in the Autumn of 1200, a German student decided to throw a bit of
a party in his apartment for some of his friends and sent his servant, a
ten- year old boy, down to the corner tavern to get his large wine-jug
filled. The tavern owner gave the boy sour wine and, when the boy
complained, the bartender and some of the barflies beat the kid up and
threw him out into the street along with his broken jug. Why? I don't
really know. Perhaps it was because the German emperor had stirred up the
English to start a long and bloody war with France. Or maybe it was
because the barkeep liked the students' money, but not the students.
In any event the boy dragged himself back to his master, and the student
and his friends went down to the tavern and beat up everybody before they
went home with a large jugful of decent wine. The barkeep asked the
provost to punish the students, and the provost gathered his men, together
with a number of volunteers, and blocked all of the streets into the Latin
Quarter. They then went hunting for the German student, slapping people
around as they went. A number of masters and students were irritated by
this, took to the streets, and a pitched battle ensued. The provost and
his men finally withdrew, but not before they had killed five students,
including the German student who had started it all, and who happened to
have been the prince-bishop elect of Liege (in what is now Belgium).
The chancellor refused to help the master and students of the Latin
Quarter, so they barricaded the streets leading into the Latin Quarter,
and the masters held a meeting that night. They decided to organize
themselves into a union, or, as it was called in the Latin of the time, a
universitas. Since their students were studying in order to
become masters themselves, the union included the students as more or less
junior members. The next day, representatives of the union went to the
king of France and announced themselves as spokesmen for The
University of the Masters and Students of Paris.
They demanded a number of corporate rights, privileges and protection from
the king. When the king asked what they would do if he decided to say no,
they replied with the famous words, "Then we shall shake the dust of
the streets of Paris from the hems of our gowns." In effect, they
were threatening to leave and to do their teaching elsewhere. King Philip
realized that Paris would lose much of its attractiveness and he would
lose a considerable amount of taxes if the masters, students and all of
the people who provided services to the Latin Quarter were to leave, and
so agreed to protect the members of the Universitas.
Much more happened in succeeding years. There were continuing struggles
with the chancellor and provost, and even among the students and masters
themselves, but in the end the union of masters and students was
recognized by all. They gained powers -- the right to establish the
curriculum, the requirements, and the standards of accomplishment; the
right to debate any subject and uphold in debate any subject; the right to
choose their own members; protection from local police; the right of each
member to keep his license to teach as soon as he had been admitted to
full membership; and others. These rights were often won in open battles
in which people -- masters and students -- died, but they were rights
that faculty still guard jealously today.
As an aside to help you to become more knowledgeable than your fellows
who don't study medieval history, I'll tell you why graduation is called
Commencement (and no, it's not because it's the beginning of
your "real life"). In the large halls where students and faculty ate, the
faculty used to eat at table on a raised platform at one end of the long
line of tables at which the students sat. When the students finished their
course of study and graduated, they became fully-fledged members of the
University and equals of the faculty. Consequently, at the grand banquet
with which they celebrated their graduation, faculty and former students
(both the newly-graduated and alumni) ate together as equals. They shared
tables, or, in the Latin of the time, they ate at a commensa, a common
table for all. This is why, not so long ago, Commencement and Reunion took
place at the same time and why the University Dinner was the high point of
the graduation events.
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