 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Straw Men – The Rise of the Universities With the huge influx of scientific and philosophical literature we discussed last time, an educational ideal of the early medieval ages drifted out of reach. No longer would it be possible for any one person, no matter how intelligent and industrious, to master all available human knowledge. Ironic, then, you might say, that it was at just about the same time, in the late 12th and early 13th centuries, that we see the rise of the medieval universities. The very name university, after all, seems to promise the opportunity of comprehensive education. It is a place where you can study all things. But, as it turns out, that is not what the medieval word meant. The term universitas had nothing to do with universal knowledge, nor, for that matter, did it refer to a place. This is not to say that the medieval university had nothing in common with our modern-day institutions. To the contrary, a list of the customs and practices that still survive from medieval universities could include the wearing of academic gowns, the division of teaching staff into faculties and of teaching sessions into lectures and seminars, the observing of summer holidays, the provision of student housing, the hazing of first-year students, examinations, endowed chairs, the awarding of bachelor's and master's degrees, and such administrative terms as chancellor and rector. Also, medieval university students drank a lot. Yet the fact that we still use the word university can be misleading. Originally, universitas just meant a group of people who banded together for collective action. It was applied to many such groups, not only scholarly ones. So, when the medieval's called these scholars at Bologna, Paris, or Oxford a universitas, it was because those scholars had joined forces, at first to seek informal protection of their interests from the church or secular governments, and then later to seek recognition as legal entities. It was only much later that these groups acquired buildings for teaching. Typically, masters would instruct their students in private rooms, such a room being called a scola, or school. At the University of Paris, many of these rooms were on the street of straw, so called because the students sat on bundles of straw during class. Instruction in these schools had already been the practice for generations, which is why we've been talking about scholastics, schoolmen, and so on as we've looked at the 12th century. What changed with the universities is that the students and masters came together to form politically and economically powerful blocs. This enabled them to win the support of kings, bishops, and popes, and also to annoy those same authorities with their demands, unlawful behavior, and alarming independence of mind. In this sense, the universities were simply a development out of the schools of the preceding generations. But the difference was more than one of size. Up through the 12th century, there had been two major institutional contexts for philosophy, the monastery and the school. In a monastery, the emphasis was on personal moral development, and the philosophical teaching that went on was part of a pastoral relationship between master and student, hence the intensely personal, intimate flavor of works by monastic thinkers like Anselm. The schools were instead places of professional expertise in the liberal arts, driven in part by competition between masters who sought to draw fee-paying students. It's in that context that we must understand the bitterness between Peter Abolyard and William of Champo, for instance. Intellectually, their feud was about the status of universals, but personally it was about who could claim the status of sharpest mind in Paris. It's also usual to see Bernard of Clavau's attempt to bring Abolyard and, later, Gilbert of Poitiers to heel as a manifestation of tension between these two institutional settings. Bernard represented the monastic ethos and wanted to subdue the creeping secularism and arrogance of the upstart schoolmen. One might take the emergence of the universities as a clear victory for team Abolyard, but in fact they sought to preserve the moral framework of monastic life alongside the liberal arts curriculum. Such moral traits as discipline and modesty were considered as important for the student as the knowledge they would acquire. In theory, at least, such moral features were even considered in the process of awarding degrees. Student instruction also continued to have a religious setting. Admittedly, most of the dozens of universities that sprang up around Europe in the Middle Ages did concentrate on the liberal arts and the disciplines of medicine and law. But the two universities that were most important in the history of philosophy were Oxford and, above all, Paris. At both, theology was the culminating discipline of the university, with the arts treated as a more basic preparatory level of study. Bonaventure, one of the greatest professors at Paris, remarked that the arts were like the foundation of a house, medicine and law like the house's walls, and theology like the roof at the top. Another difference between the universities and the earlier schools was simply the higher degree of organization implied by the term universitas. Such practices as the wearing of specific clothing, those academic gowns, and the use of official seals on documents were outward manifestations of the corporate nature of the university. Not all the universities had the same kind of organizational structure, though. There were many differences of detail from one university to the next. But the main contrast is between the arrangements at Paris and at Bologna, whose size, fame, and early foundation made them the two models that others would follow. Bologna came along first, having emerged as a major center for law already in the 12th century. The University of Paris can be roughly dated to the turn of the 13th century. It would be associated, above all, with theology, carrying on the tradition of the great Parisian theologians among the schoolmen at St. Victor and in nearby Chartres. So it's no coincidence that it was Bologna that gave us Gratian and Paris that gave us Peter Lombard. Beyond this intellectual difference, there was a contrast of constituency. Bologna was really a corporation founded by students. For them, the university was a way to improve their bargaining position against their own masters. Collective action meant they could force masters to, for example, pay a fine if a lecture was missed, started late, or taught inadequately. The Bolognese students would have loved the Rate My Professor website. By contrast, the Paris model, which was adopted also at Oxford, had the masters joining together as a university to offer a program of studies to young students. And I do mean young. Scholars would begin their studies at the Faculty of Arts at the tender age of 14. The majority of them would never even attain a degree, satisfying themselves with a basic grounding that could launch them on their further careers. This is another important contrast between medieval universities and the ones we know. These great centers of learning were to a large extent offering what we would think of as a high school education. The fact that most of the students were teenagers helps to explain why they were so strong-willed and, to be frank, badly behaved. They were scholars, but they weren't necessarily gentlemen. Many complained about the debauchery of these supposedly morally upstanding young men, and some of the biggest disputes involving universities in the 13th century erupted when the students came together to show solidarity for a fellow scholar who had, say, committed murder. The reason the confederations of students were so powerful was that they could threaten to vote with their feet if the town or other authorities failed to capitulate in such a case. This happened more than once in medieval times. The university at Cambridge was indirectly born when students left Oxford in protest at the hanging of students in reaction to a murder committed by one among their number. Similarly, the University of Vicenza was set up by students who withdrew from Bologna. Decamping like this, or simply going on strike, served as a powerful threat in any political dispute. Masters depended on teaching students for their livelihood, while the cities too benefited economically from the presence of such a large number of students. Perhaps no one benefited more than the whorehouses and taverns. Two of the most significant events concerning the University of Paris in the 13th century involved arguments over a bar bill. The first came in 1200, when a student beat up an innkeeper after arguing with him over payment, and the town authorities reacted by killing several students. In protest, the university went on strike, forcing the king to take sides. He backed the university, and offered it a charter outlining its new rights. Medieval universities didn't have sports teams, but they went in for rematches nonetheless. Almost 30 years later, another dispute over a bill led to riots, another police intervention, and then a strike of no fewer than three years, which ended when the authorities once again gave in to student demands. Students didn't actually have to open negotiations over their rights by beating up innkeepers though. Bologna had been given royal backing much earlier, when a more peaceful appeal to Frederic Barbarossa led to his placing the scholars there under his protection in 1158. However the rights were acquired, to be a student at these major institutions of learning was to enjoy a significant degree of legal protection. In Paris, a university student could only be arrested if he was caught in the very act of committing homicide, adultery, rape, or at the scene of bloodshed with a club, rock, or weapon. Amidst all this murder, rioting, whoring, and political brinksmanship, the universities did manage to put on a few classes. So what was the medieval version of the student experience, as today's institutions like to put it? The first thing to realize is that each student had a relationship with one particular master. In fact, in Paris it was laid down that no one could be considered a student without such a relationship. To matriculate was to be entered into the list of students attached to that master. This was a matter of legal importance, since it was how each student secured access to the rights that the university had managed to win for itself. Having matriculated, the student would be instructed by the arts faculty for the rest of his teenage years. The first degree he could attain would be the bachelor's, or baccalaureus. Despite attempts to suggest that this term came into Latin from the Arabic-speaking world, it seems to be of older provenance and to refer originally to a wreath worn on the head of an initiate. At this stage, the student could himself instruct younger students, while working towards a master's degree of his own. You'll notice, by the way, that I keep referring to the student as he. Women were not admitted to study at the university, so female intellectuals of the 13th and 14th centuries, and there were some, as we'll be seeing, were educated outside the university system, either in a convent, like Hildegard of Bingen had been, or through private tutoring in the aristocratic class. As he progressed through the course of study, the student would be instructed largely through means of lectures. The word lecture comes from the Latin lectio, meaning that an authoritative text was read by the master for the benefit of the students. The so-called ordinary lectures on standard texts were the bread and butter of the arts teaching, and took place first thing in the morning. Masters could also read texts outside the usual curriculum in extraordinary lectures. Furthermore, reading could be done in two different ways. The master could either offer an exposition of the text in the form of a running paraphrase, or depart from it a bit more by posing a series of problems or questions about it. These were called in Latin questiónes. The same kinds of teaching were already used in the 12th century schools. Guebert of Poitiers already refers to them. A further kind of teaching was the disputation. This was an event where two, hopefully well-prepared students would argue on either side of a point, with the master coming in at the end to adjudicate the issue. The most freewheeling kind of teaching at the university would have been the quadlibital disputation, the word quadlibet meaning anything you like. Here the idea was that the audience could raise any question for debate, with the master again giving an answer in conclusion. Occasionally, though not usually, the questions raised were intentionally trivial or silly. If a person is born with two heads, for instance, should he be baptized once or twice? This is one of the practices that was mocked by later critics of scholasticism who liked to depict the activities of the university as strictly authority-bound and mired in absurd minutiae. But in fact, all these modes of teaching gave the masters opportunities to put forward new, and sometimes even daring, ideas. This could be true even with the ordinary lecture taught as straightforward exposition, but it's more obvious with the other types of teaching. Even standard texts could serve as a jumping-off point for innovative philosophical ideas when lectures were put in the form of questions. A good example would be Duns Scotuses, pioneering metaphysical theories which were advanced in lectures on that standby of the theology curriculum, Peter Lombard's Sentences. In the context of an extraordinary lecture, meanwhile, masters were by definition travelling off the beaten path in terms of their choice of material. Then there were the disputed questions, which are worth dwelling on in a bit more detail. Textual reports of a disputed question will include the cases put for and against a given proposition, followed by the master's response and then replies to the initial arguments pro and contra. Often, the master would answer the question at hand, not with a flat yes or no, but by showing the true solution to be rather more subtle. The arguments on both sides might invoke a wide range of authorities. Everyone from Aristotle to Augustine to Avicenna, and maybe even occasionally an author whose name didn't start with an A. Isidore of Seville, perhaps. The upshot was that a series of disputed questions on a given topic could provide an evaluation of the whole history of ideas on that topic, along with nuanced attempts to reconcile the different authoritative views and original positions staked out by means of finely drawn distinctions. Good examples of the genre are Aquinas's disputed questions on truth and on evil. Here, we see the full flowering of the dialectical seeds planted by Abelard in his Sic et Non, and then by Gratian and Peter Lombard. We can now also see why so many works of medieval philosophy take the form of expositions or disputed questions. They were simply records of teaching, set down by the master himself or as a report by students who were present. Even writings not grounded in an actual teaching session would often display the same structure, the most famous example being Aquinas's Summa Theologiae. So that's how the students would be taught. The next question is what the students would be taught. And in the 13th century, questions didn't get much more disputed than this one. Certainly some texts were uncontentious. In theology, the basic textbook became Lombard's sentences with further lectures on the Bible, and no one was going to complain about that. The debates rather concerned the Arts faculty syllabus, which provided the reading list for the majority of students who were also the youngest and most impressionable participants of the university. As the name Arts Faculty implies, the basic structure was at first still the old trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic. But as the works of Aristotle became available, there were heated debates about which of them should be read. There could be little objection to pursuing the old logic that had already been known before the translation movement, with its works by Aristotle and Boethius. But what about Aristotle's works on natural philosophy and his metaphysics? These were full of problematic teachings. For instance, Aristotle seemed to depict the human as a mortal being whose soul was a mere form of the body, and argued that the universe had always existed rather than having been created. The debate over teaching Aristotle ran for a generation and more, with an initial salvo in the second decade of the 13th century. Statutes laid down in Paris in the year 1215 banned teaching of the books of Aristotle on metaphysics and natural philosophy or on summaries of them. Of course, the implication is that masters had been doing exactly that. The ban, of course, had no effect elsewhere. Aristotle continued to be read in Oxford, while a new university at Toulouse boldly advertised the possibility of studying the natural philosophy that was now blacklisted in Paris. Nor did the ban do much to blunt the Parisians' interest in this cutting-edge Aristotelian material. As we'll be seeing in coming episodes, much of the philosophical action in the first half of the 13th century continued to revolve around the interpretation and assimilation of Aristotle. By the middle of the century, the process was complete. In the 1250s, a new curriculum was set down in Paris. It did not just allow, but actually required, the reading of numerous works by Aristotle on natural philosophy and psychology as well as his metaphysics and ethics. From henceforth, philosophical education in Latin Christendom was going to mean what it had meant in late antiquity and what it had meant in the Islamic world until Avicenna came along. It was going to mean the study of Aristotle. Though our interest in this podcast series is of course with the universities as a setting for philosophy, we should remember that the universities were not institutions of philosophy, not even in the more inclusive medieval sense of the term philosophy. As we've seen, Bologna, which was the most important university alongside Paris, specialized in law. Conversely, some disciplines that did belong to the study of philosophy in the broad medieval sense were not studied at the universities, at least not as part of the standard curriculum. The mechanical arts had been included by Hugh of St. Victor in his catalogue of the arts, but apart from medicine, these did not feature in the course of study at Paris or Oxford. A more striking absence was the whole second part of the liberal arts curriculum, the mathematical disciplines of the quadrivium. These were pursued at universities, but would remain excluded from ordinary lectures. What about the crowning role of theology, at least in the system observed in Paris and Oxford? Did it cast a long shadow over the secular disciplines pursued by the arts masters? As with a good question, it isn't possible to give a simple yes or no answer. For one thing, students and masters in the theology faculty might also teach in the arts faculty, so the university was not clearly divided into two constituencies of theologians and arts masters. Nonetheless, theology professors did worry that their colleagues in the arts might be drawn into what they disdainfully called curiosity about logic or the natural world. It was an updated version of the complaints that, in the previous century, men like Bernard of Clairvaux had directed against men like Abelard. This tension will come to a head in the 1270s, with two rounds of condemnations in Paris, which sought to bring the arts masters and other Aristotle enthusiasts to heel. A further complication was that there was, after all, a way in which the university masters split into two different constituencies. As Abelard knew, with every nun comes a sic. The influence of the two mendicant orders, the Franciscans and Dominicans, would be increasingly felt at Paris as the 13th century wore on. They would cause much annoyance among these secular masters who had not taken orders. Mendicants sometimes refused to join in collective action on behalf of the university, they refused to study or teach in the arts faculty, and, perhaps worst of all, they took jobs away from ambitious secular masters. Its attention will need to bear in mind when we look at the upcoming condemnations, or at the debate between the Dominican Thomas Aquinas and the arts master C.J. of Brabant. In fact, because the institutional setting will form such an important backdrop for philosophy in the 13th century, I'll be devoting another episode to it before we plunge into the intellectual excitements to come. There's no disputing that you should join me for a conversation on this topic with medieval philosophy expert Kent Amery, next time here on the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.