by Peter Watson
The first imperial university, in fact the first university of all to be founded by a deliberate act, was installed at Naples in 1224 by the emperor Frederick II. The first papal university was at Toulouse, authorised by Gregory IX in 1229 and founded, in part, to combat heretical belief. These gave birth to the notion that the authority to found studia generalia was vested only in papal or imperial prerogative, a concept that was accepted doctrine by the fourteenth century.42 This constitution was more important then than it would be today because the fledgling universities had earned a number of privileges which were not inconsiderable two in particular are of interest. First, beneficed clergy had the right to receive the fruits of the benefice while studying at the studium. Since some courses of study lasted as long as sixteen years, this was no small thing. The second privilege was the ius ubique docendi, the right of any graduate from a studium generale to teach at any other university without further examination.43 This went back to the idea of the studium learning as a ‘third force’ in society, which was understood to be universal, transcending the boundaries of nation and race. This idea of a commonwealth of teachers, moving around Europe, never really materialised. Each of the new establishments regarded itself as superior to the others and insisted on examinations for the graduates of other universities.44
The earliest universities were those at Salerno, Bologna, Paris and Oxford. Salerno, however, was rather different from the other three. Though not as important as Toledo, it played a role in the translation of Greek and Arabic science and philosophy texts but it did not provide superior faculty teaching in any discipline other than medicine.45 It was in fact noted more for its practical medical skill rather than for anything else (it was surrounded by mineral springs where the lame and blind foregathered). The school was an assembly of medical practitioners, and though there must have been some kind of teaching there was no formal guild association. Nonetheless, the first signs of a medical literature occur at Salerno in the eleventh century encyclopaedias, treatises on herbalism and gynaecology (a number of women doctors, including Trotula, practised in the town). There were also numerous works of Arabic science and medicine and some Greek medical texts which had been translated into Arabic.46 These texts were made available mainly thanks to Constantine the African, a scholar of Arabic descent who settled in Salerno c. 1077 before moving north to the monastery of Monte Cassino where he continued translating until his death in 1087. The most influential Arabic treatises which he rendered into Latin were the Viaticus of al-Jafarr, Isaac Judaeus’ work on diet, fevers and urine and the comprehensive medical encyclopaedia of Haly Abbas compiled in Baghdad one hundred and fifty years before. Constantine’s translations provided a new impetus for the study of Greek medicine which resulted in the Salernitan doctors writing scores of new medical works in the following century. Salerno thus developed a medical curriculum that, after it was exported to Paris and other universities, was expanded under the influence of the new logic and scholasticism.47 These advances progressed most at Bologna and Montpellier. The earliest reference for human dissection occurred at Bologna c. 1300. This may well have been due to forensic investigations necessary for legal processes. (In due course the post-mortem examination became a convenient part of anatomical study.) The earliest text on surgery is the anonymous treatise now titled the Bamberg Surgery (c. 1150). Among the conditions described are fractures and dislocations, surgical lesions of the eye and ear, diseases of the skin, haemorrhoids, sciatica and hernia.48 There is a description for the treatment of goitre with substances containing iodine, and for a form of surgical anaesthesia, a ‘soporific sponge’ soaked in hyoscyamus and poppy.49
Bologna, the oldest studium generale of all, belies the overall picture of medieval universities, in that it was a lay creation designed to meet the career needs of laymen who wanted to study Roman law. Only in the 1140s was canon law, the preserve of clerical teachers and students, introduced at Bologna.50
A boost to law was provided by the polemical turmoil arising from the Investiture Struggle. ‘As Roman law was the best available ideological weapon with which to confront papal hierocratic doctrine, this system became the natural concern of laymen involved in generating an embryonic political theory to refute the claims of papal governmental thought.’51 But it was the teaching of one of these early jurists, Irnerius (possibly a Latinisation of the German Werner), who taught at Bologna around 1087, which enabled Bologna to surpass the other fledgling Italian law schools, such as Ravenna or Pavia. In commenting on Justinian’s Corpus iuris civilis, Irnerius used a method of critical analysis similar to Abelard’s Sic et Non and in so doing succeeded in synthesising Roman law better than anyone had done before. The basic Roman legal texts were made widely available in a form suitable for professional study, as a particular area of higher education, and this established Bologna as a pre-eminent centre for civilian studies to which students began to migrate from distant parts of Europe.52 Bologna’s reputation was further enhanced when, only a little later, in the 1140s and the 1150s, canon law studies were added as a major academic counterpart. This development was spearheaded by Gratian, who was a teaching master of canon law at the Bolognese monastic school of San Felice. His Concordia Discordantium Canonum (the Decretum), completed c. 1140, paralleled in canon law what Irnerius had done for Roman law producing a convenient synthesis appropriate for academic consumption. The impact of these changes may be seen from the fact that, in the two centuries following, a high percentage of popes were jurists, several of whom had been law professors at Bologna.53
A different achievement of Bologna was the Habitas–an academic constitution issued by the emperor Frederick I at Roncaglia in November 1158, apparently at the request of the scholars of the studium, and which was confirmed by the papacy. This came to acquire a fundamental academic significance which far outweighed the original intention, leading to a system of scholastic privilege which eventually ranked alongside the older-established privilegium clericorum.54 In fact, the Habitas was ever after venerated as the origin of academic freedom ‘in much the same way as Magna Carta became an indispensable reference point for English liberties’.55 It began as an attempt by the Crown to reinforce the lay lawyers against the gains being made by the canon lawyers, which fuelled the Investiture Struggle. In the Habitas the emperor is referred to as the minister or servant of God, a doctrine which reflects the idea that imperial power was derived directly from God, not through the intermediary of the Church.56 This set of ideas was refined as time passed to deny the bishops any power over the universities.57
The papal/imperial struggles brought added civil strife to several Italian cities, Bologna being one of them. These near-anarchical conditions promoted the formation of mutual protection associations, known as tower societies or confraternities. It was in this context that the schools of Bologna were founded and this is why Bologna University had the flavour that it did i.e., controlled by students. The student-university idea at Bologna owes a great deal to the contemporary concept of Italian citizenship. In a country increasingly fragmented by war, this was a valuable commodity. In a situation where the status of citizen provided personal protection, non-citizens lacking such security were vulnerable and it was only natural for foreign law students to band together to form a protective association, or universitas. Later, these subdivided into national associations, under the direction of rectors.58
If the papal/imperial rivalry was one factor giving Bologna its special character, another was economics. The city, realising the economic advantages of having a university in the commune, soon passed statutes prohibiting the masters from decamping anywhere else.59 The students, aware of the power this gave them, responded by setting up, in 1193, a universitas scolarium, the intention of which was to establish a regime where students held onto power in all its guises. Under this system, contractual arrangements between individual students and doctors were replaced by organised (and frequently militant) student guilds (universitates). Such was the success
of this arrangement that the universitates were eventually recognised by both the commune of Bologna and the papacy.60 It is worth pointing out that ‘student power’ in those days owed something to the fact that a good number of Bologna law students were older than students are now. Many were in their mid-twenties and some were closer to thirty. Many already had an undergraduate arts degree before arriving in Bologna and a good few held ecclesiastical benefices. On top of this, their legal studies might last for up to ten years and, because of their benefices, many were well-off, so that their presence was a significant economic factor in city affairs.61 All of which had a major impact on university life. Students elected their teachers several months in advance of the academic year and upon election the doctors had to take an oath of submission. A lecturer was fined if he started his lectures even a minute late or if he continued after the allotted time.62 At the start of the academic year the students and doctors agreed on the curriculum to be followed and terms were divided into two-weekly puncta so that students knew when particular material was due to be taught. The students continuously rated the masters’ performances, and could fine anyone they felt fell below par.63 Any doctor who didn’t attract at least five students to his course was deemed absent and fined anyway. If a teacher had to leave the city for some reason he was forced to lodge a deposit against his return.64 As other universities proliferated, Bologna found that this strict regime was losing its allure for teachers at any rate and, from the late thirteenth century, the commune began offering salaries for lecturers. From then on the students gradually lost power.65
The form of the lecture also became established in the twelfth century. Beginning with the Bible, the texts were studied from four points of view: subject matter, immediate aim, underlying purpose, what branch of philosophy it belonged to. The master began by discussing these aspects before giving a gloss on individual words and expressions, the whole process being known as the lectio (‘reading’) or lectura. To begin with, students were not allowed to take notes but as topics became more complex it became necessary to write down what was said.
The studium generale at Bologna was closed several times in the Middle Ages. The reasons varied from plague to papal interdict. Given the inherent conflict between canon and civil law(yers), this was perhaps inevitable. But as a direct result several daughter studia were founded: Vicenza: 1204; Arezzo: 1215; Padua: 1222; Siena: c. 1246 and Pisa:1343.
Paris, the next-oldest studium generale after Bologna, differed (as we have seen) in that its dominant speciality was theology. ‘Paris university provides both the earliest and the most dramatic example in European history of the struggle for university autonomy in the face of ecclesiastical domination.’66 In this case the immediate ecclesiastical barrier to the exercise of university freedom was the chancellor and chapter of the cathedral of Notre Dame whose schools, dating from the eleventh century and situated in the enclosed area known as the cloître, were the primordial root of the studium. ‘As these schools grew in reputation they were infiltrated by numerous outside students and this led to disorder. When the bishop and chapter curtailed the opportunities for study in the cloister, the students migrated to the left bank of the Seine, the present Latin Quarter. By the twelfth century there were many schools, dispersed on and around the bridges of the Seine, specialising in theology, grammar and logic.’67
Paris, unlike in Bologna, was from the first a university of masters. Grouped around Notre Dame, the Paris scholars were content with their clerical status because of the privileges and independence this gave them (they were exempt from certain taxes and military duty). This meant that the university in Paris was an autonomous enclave, protected by both the king and the pope. This autonomy, within the Paris urban area, helps account for the university’s pre-eminence in theology and, later on, put it at the forefront of the debate for academic freedom.68 As in Bologna the Capetian kings of France quickly recognised the economic value of the academic population and from the start pursued a tolerant and positive attitude towards both students and masters.69
In Paris, the arts faculty was much the largest. And in fact, because Paris was so large, each nation of students had its own school, with a rector who collected the fees. These schools were located, mainly, on the left bank, in the rue de Fouarre. In these different schools French, Norman, Picard, English-German lay the germ of the idea of colleges. The impact of the Hundred Years War hit Paris University badly, as foreign students drained away. Partly as a result of this, universities sprang up elsewhere–Spain, Britain, Germany and Holland, Scandinavia.
The original English universities, Oxford and Cambridge, differed from those on the continent in that they grew up in towns which had no cathedrals.70 Oxford, in a way, evolved where it did by accident. In the twelfth century there were several places in England where a studium generale might have developed there were, for example, good cathedral schools in Lincoln, Exeter and Hereford. York and Northampton were other possibilities.71 One theory has it that Oxford was initiated around 1167 by an exodus of scholars from Paris.72 Another theory contends that at first the Northampton school was pre-eminent but the town was hostile, so the scholars left en masse and decamped, around 1192, to Oxford, which was conveniently located, being a meeting point of several routes between, for example, London, Bristol, Southampton, Northampton, Bedford, Worcester and Warwick.73
It is also possible some would say likely that the Northampton scholars were attracted by the remarkable teachers who already existed at Oxford. These included: Theobaldus Stampensis in 1117 and possibly as early as 1094; Robert Pullen, a pupil of John of Salisbury, in 1133; and Geoffrey of Monmouth, who was resident at Oxford between 1129 and 1151.74 ‘The earliest specific evidence for the existence of several faculties and a large concourse of masters and students at Oxford derives from the account of Gerald of Wales c. 1185 of the reading of his Topographia Hibernica before the assembled scholars, a feat which occupied three days. In c. 1190 Oxford is described as a studium commune by a Freisland student then studying [in the town] This is reinforced by the known presence in Oxford, towards the end of the century, of a number of celebrated scholars, including Daniel of Morley and Alexander Nequam.’75 Basically, Oxford was modelled on the Paris system (i.e., led by masters, not students), but it never attracted an international cache of students like Paris did. In organisational terms a distinction was made between northerners (boreales) and southerners (australes, south of the river Nene in what is now Cambridgeshire).76
Whereas Bologna’s main speciality was law and in Paris it was logic and theology, so Oxford became known for its expertise in mathematics and the natural sciences.77 As was mentioned briefly earlier on, this was due in no small part to a number of itinerant Englishmen in the twelfth century who had travelled widely to familiarise themselves with scientific data, revealed through the great translations in Toledo, Salerno and Sicily. Oxford was also the beneficiary of the papal ban on the teaching of the New Aristotle imposed at Paris in the early thirteenth century.
Robert Grosseteste is now seen as the key figure in the Oxford scientific movement (he made the study of Aristotle required reading). Bishop of Lincoln from 1235 to 1253, he was also an early chancellor of the university.78 Grosseteste’s translations (he knew Greek, Hebrew and French) and his assimilation of the new Aristotelian material led to two advances, both of which had a seminal influence on the growth of science in the Middle Ages. These were, first, the application of mathematics to the natural sciences as a means of description and explanation; and second, a stress upon observation and experiment as the essential method of testing a given hypothesis. ‘These principles transformed the study of scientific data from a fairly random exercise to an integrated mathematical inquiry into physical phenomena based upon the tripartite cycle of observation, hypothesis and experimental verification.’79
He was followed by Roger Bacon, who runs him close as the first scientist in the sense that we now use that term. Having studied under Grosseteste
at Oxford, Bacon lectured at Paris, where he was every bit as contentious as Abelard before him. He was convinced that, someday, scientific knowledge would give humanity mastery over nature and he forecast submarines, automobiles and airplanes (together with devices for walking on water). Like Grosseteste he thought that mathematics was the hidden language of nature and that light, optics, then called ‘perspective’, would give access to the mind of the Creator (he thought that rays travelled in straight lines and had a finite, but very fast, speed). Bacon’s thinking was a definite step forward, between the religious mind and the modern scientific way of thinking.
