Research Article: Medieval Europe 814-1450: Philosophy

Scholasticism is a term that was borrowed from the Greek word schole, which means "leisure," and came to mean the activity of a person of leisure or a scholastikos, a scholar. By the twelfth century the term "scholastic" had come to signify the system whereby knowledge was imparted in an organized fashion and with a specific methodology. At first, the term was only applied to those schools which taught a certain curriculum of the seven liberal arts, headed by a scholasticus, or master scholar. Yet as more specific forms of study began to appear, there was need to expand the term scholasticism to signify any type of formal learning that occurred between a teacher of great knowledge and a student. Hence, as universities came into existence during the course of the twelfth century, many historians have called the rise in the level of education the "Golden Age of Scholasticism" in...
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