. In the Middle Ages, the term for a university was studium or studium generale, with the word universitas referring to the institutional or corporate shell enclosing and regulating the communities of masters and students. The most important university in medieval France was that of Paris, whose origins can be found in the 12th century; also of 12th-century origin was the medical school of Montpellier. By the end of the 15th century, however, the model of these early universities had inspired the foundation of many universities throughout France.
In the late 11th century, the school of William of Champeaux had been located in Paris. After William left the city for the nearby community of Saint-Victor, his absence permitted his former student Peter Abélard to establish his own school outside the city on Mont-Sainte-Geneviève; later, in the 1130s, when Abélard again resumed teaching after the interruption prompted by his castration and entry into monastic life, it was again to Mont-Sainte-Geneviève that he returned. The attractions of Paris were several: it was well provided with food and wine; it was the capital of the king of France; there were numerous regional schools that could provide students; and the bishop and cathedral chapter generally failed to exercise much control over teaching in the city.
By the time Abélard left Paris for the last time, in 1141, the city was the center of a considerable community of masters and students: sources regarding the schools of Paris in the early 1140s mention not only Abélard but Albéric de Monte, Robert of Melun, Peter Helias, Adam du Petit-Pont, Gilbert of Poitiers, Thierry of Chartres, and Peter Lombard. Other towns may have boasted masters who were worthy of this company, but none could match the concentration of talent that Paris offered an aspiring student. Students naturally came in large numbers and often from considerable distances; how many there were is impossible to say with any certainty, but the rapid settlement of the Left Bank—the area between the cathedral and Mont-Sainte-Geneviéve where scholars settled in large numbers—suggests that the academic community may have numbered 3,000 or 4,000 by the end of the 12th century. Whatever the precise number, by 1200 Paris was the leading center in Europe for the study of the Liberal Arts and theology.
The texture of the intellectual community, however, was also changing by the 1140s, John of Salisbury recalled having come to Paris as a young man in the 1130s and hearing Abélard lecture, but students in the 1140s were studying with John, a student himself who used the money he earned to finance his own studies. The growing size of the academic community perhaps contributes to the fact that we know the names of comparatively few masters for the second half of the 12th century; it must have been harder to stand out from the crowd. But it was also in this period that one sees the first steps toward defining the legal context in which the masters and students operated.
The first issue to arise was the licentia docendi, or license to teach. Pope Alexander III, in 1166–67 and later in conjunction with the Third Lateran Council (1179), barred the chancellor of Paris from exacting a fee for the right to teach at Paris. The prohibition apparently was not entirely effective, for it had to be repeated in the early 13th century. At that time, Pope Innocent III and then his legate (and Paris master) Robert de Courçon assigned the right to assess the qualifications of candidates for the license to teach to the masters themselves. This provision of Courçon’s statutes, moreover, confirmed the formation of the masters into a corporation that could act jointly on issues of university governance. The masters may in fact have been acting collectively as early as the mid-12th century, but a corporation, or universitas, of masters was not specifically mentioned until 1208. By the early 13th century, therefore, the University of Paris had both achieved corporate status and won independence from local supervision by the chancellor of Paris.
In practice, the University of Paris consisted of several institutions that managed different aspects of university life. The universitas to which Innocent III addressed his letter in 1208 comprised all the masters of theology, canon law, and the arts. Already they were exercising authority over their members in such matters as dress and the order of lectures, as well as more internal issues, such as the duty of masters to attend the funerals of dead colleagues. Courçon’s statutes of 1215, moreover, also assigned the masters jurisdiction over crimes involving one of their members, as well as control over such issues as the prices to be charged for lodging. The independence of the university of scholars from local (but not papal) supervision was made still more explicit by Gregory IX in 1231, when the bull Parens scientiarum commanded the chancellor of
Paris to swear to respect the rights of the university, that is, the corporation of masters.
The superior faculties of theology, medicine, and law were headed by “regent” masters. The faculty in these faculties were quite few—e.g., eight for theology—and the great bulk of the masters taught in the arts. In the 13th century, there are also references to the university of artists and its rector, an official whose role would grow in the later Middle Ages. The membership of the medieval faculty of arts was also subdivided according to each member’s country of origin into several groupings known as “nations”: French, for those from the Île-de-France and the Mediterranean, Norman for those from Normandy and Brittany, Picard for those from Picardy and the Low Countries, and English for those from England, Germany, and Scandinavia. Each nation possessed its own seal and oper-ated as an independent organization, meeting regularly and being responsible for the examinations for the license to teach the arts. The importance of the nations declined at the end of the Middle Ages, as Paris itself became less international in its composition as a result of competition from other newly founded universities.
Also operating within the ambit of the university were colleges. These were foundations intended to support the studies of poorer scholars. The most famous of them was that founded by St. Louis’s chaplain Robert de Sorbon ca. 1257.
Although the course of studies at Paris before 1150 appears to have been fluid, with masters and students both able to move from one discipline to another, by the 13th century it had become traditional that the youngest scholars would study arts, only later advancing to the superior faculties of law, medicine, or theology. This sequence is already enshrined in the statutes of Robert de Courçon, who specifies twenty-one as the minimum age for lecturing in the arts (by which time a scholar should have heard lectures himself for six years), while the minimum age for theologians was to be thirty-five.
Lecturing took the form of expositions of standard texts; the master would explain each passage, noting as well the issues surrounding the passage that were currently being discussed. The list of texts remained remarkably stable for centuries: for example, students read Priscian for grammar, Aristotle for logic, Peter Lombard’s Sententiae for theology. The fixed place in the curriculum held by some of these texts does not, however, mean that the education received at the university was unchanging. In the first place, even while lecturing on traditional texts, masters generally discussed whatever issues were more professionally important at the time; these issues changed constantly, as some questions were settled and scholars’ attention turned to new ground. The curriculum also evolved, especially in the 13th century, by the introduction of lectures on newly translated works, such as Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Ethics, that brought with them a variety of concepts apparently in conflict with Christian doctrine. Several times in the course of the century, popes attempted to ban the teaching of certain doctrines or books, but these prohibitions were only sporadically effective, at least until a doctrine had actually been formally proclaimed to be heretical.
Medieval universities did not grant formal degrees, but there were events that marked a student’s progress through his studies. Mid-13th-century statutes of the English nation use the term “bachelors” to describe students who had been licensed to take the exam known as “determination.” To take this exam, they had to be at least twenty years old and to have listened to lectures for five years; the exam itself consisted of a series of disputations, after which a student would be expected to participate in disputations for another year. A student who had “determined” could continue his studies and receive a license to teach, a further step known as “inception,” which like determination involved disputations and public ceremonies; inception functioned as the examination for master in the faculty of arts.
A student who qualified to teach in the faculties of law, medicine, or theology at Paris was known as a “doctor.” In law and medicine, candidates typically would have been about twenty-five years old; the age for incepting in theology was thirty-five. Although master and doctor designate a person who has demonstrated a level of competency worthy of a license to teach, in practice few graduates of the university taught for long. The world outside the university also acknowledged the value of the learning certified by these titles, and graduates continued to claim their status as masters and doctors long after leaving academic life.
As part of its control of the academic environment, the University of Paris claimed the right to regulate the book trade as well as the price of classroom rentals and tuition. The university’s objective was both to control prices and to certify the accuracy of texts. University stationers had official copies of works, whose sections, however, had not been bound into a codex; copyists then worked from these sections, known as pecia, to produce multiple copies.Using this method, several copyists could work together to reproduce a book quickly; indeed, one reason for the ascendancy of Gothic script was the fact that Gothic tended to be more uniform from one scribe to another. Students could also borrow pecia rather than an entire book. Both the wages of the copyists and the fees charged by the stationers were regulated by the university, although the stationers did not always comply completely or happily.
Also having roots in the 12th century, the University of Montpellier originally centered on medicine, which may have been taught there before 1150.In 1220, a papal legate confirmed university statutes for the universitas medicorum. Law had also been taught at Montpellier in the 12th century, most notably by the great Italian jurist Placentinus, and legal teaching was firmly established by the second third of the 13th century. A collection of statutes for the faculty of arts dates from 1242. Formal acknowledgment that the schools at Montpellier constituted a studium generale came from Pope Nicholas IV in 1289.
By the 13th century, there was a concept of studium, or university, that was sufficiently well defined to permit the founding of new universities as deliberate acts. The University of Toulouse was founded in 1229, by treaty between the king of France and the count of Toulouse, as part of the settlement of the Albigensian heresy. The count promised to pay the salaries of fourteen professors—four in theology, two in canon law, six in the arts, and two in grammar. The idea clearly was to promote the teaching of orthodox learning as a way to counter heretical doctrines. An effort was made to attract doctors from Paris to staff the new university, but when the count reneged on the salaries he had promised the studium quickly foundered. At this point, however, the pope intervened with a bull guaranteeing the privileges of the masters, and the university seems to have been functioning successfully by the 1240s.
Other, smaller studia can also be documented for the 13th century, and there was a continuous string of foundations in the 14th and 15th centuries, often under the sponsorship of the local bishop. Having a university could be a matter of local pride, and successions of masters from existing universities could provide recruits out of which faculties could be formed. Most of these universities were small compared with Paris, however, and many offered training only or mainly in law. This was a field that saw a steady demand for university graduates, and after the mid-14th century an increasing percentage of French lawyers were laymen with university degrees.
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