books for preachers, advice for rulers, manuals for priests, textbooks for students,
and guides for living addressed to laypeople. Nor was mastery of the liberal arts the
end of everyone’s education. Many students went on to study theology (for which
Paris was the center). Others studied law; at Bologna, for example, where Gratian
worked on canon law, other jurists—such as the so-called Four Doctors—achieved
fame by teaching and writing about Roman law. By the mid-twelfth century, scholars
had made real progress toward a systematic understanding of Justinian’s law codes
(see above, p. 34). The lawyers who emerged from the school at Bologna went on to
serve popes, bishops, kings, princes, or communes. Thus the learning of the schools
was put to work by the newly powerful twelfth-century states, preached in the
churches, and consulted in the courts.
It found a place in the treatment of the ill as well. The greatest schools of
medicine were at Salerno (in Italy) and at Montpellier (in France). In the course of
the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, these schools’ curricula began to draw on
classical Greek medical texts, which had been translated into Arabic during the ninth
century. Now the Arabic texts were turned into Latin. For example, Constantine the
African, who was at Salerno before 1077, translated a key Arabic text based on
Galen’s Art of Medicine. He called it the Isagoge (“Introduction”), which indeed it
was:
[The principal members of the body are] the brain, the heart, the liver,
and the testicles. Other members serve the aforesaid principal members,
such as the nerves, which minister to the brain, and the arteries which
minister to the heart, and the veins, which minister to the liver, and the
spermatic vessels, which convey sperm to the testicles. Some members
have their own inherent power... for example bones, all the cartilages
or the membranes that are between the skin and the flesh, the muscles,
fat, and flesh... [Other members] originate from their own innate
power and derive vigor from the fundamental [members], for example,
the stomach, kidneys, intestines, and all the muscles. By their own
proper power, these members seek out food and transform it.^11
Soon the Isagoge was gathered together with other texts into the Articella, a major
training manual for doctors throughout the Middle Ages.
