The curriculum of each university depended on its specialty and its traditions. At
Paris in the early thirteenth century, students spent at least six years studying the
liberal arts before gaining the right to teach. If they wanted to specialize in theology,
they attended lectures on the subject for at least another five years. With books both
expensive and hard to find, lectures were the chief method of communication. These
were centered on important texts: the master read an excerpt aloud, delivered his
commentary on it, and disputed any contrary commentaries that rival masters might
have proposed. Students committed the lectures to memory.
Within the larger association of the university, students found more intimate
groups with which to live: “nations,” linked to the students’ place of origin. At
Bologna, for example, students belonged to one of two nations, the Italians and the
non-Italians. Each nation protected its members, wrote statutes, and elected officers.
Both masters and students were considered part of another group: clerics. This
was an outgrowth of the original, church-related, purposes of the schools, and it had
two important consequences. First, there were no university women. And second,
university men were subject to church courts rather than the secular jurisdiction of
towns or lords. Many universities could also boast generous privileges from popes
and kings, who valued the services of scholars. The combination of clerical status
and special privileges made universities virtually self-governing corporations within
the towns. This sometimes led to friction. When the townsmen of Oxford tried to
punish a student suspected of killing his mistress, the masters protested by refusing to
teach and leaving the city. Such disputes are called “town against gown” struggles
because students and masters wore gowns (the distant ancestors of today’s
graduation gowns). But since university towns depended on scholars to patronize
local taverns, shops, and hostels, town and gown normally learned to negotiate with
one another to their mutual advantage.
GOTHIC STYLE
Certainly town and gown agreed on building style: by c.1200, “Gothic” (the term
itself comes from the sixteenth century) was the architecture of choice. Beginning as
a variant of Romanesque in the Ile-de-France, Gothic style quickly took on an
identity of its own. Gothic architects tried to eliminate heavy walls by enlivening them
with sculpture or piercing them with glass, creating a soaring feel by using pointed
arches. Suger, abbot of Saint-Denis and the promoter of Capetian royal power (see p.
176), was the style’s first sponsor. When he rebuilt portions of his church around
1135, he tried to meld royal and ecclesiastical interests and ideals in stone and glass.
