92 Shank
universities multiplied in the fourteenth and fi fteenth centuries, number-
ing some sixty by 1500.^45 It is diffi cult to exaggerate their importance as
institutional homes for the pursuit of natural philosophy, medicine, and
the mathematical sciences, as well as the crucial ancillary disciplines of
logic and mathematics.
The organization of the universities embodied a new classifi cation of
learning initially subdivided according to two predominant models. The
northern European one, patterned on Paris, consisted of a faculty of arts
and three higher faculties (medicine, law, and theology). The northern
Italian pattern associated with Bologna had grown out of an eleventh-
century school of law. In the mid- thirteenth century, Bologna put law in
one faculty, the “arts” and medicine in another, adding theology in the
fourteenth century.^46
By naming their introductory and largest faculty for the “arts,” the
universities institutionalized a terminology that was almost as out- of- date
then as it is today (bachelor of arts, and so forth). By the mid- 1250s, the
faculty of arts at Paris required Aristotle’s libri naturales, which fi t neither
the trivium nor the quadrivium. The disciplines of the trivium were taught,
but the many new subspecialties of logic eventually outnumbered gram-
mar and rhetoric. Obsolete or not, the “liberal arts” would remain a cliché
of academic speeches for centuries.^47
While thirteenth- century masters were sometimes called artistae, they
thought of themselves generically as philosophers, philosophi, particularly
at Paris, where some deliberately set themselves against the theologians.
Tellingly, the bishop of Paris’s Condemnation of 1277 included the prop-
ositions: “That the only wise men of the world are philosophers” and
“There is no higher life than the philosophical life.” When the masters
changed hats, they adopted more specifi c designations for themselves
and their colleagues: logicus, physicus, perspectivus, astronomus, and the
like.^48 Some of them clearly specialized as authors or teachers, especially
in the mathematical sciences and medicine. In Paris, John of Sacrobos-
co’s popular textbooks were exclusively astronomical and mathematical,
while questions about, and texts of, the “intermediate sciences” are often
grouped in academic manuscripts, suggesting that the latter were studied,
and probably taught, together.^49 In Vienna, John of Gmunden (d. 1442)
chose to specialize in teaching mathematics and astronomy for two de-
cades. By the early fi fteenth century, Bologna and Kraków each created
a fi rst chair, then a second, dedicated to astronomy / astrology. From the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, specialized treatises on anatomy and
the dissections that accompanied them (Paris, Bologna) preceded the es-
tablishment of new chairs in anatomy and eventually surgery.^50