94 Shank
new learning in the hierarchy of knowledge. Although immersed in the
Aristotelian revival and very attuned to mathematics, Roger Bacon also
sympathized with an Augustinian hierarchy of knowledge. Unlike Wil-
liam of Conches, he believed that scripture contained all wisdom and that
the various branches of philosophy served the faith as handmaidens, a
nostalgic perspective that surfaces now and again into the late fourteenth
century.^54 That role was fading, however: members of the faculties of arts
thought and behaved not as handmaidens, but as autonomous agents.
Well they might have. Since attrition rates hovered around 80 to 90 per-
cent between matriculation and the master’s degree, most students never
entered a higher faculty, let alone theology. Even without a degree, their
sojourn in the “arts” faculty nevertheless advanced their careers. The ana-
lytical skills and advanced literacy they gained signifi ed competence.^55
The universities thus diffused the inquiry into nature throughout the
culture, for they exposed vast numbers of students, who would run the
growing princely, ecclesiastical, and town bureaucracies, to disciplines
and texts that treated the operations and structures of the natural world.
Courts did not want to be left out of this trend: King Charles V of France,
for example, commissioned several translations of university texts into
French. Some 250 of the 1,239 manuscripts in his library belonged to the
quadrivium, the second largest category; 40 to 60 each were natural philo-
sophical and medical or surgical.^56
The logic and natural philosophy of the “lower” faculty shaped the
higher faculties profoundly, for the “step” (gradus = degree, step) structure
of university curricula required an advanced arts degree for admission to a
higher faculty. The questions that theological and medical masters raised,
respectively, about the scientifi c status of theology and the natural philo-
sophical status of medicine show strikingly how much they had internal-
ized the criteria of the arts faculty and used them to analyze and to justify
their own knowledge claims.THE RANGE OF SCIENTIA
By the early thirteenth century, the translation of Aristotle’s works, the
impressive Arabic commentaries on them, and much original Arabic med-
ical, natural philosophical, and mathematical material heightened the in-
terest of questions about the scientifi c status of specifi c areas of inquiry.
The central treatises of Aristotle’s natural philosophy—the Physics, On the
Soul, and On the Heavens—provided concrete examples not of dogmatic
expositions but of natural knowledge in the making. These were reasoned