THE ORIGINS OF UNIVERSITIES The first European uni-
versity was founded in Bologna, Italy, and coincided
with the revival of interest in Roman law, especially
the rediscovery of Justinian’sBody of Civil Law.Inthe
twelfth century, Irnerius (1088–1125), a great teacher
of Roman law in Bologna (buh-LOHN-yuh), attracted
students from all over Europe. Most of them were lay-
men, usually older individuals who served as adminis-
trators to kings and princes and were eager to learn
more about law so they could apply it in their jobs. To
protect themselves, students at Bologna formed a guild
or universitas, which was recognized by Emperor Fred-
erick Barbarossa and given a charter in 1158. Although
the faculty members also organized themselves as a
group, the universitas of students at Bologna was far
more influential. It obtained a promise of freedom for
students from local authorities, regulated the prices of
books and lodging, and determined the curriculum,
fees, and standards for their masters. Teachers were
fined if they missed a class or began their lectures late.
In northern Europe, the University of Paris became
the first recognized university. A number of teachers or
masters who had received licenses to teach from the ca-
thedral school of Notre-Dame in Paris began to take on
extra students for a fee. By the end of the twelfth cen-
tury, these masters teaching at Paris had formed a uni-
versitas or guild of masters. By 1200, the king of
France, Philip Augustus, officially acknowledged the ex-
istence of the University of Paris. The University of
Oxford in England, organized on the Paris model,
appeared in 1208. A migration of scholars from Oxford
led to the establishment of Cambridge University the
following year. In the late Middle Ages, kings, popes,
and princes vied to found new universities. By the end
of the Middle Ages, there were eighty universities in
Europe, most of them located in England, France, Italy,
and Germany (see Map 9.2).
TEACHERS AND STUDENTS IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY
A student’s initial studies at a medieval university cen-
tered around the traditional liberal arts curriculum,
which consisted of grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic,
geometry, astronomy, and music. All classes were con-
ducted in Latin, which provided a common means of
Atlantic
Ocean
North
Sea
Baltic
Sea
Mediterranean
Sea
IRELAND
SCOTLAND
ENGLAND
FRANCE
SPAIN
DENMARK
HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE
Valladolid
Salamanca
Coimbra
Seville
Toledo
Palermo
Salerno
Naples
Monte
Rome Cassino
Perugia
Florence Vallombrosa
Bologna
Ferrara
Piacenza Padua
Jarrow
Durham
Cambridge
Oxford
Salisbury
Winchester
Canterbury
York
Mont-
Saint-
Michel
Poitiers
ToulouseMontpellier
Cahors
Avignon
Grenoble
Bordeaux
Laon
Saint-
Denis
Notre-
Dame
Chartres Paris
ToursOrléans Fleury
Bourges
Reims
Basel
Cluny
Citeaux
Clairvaux
Hirsau
Krakow
Prague
Cologne
Mainz
Heidelberg
Fulda
Bamberg
Magdeburg Leipzig
Saint-Gall
Vienna
Lorch
Regensburg
Corsica
Sardinia
Balearic Islands
Sicily
0 200 400 Miles
0 200 400 600 Kilometers
University
Important monastic school
Important cathedral school
MAP 9.2Main Intellectual
Centers of Medieval Europe.
Education in the early Middle Ages
was provided primarily by the
clergy, especially the monks.
Although monastic schools were
the centers of learning from the
ninth century to the early eleventh,
they were surpassed in the course
of the eleventh century by the
cathedral schools organized by the
secular (nonmonastic) clergy. In the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries,
the universities surpassed both
monastic and cathedral schools as
intellectual centers.
Q In what ways did France
qualify as the intellectual
capital of Europe?
212 Chapter 9The Recovery and Growth of European Society in the High Middle Ages
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