Western Civilization

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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