Euclid on mathematics. Above all, the West now had
available the complete works of Aristotle. During the
second half of the twelfth century, all of Aristotle’s sci-
entific works were translated into Latin. This great
influx of Aristotle’s works had an overwhelming impact
on the West. He came to be viewed as the “master of
those who know,” the man who seemed to have under-
stood every field of knowledge.
The recovery of Greek scientific and philosophical
works was not a simple process, however. Little knowl-
edge of Greek had survived in Europe. It was through
the Muslim world, especially in Spain, that the West
recovered the works of Aristotle and other Greeks. The
translation of Greek works into Arabic was one aspect
of the brilliant Muslim civilization; in the twelfth cen-
tury, these writings were translated from Arabic into
Latin, making them available to the West.
The Islamic world had more to contribute intellectu-
ally to the West than translations, however. Scientific
work in the ninth and tenth centuries had enabled Mus-
lim scholars to forge far ahead of the Western world,
and in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Arabic
works on physics, mathematics, medicine, and optics
became available to the West in Latin translations.
When Aristotle’s works were brought into the West
in the second half of the twelfth century, they were
accompanied by commentaries written by outstanding
Arabic and Jewish philosophers. One example was Ibn-
Rushd (ib-un-RUSHTorib-un-RUSH-ed), also known as
Averro€es (uh-VERR-oh-eez) (1126–1198), who lived in
Cordoba and composed a systematic commentary on
virtually all of Aristotle’s surviving works.The Revival of Roman Law
Another aspect of the revival of classical antiquity was
the rediscovery of the great work of Justinian, theBody
of Civil Law, known to the medieval West before 1100
only at second hand. Initially, teachers of law, such as
Irnerius of Bologna, were content merely to explain the
meaning of Roman legal terms to their students. Gradu-
ally, they became more sophisticated, so that by the
mid-twelfth century, “doctors of law” had developed
commentaries and systematic treatises on the legal
texts. Italian cities, especially Pavia and Bologna, became
prominent centers for the study of Roman law. By the
thirteenth century, Italian jurists were systematizing the
various professional commentaries on Roman law into a
single commentary known as the ordinary gloss. Study
of Roman law at the universities came to consist of
learning the text of the law along with this gloss.The training of students in Roman law at medieval
universities led to further application of its principles as
these students became judges, lawyers, scribes, and
councillors for the towns and monarchies of western
Europe. By the beginning of the thirteenth century, the
old system of the ordeal was being replaced by a rational
decision-making process based on the systematic collec-
tion and analysis of evidence, a clear indication of the
impact of Roman law on the European legal system.The Development of Scholasticism
The importance of Christianity in medieval society prob-
ably made it certain that theology would play a central
role in the European intellectual world. Theology, the
formal study of religion, was “queen of the sciences” in
the new universities. Beginning in the eleventh century,
the effort to apply reason or logical analysis to the
church’s basic doctrines had a significant impact on the
study of theology. The philosophical and theological sys-
tem of the medieval schools is known asscholasticism.
A primary preoccupation of scholasticism was the
attempt to reconcile faith and reason—to demonstrate
that what was accepted on faith was in harmony with
what could be learned by reason.
Scholasticism had its beginnings in the theological
world of the eleventh and twelfth centuries but reached
its high point in the thirteenth. The overriding task of
scholasticism in the thirteenth century was to harmo-
nize Christian revelation with the work of Aristotle. The
great influx of Aristotle’s works into the West in the
High Middle Ages threw many theologians into conster-
nation. Aristotle was so highly regarded that he was
called simply “the Philosopher,” yet he had arrived at his
conclusions by rational thought—not revelation—and
some of his doctrines, such as the mortality of the indi-
vidual soul, contradicted the teachings of the church.
The most famous attempt to reconcile Aristotle and the
doctrines of Christianity was that of Saint Thomas Aqui-
nas (uh-KWY-nuss).
Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) taught theology at
Paris, where he finished his famousSumma Theologica
(SOO-muh tay-oh-LOG-jee-kuh)(Summa of Theology—a
summa was a compendium that attempted to bring to-
gether all existing knowledge on a given subject). Aqui-
nas’s masterpiece was organized according to the
dialectical method of the scholastics. He first posed a
question, cited sources that offered opposing opinions
on the question, and then resolved them by arriving at
his own conclusions. In this fashion, Aquinas raised
and discussed some six hundred articles or issues.214 Chapter 9The Recovery and Growth of European Society in the High Middle AgesCopyright 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
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