The superior faculties of theology, medicine, and law were headed by “regent”
masters. The faculty in these faculties were quite few—e.g., eight for theology—and the
great bulk of the masters taught in the arts. In the 13th century, there are also references
to the university of artists and its rector, an official whose role would grow in the later
Middle Ages. The membership of the medieval faculty of arts was also subdivided
according to each member’s country of origin into several groupings known as “nations”:
French, for those from the Île-de-France and the Mediterranean, Norman for those from
Normandy and Brittany, Picard for those from Picardy and the Low Countries, and
English for those from England, Germany, and Scandinavia. Each nation possessed its
own seal and oper-ated as an independent organization, meeting regularly and being
responsible for the examinations for the license to teach the arts. The importance of the
nations declined at the end of the Middle Ages, as Paris itself became less international in
its composition as a result of competition from other newly founded universities.
Also operating within the ambit of the university were colleges. These were
foundations intended to support the studies of poorer scholars. The most famous of them
was that founded by St. Louis’s chaplain Robert de Sorbon ca. 1257.
Although the course of studies at Paris before 1150 appears to have been fluid, with
masters and students both able to move from one discipline to another, by the 13th
century it had become traditional that the youngest scholars would study arts, only later
advancing to the superior faculties of law, medicine, or theology. This sequence is
already enshrined in the statutes of Robert de Courçon, who specifies twenty-one as the
minimum age for lecturing in the arts (by which time a scholar should have heard lectures
himself for six years), while the minimum age for theologians was to be thirty-five.
Lecturing took the form of expositions of standard texts; the master would explain
each passage, noting as well the issues surrounding the passage that were currently being
discussed. The list of texts remained remarkably stable for centuries: for example,
students read Priscian for grammar, Aristotle for logic, Peter Lombard’s Sententiae for
theology. The fixed place in the curriculum held by some of these texts does not,
however, mean that the education received at the university was unchanging. In the first
place, even while lecturing on traditional texts, masters generally discussed whatever
issues were more professionally important at the time; these issues changed constantly, as
some questions were settled and scholars’ attention turned to new ground. The
curriculum also evolved, especially in the 13th century, by the introduction of lectures on
newly translated works, such as Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Ethics, that brought with
them a variety of concepts apparently in conflict with Christian doctrine. Several times in
the course of the century, popes attempted to ban the teaching of certain doctrines or
books, but these prohibitions were only sporadically effective, at least until a doctrine had
actually been formally proclaimed to be heretical.
Medieval universities did not grant formal degrees, but there were events that marked
a student’s progress through his studies. Mid-13th-century statutes of the English nation
use the term “bachelors” to describe students who had been licensed to take the exam
known as “determination.” To take this exam, they had to be at least twenty years old and
to have listened to lectures for five years; the exam itself consisted of a series of
disputations, after which a student would be expected to participate in disputations for
another year. A student who had “determined” could continue his studies and receive a
license to teach, a further step known as “inception,” which like determination involved
The Encyclopedia 1777