areas, schools for children were attached to monasteries or established in villages. In
the south of France, where the church still feared heresy, preachers made sure that
they taught children how to read along with the tenets of the faith. In the cities, all
merchants and most artisans had some functional literacy: they had to read and write
to keep accounts, and, increasingly, they owned religious books for their private
devotions. In France, Books of Hours were most fashionable; Psalters were favored
in England.
The broad popularity of the friars fed the institutions of higher education.
Franciscans and Dominicans now established convents and churches within cities;
their members attended the universities as students, and many went on to become
masters. By the time the other theologians at the University of Paris saw the danger
to their independence, the friars were too entrenched to be budged. Besides, the
friars—men like Thomas Aquinas (c.1225–1274) and Bonaventure (c.1217–1274)—
were unarguably the greatest of the scholastics, the scholars who mastered the use of
logic to summarize and reconcile all knowledge and use it in the service of
contemporary society.
The Dominican Thomas Aquinas’s summae (sing. summa)—long, systematic
treatises that attempted to sum up all knowledge—were written to harmonize matters
both human and divine. Using the technique of juxtaposing opposite positions, as
Abelard had done in his Sic et non, Aquinas (unlike Abelard) carefully explained
away or reconciled contradictions, using Aristotelian logic as his tool for analysis and
exposition. Aquinas wanted to reconcile faith with reason, to demonstrate the
harmony of belief and understanding even though (in his view) faith ultimately
surpassed reason in knowing higher truths. Thomas’s Summa against the Gentiles,
for example, written as a guide for missionaries attempting to convert the Muslims,
tried to demonstrate the truths of Christian practice and religion through natural
reason to the extent possible, taking up questions ranging from the principles of the
Christian religion to mundane matters. Are God’s words contrary to reason? Should
marriage be between one man and one woman only? Is simple fornication a sin? In
the work of Albertus Magnus (c.1200–1280), Aquinas’s teacher, the topics ranged
from biology and physics to theology. In the writings of the Franciscan Saint
Bonaventure, for whom Augustine replaced Aristotle as the key philosopher, the
topics as such were secondary to an overall vision of the human mind as the recipient
of God’s beneficent illumination. For Bonaventure, minister general of the Franciscan
Order, spirituality was the font of theology. Yet it was the Spiritual Franciscan Peter
Olivi (1248–1298) who first defined the very practical word “capital”: wealth with the
