What Did One Learn in a Medieval University?

AA100 Tutorial 2 Handout 2:

What did one learn in a medieval university?

Ancient texts were lost to Western Christendom with the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century CE. The political unification of Europe was over, leaving behind a variety of barbarian kingdoms.

• In Western Europe there was a strong sense of a lost, superior classical culture which for centuries would drive scholars to search for relics of ancient learning, to recover what had been lost and even to advance beyond the ancients.
• One of the few Ancient texts to survive was Aristotle’s Analytics, a treatise on logic: this became a basic intellectual tool in the West.
• From the eleventh century education moved from rural monasteries to the new urban cathedral schools, some of which then developed into universities (Chartres, Rheims, Paris, Canterbury, Salamanca).
• The medieval University curriculum was generally broken down into the trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic, and the quadrivium of arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. Together these were ‘the seven liberal arts’, studied in the faculty of arts, which served as a four-year foundation course for the higher studies of theology, law and medicine.
• University studies took up to twelve additional years for a master's degree and doctorate. Theology was the most prestigious area of study and the most difficult.
• However, in the thirteenth century the Latin West rediscovered the treasury of Greek knowledge through the intermediary of Arabic sources, along with stimulating Arabic commentaries and discoveries. Chief amongst these were Aristotle's works.
• The Christianization of Aristotle: the synthesis of St Thomas Aquinas and the development of Scholastic Aristotelianism. In spite of considerable discomfort over teaching the works of a pagan, pre-Christian Greek, Aristotelian doctrines cast a powerful hold over the universities.
• From 1325, after some decades of dispute, Aristotelianism became the established orthodoxy of the Western academic world; and through Aquinas, an intimate synthesis of Aristotle and Christianity was achieved. Thus the investigation of nature became respectable in the service of the Christian faith and all the characteristics of the Christian faith continued to permeate the new world view: Heaven, Hell, Purgatory and all the rest of it. By these means, Aristotelian philosophy became the basis of much interpretation of Christian doctrine: any challenge to it would be met with powerful resistance from governments and the Church.
• It took the form of Scholastic Aristotelianism with a] masters reading texts from authoritative authors, commenting on and elucidating difficult passages and b] masters using ‘disputation’, posing questions and then using logical argument to establish or refute propositions.There were some in the university world who were convinced that logic was the most important of the seven liberal arts, basic for the sciences and all other knowledge.
• Everywhere in Western Europe the same sources became the authoritative texts: Galen, Avicenna and Hippocrates for medicine; Ptolemy and John of Sacrobosco for astronomy (perhaps English, his thirteenth-century Sphera was a simplified version of Ptolemy's Almagest and some Arabic astronomical works); and especially Aristotle for logic and practically everything to do with the natural world, organic and inorganic.

Dr Kate CrawleyPage 1