124. Value and Influence of the Medieval University (Rashdall, H., The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, vol. II, part п, pp. 703-12. Oxford 1895)

66

The standard history of the origin, development, customs, practices, work, and influence of the medieval universities is the three-volume one by Rashdall. It has been rated as the best history of the subject in any language." From the concluding chapter of this work the following extracts are taken.

What was the real value of the education which the medieval university imparted?...

To the modern student, no doubt, the defects of a mediæval education lie upon the surface. The external defects of the University organization have already been incidentally noticed. In the older Uni

FIG. 21. A LECTURE at a MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY

(After an illustration printed at Paris, in 1487)

The students are seated in rows, while beneath the pro-
fessor is seated the mace bearer of the institution, holding
upright his symbol of authority and prepared if necessary
to preserve order

versity system of northern Europe there is the want of selection and consequent incompetency of the teachers, and the excessive youth of the students in Arts. In the higher Faculties too we have encountered the constant effort on the part of the Doctors to evade the obligation of teaching without surrendering its emoluments, while the real teaching devolved upon half-trained Bachelors. It is, indeed, in the Student-Universities that the chairs would appear to have been most competently filled and their duties most efficiently discharged; in mediæval times students were more anxious to learn than teachers were to teach. In the earlier period again there was an utter want of discipline among students who ought to have been treated as mere schoolboys. The want was partially corrected (in England) by the growth of the College system, but the improvement in this respect was balanced by the decay and degradation in the higher intellectual life of the Universities... There is considerable reason to believe that in the Middle Ages a larger proportion than at the present day of the nominal students derived exceedingly little benefit from their University education. . . . In the earlier part of our period this must have been peculiarly the case, when so little exertion on the part of the student himself was required. A man was allowed year after year to sit through lectures of which he might not understand one word; later on this defect was partly remedied by the multiplication of "exercises" in College and Hall.

For the fairly competent student the main defects of a mediæval education may be summed up by saying that it was at once too dogmatic and too disputatious. Of

a

the superstitious adherence to
Aristotle or other prescribed au-
thority sufficient illustrations
have already been given. It is, of
course, a direct outcome of the
intellectual vice of the age
vice of which the human mind
was by no means cured by the
Renaissance or the Reformation.
It lasted longest where it was
most out of place. In the middle
of the seventeenth century a Doc-
tor of Medicine was compelled by
the English College of Physicians
to retract a proposition which he
had advanced in opposition to
the authority of Aristotle, under
threat of imprisonment. It may
seem a contradiction to allege

was at the same time too controversial. Yet the readiness with which the student was encouraged to dispute the thesis of a prescribed opponent, and the readiness with which he would swear to teach only the system of a prescribed authority, were but opposite sides of the same fundamental defect the same fatal indifference to facts, the facts of external nature, the facts of history, and the facts of life. Books were put in the place of things. This is a defect which was certainly not removed by the mere substitution of Classics for Philosophy....

But, because it is easy enough to pick holes in the education of the past, it must not for one moment be supposed that the education either of the scholastic or of the ultra-classical period was of little value. Up to a certain point - and this is the one consolation to the educa

tional historian- the value of education is independent either of the intrinsic value or of the practical usefulness of what is taught. . . . It was emphatically so in the Middle Ages. Kings and princes found their statesmen and men of business in the Universities most often, no doubt, among those trained in the practical science of Law, but not invariably so. Talleyrand is said to have asserted that Theologians made the best diplomatists. It was not the wont of the practical men of the Middle Ages to disparage academic training. The rapid multiplication of Universities during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was largely due to a direct demand for highly educated lawyers and administrators. In a sense the academic discipline of the Middle Ages was too practical. It trained pure intellect, encouraged habits of laborious subtlety, heroic industry, and intense application, while it left uncultivated the imagination, the taste, the sense of beauty, - in a word, all the amenities and refinements of the civilized intellect. It taught men to think and to work rather than to enjoy. Most of what we understand by "culture," much of what Aristotle understood by the "noble use of leisure," was unappreciated by the mediaval intellect. On the speculative side the Universities were (as has been said) "the school of the modern spirit": they taught men to reason and to speculate, to doubt and to inquire, to find a pleasure in the things of the intellect both for their own sake and for the sake of their applications to life. They dispelled forever the obscurantism of the Dark Ages. From a more practical point of view their greatest service to mankind was simply this, that they placed the administration of human affairs — in short the government of the world — in the hands of educated men. The actual rulers · the Kings or the aristocrats might often be as uneducated or more uneducated than modern democracies, but they had to rule through the instrumentality of a highly educated class.

In criticizing mediæval culture and education, attention is sometimes too much confined to the Scholastic Philosophy and Theology.

The Scholastic Philosophy and Theology do, indeed, represent the highest intellectual development of the period. But they do not represent the most widely diffused or the most practically influential of mediæval studies. Law was the leading Faculty in by far the greater number of mediæval Universities: for a very large proportion of University students the study of Arts, in so far as they pursued it at all, took the place of a modern school rather than of a modern University. From a broad political and social point of view one of the most important results of the Universities was the creation, or at least the enormously increased power and importance, of the lawyer-class. Great as are the evils which society still owes to lawyers, the lawyer-class has always been a civilizing agency. Their power represents at least the triumph of reason and education over caprice and brute force. Lawyers have moderated or regulated despotism even when they have proved its most willing tools: just as in modern democratic communities their prominence must be looked upon as an important conservative check upon democracy..

Over the greater part of Europe the influence of the Universities meant more than this. It brought with it the increasing modification of legal and political institutions by the Roman Law, whether directly or through the Canon Law, whether by avowed adoption or by gradual and unconscious infiltration and imitation. This too was a civilizing agency, though here again an increase of civilization had often to be bought by a decline of rude, barbaric liberty. . . .

It is more directly relative to our subject to examine what have been the effects of the medieval Universities upon our modern educational system. The genius of the Middle Age showed itself above all in the creation of institutions. The institutions of the Middle Age are greater they may prove more imperishable even than its Cathedrals. The University is a distinctly medieval institution. By this is implied not merely that in the most altered and the most modern of the Schools so called there are customs, offices, titles, for the explanation of which we must go back to the history of the thirteenth century with its Guild movement, its Cathedral Schools, and especially its great struggle between the Chancellor of Paris and the Society of Masters. The very idea of the institution is essentially medieval, and it is curious to observe how largely that idea still dominates our modern schemes of education.

CHAPTER X

THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING

THE Readings contained in this chapter illustrate the great Revival of Learning or Renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This revival began in Italy, and for a century absorbed the energies of a small but very devoted body of scholars, inspired by a patriotic ardor for the recovery of their lost intellectual inheritance, and actuated by a modern spirit of investigation and criticism. In that century they ransacked Europe for lost books, brought to light the old monastic treasures, reconstructed and edited them, and, in the process, reconstructed Roman life and literature and history. In searching for, copying, comparing, questioning, inferring, criticizing, and editing, they awakened that modern scientific spirit which, applied later to problems of religion, nature, and government, has been productive of such great results. In awakening this modern scientific spirit, in developing an historical appreciation, and in creating a craving for truth for its own sake, they ushered in the modern, as contrasted with the medieval, age.

The first selection (125), a letter of Petrarch to a friend, returning a volume of Cicero he had borrowed to copy, breathes a spirit of literary appreciation new in the ancient world. The second (126), recording Boccaccio's visit to the famous monastery at Monte Cassino and his finding its great library in ruins, also reveals the new feeling for the ancient learning. Even more is this shown in the letter of Poggio Bracciolini to his friend in Italy (127 a), describing his visit to the monastery at Saint Gall, in Switzerland, and his finding there a copy of the long-lost Quintilian's Institutes of Oratory. His friend's reply (127 b) is equally interesting as breathing the same new spirit. The difficulties involved in restoring and copying these old manuscripts, before the days of printing, may be inferred from the page from one of the copied manuscripts, reproduced as selection 128.

After the pioneers had done their work, and the revival of ancient learning, both Greek and Latin, was well under way all over central and northern Italy, a number of societies, usually called