Part 4
Now as to philosophy and theology. The trouble lies of course with theology, for philosophy was free save when it touched theological questions. But then, philosophy is very apt to touch theological questions, and all through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries there was an intermittent fight between Christian theology and pagan philosophy as represented by the works of Aristotle. It began with Abelard when he tried to apply his logical method of inquiry to theology, and it went on when his contemporary, Gilbert de la Porrée, directed still more of the Aristotelian logic toward theological speculation. By the end of the twelfth century, the _New Logic_ was pretty well assimilated, but then came Aristotle’s _Metaphysics_ and natural philosophy, with their Arabic commentators, the study of which at Paris was formally forbidden in 1210 and 1215. In 1231 the Pope requires them to be “examined and purged of all suspicion of error,” but by 1254 they are a fixed part of the curriculum in arts, not expurgated but reconciled by interpretation to the Christian faith. A generation later there is a recrudescence of Averroism, emphasizing the doctrine of the eternity of matter and the determination of earthly acts by the heavenly bodies; and two hundred and nineteen errors of this party were condemned in 1277 by the bishop of Paris, who took occasion to lament incursions into theology on the part of students of arts. Throughout this period the whole of Aristotle was taught and studied at Paris, and his method was used by Thomas Aquinas to rear his vast structure of scholastic theology. Others reserved for themselves a wide range of philosophic speculation, and in case of trouble they could save themselves by falling back on the doctrine that what was true in philosophy might be false in theology, and _vice versa_.
With an eye to this question of freedom of teaching, I have gone through all the documents of the thirteenth century in the Paris _Chartularium_. Outside of the great controversies just mentioned the result is meagre. In 1241 a series of ten errors was examined and condemned by the chancellor and the professors of theology, a very abstract series of propositions dealing with the visibility of the divine essence, angels, and the exact abiding-place of glorified souls in the next world, whether in the empyrean or the crystalline heaven. In 1247 it appears that a certain Master Raymond had been imprisoned for his errors by the advice of the masters of theology, and one John de Brescain had been deprived of his right to teach because of certain errors in logic “which seemed to come near Arian heresy,” thus confusing the subjects of the two faculties, whose bounds had been set by the fathers. In and about 1255 Paris was in a ferment over the so-called ‘Eternal Gospel,’ an apocalyptic treatise which foretold a new era of the Spirit, beginning in 1260, in which the New Testament, the Pope, and the hierarchy should be superseded. Accepted by certain advanced Franciscans, these doctrines became the occasion of a long conflict with the Mendicant orders, but with no very decisive results. In 1277 Paris received notice of thirty errors in arts condemned at Oxford, not as heretical but as sufficient to cause the deposition of the master teaching them; but when we find among them the abolition of the cases of Latin nouns and the personal endings of verbs (_ego currit_, _tu currit_, etc.), we are likely to sympathize more with their unfortunate students than with the deposed masters. One is reminded of the modern definition of academic freedom as “the right to say what one thinks without thinking what one says!”
With these as the only notable examples of interference with free teaching at the storm centre of theological speculation in the most active period of its history, we must infer that there was a large amount of actual freedom. Trouble arose almost entirely out of what was deemed theological heresy, or undue meddling with theological subjects by those who lacked theological training. Those who stuck to their job seem generally to have been let alone. As the great jurist Cujas replied in the sixteenth century when asked whether he was Protestant or Catholic, _Nihil hoc ad edictum praetoris_. Even within the more carefully guarded field of theology and philosophy, it is doubtful whether many found themselves cramped. Accepting the principle of authority as their starting-point, men did not feel its limitations as we should feel them now. A fence is no obstacle to those who do not desire to go outside, and many barriers that would seem intolerable to a more sceptical age were not felt as barriers by the schoolmen. He is free who feels himself free.
Furthermore, for those accustomed to the wide diversities of the modern world, it is easy to form a false impression of the uniformity and sameness of mediaeval thought. Scholasticism was not one thing but many, as its historians constantly remind us, and the contests between different schools and shades of opinion were as keen as among the Greeks or in our own day. And if the differences often seem minute or unreal to our distant eye, we can make them modern enough by turning, for example, to the old question of the nature of universal conceptions, which divided the Nominalists and Realists of the Middle Ages. Are universals mere names, or have they a real existence, independent of their individual embodiments? A bit arid it all sounds if we make it merely a matter of logic, but exciting enough as soon as it becomes a question of life. The essence of the Reformation lies implicit in whether we take a nominalist or a realist view of the church; the central problem of politics depends largely upon a nominalist or a realist view of the state. Upon the two sides of this last question millions of men have “all uncouthly died,” all unconsciously too, no doubt, in the majority of cases, unaware of the ultimate issues of political authority for which they fought, but yet able to comprehend them when expressed in the concrete form of putting the interest of the state above the interest of its members.
In his own time and his own way the mediaeval professor often dealt with permanent human interests as he sharpened men’s wits and kept alive the continuous tradition of learning.
III
THE MEDIAEVAL STUDENT
“A University,” it has more than once been remarked by professors, “would be a very comfortable place were it not for the students.” So far we have been considering universities from the point of view of professors; it is now the turn of the students, for whether these be regarded as a necessary evil or as the main reason for the university’s existence, they certainly cannot be ignored. A mediaeval university was no regiment of colonels but “a society of masters _and scholars_,” and to this second and more numerous element we must now direct our attention.
The mediaeval student is a more elusive figure than his teachers, for he is individually less conspicuous and must generally be seen in the mass. Moreover the mass is much diversified in time and space, so that generalization is difficult, what is true of one age and one university being quite untrue of other times and places. Even within the briefer span of American universities there are wide differences among the students of, let us say, Harvard in the seventeenth century, William and Mary in the eighteenth century, California in the nineteenth century, and Columbia in the twentieth century; and it would be impossible to make a true picture out of elements drawn indiscriminately from such disparate sources. Until the conditions at each university of the Middle Ages shall have been studied chronologically, no sound account of student life in general can be written, and this preliminary labor has nowhere been systematically attempted. At present we can do no more than indicate the principal sources of our information and the kind of light they throw upon student life.
Fortunately, out of the scattered remains of mediaeval times, there has come down to us a considerable body of material which deals, more or less directly, with student affairs. There are, for one thing, the records of the courts of law, which, amid the monotonous detail of petty disorders and oft-repeated offences, preserve now and then a vivid bit of mediaeval life--like the case of the Bolognese student who was attacked with a cutlass in a class-room, to the great damage and loss of those assembled to hear the lecture of a noble and egregious doctor of laws; or the student in 1289 who was set upon in the street in front of a lecture-room by a certain scribe, “who wounded him on the head with a stone, so that much blood gushed forth,” while two companions gave aid and counsel, saying, “Give it to him, hit him,” and when the offence had been committed ran away. So the coroners’ rolls of Oxford record many a fatal issue of town and gown riots, while a recently published register of 1265 and 1266 shows the students of Bologna actively engaged in raising money by loans and by the sale of textbooks. There are of course the university and college statutes, with their prohibitions and fines, regulating the subjects of conversation, the shape and color of caps and gowns, that academic dress which looks to us so mediaeval and is, especially in its American form, so very modern; careful also of the weightier matters of the law, like the enactment of New College against throwing stones in chapel, or the graded penalties at Leipzig for him who picks up a missile to throw at a professor, him who throws and misses, and him who accomplishes his fell purpose to the master’s hurt. The chroniclers, too, sometimes interrupt their narrative of the affairs of kings and princes to tell of students and their doings, although their attention, like that of their modern successors, the newspapers, is apt to be caught by outbreaks of student lawlessness rather than by the wholesome routine of academic life.
Then we have the preachers of the time, many of them also professors, whose sermons contain frequent allusions to student customs; indeed if further evidence were needed to dispel the illusion that the mediaeval university was devoted to biblical study and religious nurture, the Paris preachers of the period would offer sufficient proof. “The student’s heart is in the mire,” says one of them, “fixed on prebends and things temporal and how to satisfy his desires.” “They are so litigious and quarrelsome that there is no peace with them; wherever they go, be it Paris or Orleans, they disturb the country, their associates, even the whole university.” Many of them go about the streets armed, attacking the citizens, breaking into houses, and abusing women. They quarrel among themselves over dogs, women, or what-not, slashing off one another’s fingers with their swords, or, with only knives in their hands and nothing to protect their tonsured pates, rush into conflicts from which armed knights would hold back. Their compatriots come to their aid, and soon whole nations of students may be involved in the fray. These Paris preachers take us into the very atmosphere of the Latin quarter and show us much of its varied activity. We hear the cries and songs of the streets--
Li tens s’en veit, Et je n’ei riens fait; Li tens revient, Et je ne fais riens--
the students’ tambourines and guitars, their “light and scurrilous words,” their hisses and handclappings and loud shouts of applause at sermons and disputations. We watch them as they mock a neighbor for her false hair or stick out their tongues and make faces at the passers-by. We see the student studying by his window, talking over his future with his room-mate, receiving visits from his parents, nursed by friends when he is ill, singing psalms at a student’s funeral, or visiting a fellow-student and asking him to visit him--“I have been to see you, now come to our hospice.”
All types are represented. There is the poor student, with no friend but St. Nicholas, seeking such charity as he can find or earning a pittance by carrying holy water or copying for others, in a fair but none too accurate hand, sometimes too poor to buy books or afford the expense of a course in theology, yet usually surpassing his more prosperous fellows who have an abundance of books at which they never look. There is the well-to-do student, who besides his books and desk will be sure to have a candle in his room and a comfortable bed with a soft mattress and luxurious coverings, and will be tempted to indulge the mediaeval fondness for fine raiment beyond the gown and hood and simple wardrobe prescribed by the statutes. Then there are the idle and aimless, drifting about from master to master and from school to school, and never hearing full courses or regular lectures. Some, who care only for the name of scholar and the income which they receive while attending the university, go to class but once or twice a week, choosing by preference the lectures on canon law, which leave them plenty of time for sleep in the morning. Many eat cakes when they ought to be at study, or go to sleep in the class-rooms, spending the rest of their time drinking in taverns or building castles in Spain (_castella in Hispania_); and when it is time to leave Paris, in order to make some show of learning such students get together huge volumes of calfskin, with wide margins and fine red bindings, and so with wise sack and empty mind they go back to their parents. “What knowledge is this,” asks the preacher, “which thieves may steal, mice or moths eat up, fire or water destroy?” and he cites an instance where the student’s horse fell into a river, carrying all his books with him. Some never go home, but continue to enjoy in idleness the fruits of their benefices. Even in vacation time, when the rich ride off with their servants and the poor trudge home under the burning sun, many idlers remain in Paris to their own and the city’s harm. Mediaeval Paris, we should remember, was not only the incomparable “parent of the sciences,” but also a place of good cheer and good fellowship and varied delights, a favorite resort not only of the studious but of country priests on a holiday; and it would not be strange if sometimes scholars prolonged their stay unduly and lamented their departure in phrases which are something more than rhetorical commonplace.
Then the student is not unknown to the poets of the period, among whom Rutebeuf gives a picture of thirteenth-century Paris not unlike that of the sermonizers, while in the preceding century Jean de Hauteville shows the misery of the poor and diligent scholar falling asleep over his books, and Nigel “Wireker” satirizes the English students at Paris in the person of an ass, Brunellus,--“Daun Burnell” in Chaucer--who studies there seven years without learning a word, braying at the end as at the beginning of his course, and leaving at last with the resolve to become a monk or a bishop. Best of all is Chaucer’s incomparable portrait of the clerk of Oxenford, hollow, threadbare, unworldly--
For him was lever have at his beddes heed Twenty bokes, clad in blak or reed, Of Aristotle and his philosophye, Than robes riche, or fithele, or gay sautrye.
* * * * *
Souninge in moral vertu was his speche, And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche.
But after all, no one knows so much about student life as the students themselves, and it is particularly from what was written by and for them, the student literature of the Middle Ages, that I wish to draw more at length. Such remains of the academic past fall into three chief classes: student manuals, student letters, and student poetry. Let us consider them in this order.
The manuals of general advice and counsel addressed to the mediaeval scholar do not call for extended consideration. Formal treatises on the whole duty of students are characteristic of the didactic habit of mind of the Middle Ages, but the advice which they contain is apt to be of a very general sort, applicable to one age as well as another and lacking in those concrete illustrations which enliven the sermons of the period into useful sources for university life.
A more interesting type of student manual, the student dictionary, owes its existence to the position of Latin as the universal language of mediaeval education. Textbooks were in Latin, lectures were in Latin, and, what is more, the use of Latin was compulsory in all forms of student intercourse. This rule may have been designed as a check on conversation, as well as an incentive to learning, but it was enforced by penalties and informers (called wolves), and the freshman, or yellow-beak, as he was termed in mediaeval parlance, might find himself but ill equipped for making himself understood in his new community. For his convenience a master in the University of Paris in the thirteenth century, John of Garlande, prepared a descriptive vocabulary, topically arranged and devoting a large amount of space to the objects to be seen in the course of a walk through the streets of Paris. The reader is conducted from quarter to quarter and from trade to trade, from the book-stalls of the Parvis Notre-Dame and the fowl-market of the adjoining Rue Neuve to the money-changers’ tables and goldsmiths’ shops on the Grand-Pont and the bow-makers of the Porte S.-Lazare, not omitting the classes of _ouvrières_ whose acquaintance the student was most likely to make. Saddlers and glovers, furriers, cobblers, and apothecaries, the clerk might have use for the wares of all of them, as well as the desk and candle and writing-materials which were the special tools of his calling; but his most frequent relations were with the purveyors of food and drink, whose agents plied their trade vigorously through the streets and lanes of the Latin quarter and worked off their poorer goods on scholars and their servants. There were the hawkers of wine, crying their samples of different qualities from the taverns; the fruit-sellers, deceiving clerks with lettuce and cress, cherries, pears, and green apples; and at night the vendors of light pastry, with their carefully covered baskets of wafers, waffles, and rissoles--a frequent stake at the games of dice among students, who had a custom of hanging from their windows the baskets gained by lucky throws of the six. The _pâtissiers_ had also more substantial wares suited to the clerical taste, tarts filled with eggs and cheese and well-peppered pies of pork, chicken, and eels. To the _rôtissiers_ scholars’ servants resorted, not only for the pigeons, geese, and other fowl roasted on their spits, but also for uncooked beef, pork, and mutton, seasoned with garlic and other strong sauces. Such fare, however, was not for the poorer students, whose slender purses limited them to tripe and various kinds of sausage, over which a quarrel might easily arise and “the butchers be themselves butchered by angry scholars.”
A dictionary of this sort easily passes into another type of treatise, the manual of conversation. This method of studying foreign languages is old, as survivals from ancient Egypt testify, and it still spreads its snares for the unwary traveller who prepares to conquer Europe _à la_ Ollendorff. To the writers of the later Middle Ages it seemed to offer an exceptional opportunity for combining Instruction in Latin with sound academic discipline, and from both school and university it left its monuments for our perusal. The most interesting of these handbooks is entitled a “Manual of Scholars who propose to attend universities of students and to profit therein,” and while in its most common form it is designed for the students of Heidelberg about the year 1480, it could be adapted with slight changes to any of the German universities. “Rollo at Heidelberg,” we might call it. Its eighteen chapters conduct the student from his matriculation to his degree, and inform him by the way on many subjects quite unnecessary for either. When the young man arrives he registers from Ulm; his parents are in moderate circumstances; he has come to study. He is then duly hazed after the German fashion, which treats the candidate as an unclean beast with horns and tusks which must be removed by officious fellow-students, who also hear his confession of sin and fix as the penance a good dinner for the crowd. He begins his studies by attending three lectures a day, and learns to champion nominalism against realism and the comedies of Terence against the law, and to discuss the advantages of various universities and the price of food and the quality of the beer in university towns. Then we find him and his room-mate quarrelling over a mislaid book; rushing at the first sound of the bell to dinner, where they debate the relative merits of veal and beans; or walking in the fields beyond the Neckar, perhaps by the famous Philosophers’ Road which has charmed so many generations of Heidelberg youth, and exchanging Latin remarks on the birds and fish as they go. Then there are shorter dialogues: the scholar breaks the statutes; he borrows money, and gets it back; he falls in love and recovers; he goes to hear a fat Italian monk preach or to see the jugglers and the jousting in the market-place; he knows the dog-days are coming--he can feel them in his head! Finally our student is told by his parents that it is high time for him to take his degree and come home. At this he is much disturbed; he has gone to few lectures, and he will have to swear that he has attended regularly; he has not worked much and has incurred the enmity of many professors; his master discourages him from trying the examination; he fears the disgrace of failure. But his interlocutor reassures him by a pertinent quotation from Ovid and suggests that a judicious distribution of gifts may do much--a few florins will win him the favor of all. Let him write home for more money and give a great feast for his professors; if he treats them well, he need not fear the outcome. This advice throws a curious light upon the educational standards of the time; it appears to have been followed, for the manual closes with a set of forms inviting the masters to the banquet and the free bath by which it was preceded.