Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 23.djvu/870

Rh that was common to both: the latter, even in the narrow and meagre instruction which it imparted, could not altogether dispense with the ancient text-books, simply because there were no others in existence. Certain treatises of Aristotle, of Porphyry, of Martianus Capella, and of Boetius continued consequently to be used and studied; and in the slender outlines of pagan learning thus still kept in view, and in the exposition which they necessitated, we recognize the main cause which prevented the thought and literature of classic antiquity from falling altogether into oblivion.

Under the rule of the Merovingian dynasty even these scanty traditions of learning declined throughout the Frankish dominions; but in England the designs of Gregory the Great, as carried out by Theodorus, Bede, and Alcuin, resulted in a great revival of education and letters. The influence of this revival extended in the 8th and 9th centuries to Frankland, where Charles the Great, advised and aided by Alcuin, effected a memorable reformation, which included both the monastic and the cathedral schools; while the school attached to the imperial court, known as the Palace School, also became a famous centre of learned intercourse and instruction.

But the activity thus generated, and the interest in learning which it served for a time to diffuse, well nigh died out amid the anarchy which characterizes the 10th century in Latin Christendom, and it is at least question able whether any real connexion can be shown to have existed between this earlier revival and that remarkable movement in which the university of Paris had its origin. On the whole, however, a clearly traced, although imperfectly continuous, succession of distinguished teachers has inclined the majority of those who have studied this obscure period to conclude that a certain tradition of learning, handed down from the famous school over which Alcuin presided at the great abbey of St Martin at Tours, continued to survive, and became the nucleus of the teaching in which the university took its rise. But, in order adequately to explain the remarkable development and novel character which that teaching assumed in the course of the 12th and 13th centuries, it is necessary to take account of the operation of certain more general causes to which the origin of the great majority of the earlier universities may in common unhesitatingly be referred. These causes are (1) the introduction of new subjects of study, as embodied in a new or revived literature; (2) the adoption of new methods of teaching which were rendered necessary by the new studies; (3) the growing tendency to organization which accompanied the development and consolidation of the European nationalities.

That the earlier universities took their rise to a great extent in endeavours to obtain and provide instruction of a kind beyond the range of the monastic and cathedral schools appears to be very generally admitted, and this general fact has its value in assisting us to arrive at a conclusion with respect to the origin of the first European university, that of Salerno in Italy, which became known as a school of medicine as early as the 9th century. The circumstances of its rise are extremely obscure, and whether it was monastic or secular in its origin has been much disputed. One writer derives its origin from an independent tradition of classical learning which continued to exist in Italy down to the 10th century. Another writer maintains that it had its commencement in the teaching at the famous Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino, where the study of medicine was undoubtedly pursued. But various facts may be urged in contravention of such a theory. The school at Salerno, so far as its history can be traced, appears to have been entirely a secular community; it was distinguished also by its catholic spirit, and, at a time when Jews were the object of religious persecution throughout Europe, members of this nationality were to be found both as teachers and learners at Salerno. Situated, moreover, as it was on the seacoast, its communication with the neighbouring island of Sicily was easy and frequent; and it would accordingly seem far more probable that it was owing to the new knowledge gained from the Saracens, after their occupation of that island, that Salerno acquired its reputation. It was by a band of these invaders that Bertharius, abbot of Monte Cassino, and the author of certain medical treatises, was massacred along with his monks in the year 883. The Saracens were famed for their medical skill, and, by their translations of Galen and Hippocrates, did much to advance the study; and, according to Jourdain, there were translations from the Arabic into Latin long before the time of Constantino the African, but these versions have perished. In the course of the 11th century, under the teaching of Constantino the African (d. 1087), the celebrity of Salerno became diffused all over Europe. Ordericus Vitalis, who wrote in the first half of the 12th century, speaks of it as then long famous. In 1231 it was constituted by the emperor Frederick II. the only school of medicine in the kingdom of Naples.

It was at a considerable interval after the rise of the school at Salerno, about the year 1113, that Irnerius commenced at Bologna his lectures on the ci-vil law. This instruction, again, was of a kind which the monastic and Bologna. cathedral schools could not supply, and it also met a new and pressing want. The states of Lombardy were at this time rising rapidly in population and in wealth; and the greater complexity of their political relations, their increasing manufactures and commerce, called for a more definite application of the principles embodied in the codes that had been handed down by Theodosius and Justinian. But the distinctly secular character of this new study, and its intimate connexion with the claims and prerogatives of the Western emperor, aroused at first the susceptibilities of the Roman see, and for a time Bologna and its civilians were regarded by the church with distrust and even with alarm. These sentiments were not, however, of long duration. In the year 1151 the appearance of the Decretum of largely compiled from spurious documents, invested the studies of the canonist with fresh importance; and numerous decrees of past and almost forgotten pontiffs now claimed to take their stand side by side with the enactments contained in the Corpus Juris Civilis. They constituted, in fact, the main basis of those new pretensions asserted with so much success by the popedom in the course of the 12th and 13th centuries. It was necessary, accordingly, that the Decretum should be known and studied beyond the walls of the monastery or the episcopal palace, and that its pages should receive authoritative ex position at some common centre of instruction. Such a centre was to be found in Bologna. The needs of the secular student and of the ecclesiastical student were thus brought for a time into accord, and from the days of Irnerius down to the close of the 13th century we have satisfactory evidence that Bologna was generally recognized as the chief school both of the civil and the canon law. It has indeed been asserted that university degrees were instituted there as early as the pontificate of Eugenius III. (1145–53), but the statement rests on no goad authority, and is in every way improbable. There is, however, another tradition which is in better harmony