Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 23.djvu/872

Rh somewhat the earlier. It was developed, as that of the civil law had been developed, by a succession of able teachers, among whom Thaddeus Alderottus was especially eminent. The faculty of arts, down to the 14th century, scarcely attained to equal eminence. The teaching of theology remained for a long time exclusively in the hands of the Dominicans; and it was not until the year 1360 that Innocent VI. recognized the university as a "studium generale" in this branch, in other words, as a place of theological education for all students, with the power of conferring degrees of universal validity.

In the year 1371 the cardinal legate, Anglicus, compiled, as chief director of ecclesiastical affairs in the city, an account of the university, which he presented to Urban V. The information it supplies is, however, defective, owing to the fact that only the professors who were in receipt of salaries from the municipality are mentioned. Of these there were twelve of civil law and six of canon law; three of medicine, three of practical medicine, and one of surgery; two of logic, and one each of astrology, rhetoric, and notarial practice. The professors of theology, who, as members of the religious orders, received no state remuneration, are unmentioned.

Colleges existed at Bologna at a very early date, but it is not until the 14th century that we find them possessing any organization. They were designed solely for necessitous students, not being natives of Bologna. A separate house, with a certain fund for the maintenance of a specified number of scholars, was all that was originally con templated. Such was the character of that founded by Zoen, bishop of Avignon, in February 1256 (O.S.), the same month and year, it is to be noted, in which the Sorbonne was founded in Paris. It was designed for the maintenance of eight scholars from the province of Avignon, under the supervision of three canons of the church, maintaining themselves in the university. Each scholar was to receive 24 Bolognese lire annually for five years. The college of Brescia was founded in 1326 by William of Brescia, archdeacon of Bologna, for poor foreign students without distinction as to nationality. The Spanish college, founded in 1364, for twenty-four Spanish scholars and two chaplains, is noted by Denifle as the one college founded in mediaeval times which still exists on the Continent.

Of the general fact that the early universities rose in response to new wants the commencement of the university of Paris supplies us with a further illustration. The study of logic, which, prior to the 12th century, was founded exclusively on one or two meagre compends, received about the year 1100, on two occasions, a powerful stimulus, in the first instance, from the memorable controversy between Lanfranc and Berengar; in the second, from the no less famous controversy between Anselm and Eoscellinus. A belief sprang up that an intelligent apprehension of spiritual truth depended on a correct use of prescribed methods of argumentation. Dialectic was looked upon as " the science of sciences "; and, when, somewhere in the first decade of the 12th century, William of Champeaux opened in Paris a school for the more advanced study of dialectic as an art, his teaching was attended with marked success. Among his pupils was Abelard, in whose hands the study made a yet more notable advance; so that, by the middle of the century, we find John of Salisbury, on returning from the French capital to England, relating with astonishment, not unmingled with contempt, how all learned Paris had gone well nigh mad in its pursuit and practice of the new dialectic.

Abelard taught in the first instance at the cathedral school at Notre Dame, and subsequently at the schools on the Montagne Sainte-Genevieve, of which he was the founder, and where he imparted to logic its new develop ment. But in 1147 the secular canons of Ste Genevieve gave place to canons regular from St Victor; and hence forth the school on the former foundation was merely a school for the teaching of theology, and was attended only by the members of the house. The schools out of which the university arose were those attached to the cathedral on the Île de la Cité, and presided over by the chancellor, a dignitary who must be carefully distinguished from the later chancellor of the university. For a long time the teachers lived in separate houses on the island, and it was only by degrees that they combined themselves into a society, and that special buildings were constructed for their class- work. But the flame which Abelard's teaching had kindled was not destined to expire. Among his pupils was Peter Lombard, who was bishop of Paris in 1159, and widely known to posterity as the compiler of the famous volume of the Sentences. The design of this work was to place before the student, in as strictly logical a form as practicable, the views (sententiæ) of the fathers and all the great doctors of the church upon the chief and most difficult points in the Christian belief. Conceived with the purpose of allaying and preventing, it really stimulated, controversy. The logicians seized upon it as a great storehouse of indisputable major premises, on which they argued with renewed energy and with endless ingenuity of dialectical refinement; and upon this new compendium of theological doctrine, which became the text-book of the Middle Ages, the schoolmen, in their successive treatises super Sententias, expended a consider able share of that subtlety and labour which still excite the astonishment of the student of metaphysical literature.

It is in these prominent features in the history of these early universities the development of new methods of instruction concurrently with the appearance of new material for their application that we find the most probable solution of the question as to how the university, as distinguished from the older cathedral or monastic schools, was first formed. In a similar manner, it seems probable, the majority of the earlier universities of Italy Reggio, Modena, Vicenza, Padua, and Vercelli arose, for they had their origin independently alike of the civil and the papal authority. Instances, it is true, occur, which cannot be referred to this spontaneous mode of growth. The university of Naples, for example, was founded solely by the fiat of the emperor Frederick II. in the year 1224; and, if we may rely upon the documents cited by Denifle, Innocent IV. about the year 1245 founded in connexion with the curia a "studium generale" which was attached to the papal court, and followed it when removed from Rome, very much as the Palace School of Charles the Great ac companied that monarch on his progresses.

As the university of Paris became the model, not only for the universities of France north of the Loire, but also for the great majority of those of central Europe as well as for Oxford and Cambridge, some account of its early organization will here be indispensable. Such an account is rendered still further necessary by the fact that the recent and almost exhaustive researches of Denifle, the Dominican father, have led him to conclusions which on some important points run altogether counter to those sanctioned by the high authority of Savigny.

The original university, as already stated, took its rise entirely out of the movement carried on by teachers on the