Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/640

 546 Outlines of European History The University of Oxford was founded in the time of Henry II, probably by English students and masters who had become dis- contented at Paris for some reason. The University of Cambridge, as well as numerous universities in France, Italy, and Spain, were founded in the thirteenth century. The German universities, which are still so famous, were established somewhat later, most of them in the latter half of the fourteenth and in the fifteenth century. The northern institutions generally took the great mother university on the Seine as their model, while those in southern Europe usually adopted the methods of Bologna. When, after some years of study, a student was examined by the professors, he was, if successful, admitted to the cor- poration of teachers and became a master himself. What we call a degree to-day was original!}', in the medieval universi- ties, nothing more than the right to teach ; but in the thirteenth century many who did not care to become professors in our sense of the word began to desire the honorable title of master or doctor (v^diich is onl}- the Latin w^ord for " teacher ").-^ The students in the medieval universities were of all ages, from thirteen to forty, and even older. There were no univer- sity buildings, and in Paris the lectures were given in the Latin Quarter, in Straw Street, so called from the straw strewn on the floors of the hired rooms where the lecturer explained the text- book, with the students squatting on the floor before him. There were no laboratories, for there was no experimentation. All that was required was a copy of the textbook. This the lecturer explained sentence by sentence, and the students listened and sometimes took notes. The most striking peculiarity of the mstruction in the medieval universit}^ was the suprenie deference paid to Aristotle. Most 1 The origin of the bachelor's degree, which comes at the end of our college course nowadays, may be explained as follows : The bachelor in the thirteenth century was a student who had passed part of his examinations in the course in " arts," as the college course was then called, and was permitted to teach certain elementary subjects before he became a full-fledged master. So the A.B. was inferior to the A.M. then as now.