In Our Time - The Medieval University

Episode Date: March 17, 2011

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the medieval universities.In the 11th and 12th centuries a new type of institution started to appear in the major cities of Europe. The first universities were those of Bologna and Paris; within a hundred years similar educational organisations were springing up all over the continent. The first universities based their studies on the liberal arts curriculum, a mix of seven separate disciplines derived from the educational theories of Ancient Greece. The universities provided training for those intending to embark on careers in the Church, the law and education. They provided a new focus for intellectual life in Europe, and exerted a significant influence on society around them. And the university model proved so robust that many of these institutions and their medieval innovations still exist today.With:Miri RubinProfessor of Medieval and Early Modern History at Queen Mary, University of LondonIan WeiSenior Lecturer in Medieval European History at the University of BristolPeter DenleyReader in History at Queen Mary, University of London.Producer: Thomas Morris.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, there are 115 universities in Britain today, but 800 years ago that number was just two, Oxford and Cambridge. They were the first examples of a new type of educational institution which had first appeared in Italy and France in the 11th and 12th centuries.

Within a few generations, universities were providing a similar, education in Latin to people all over Europe. The medieval universities offered a rigorous training in subjects, including law, medicine and above all, theology. Their influence was tremendous and forever altered the intellectual landscape of the continent. The university model of further education proved so durable that it changed little in the following seven centuries. And it seems that students don't change much either. At one point the teachers and students of Paris went on a two-year strike. With me to illustrate

and to discuss the medieval universities and their influence are Minir Rubin, Professor of medieval and early modern history at Queen Mary, University of London. Ian Way, senior lecturer in medieval European history at the University of Bristol, and Peter Denley, reader in history also of

Queen Mary University of London. Mirabin, the story begins about a thousand years ago, but before those first universities, what institutions as it were, bred them? Well, around the year 1,000, thousand in Europe, there would have been probably four places where you might get as a sort of adolescent growing man, some sort of refinement in education. One of them would be in courts.

So, for example, the Holy Roman Emperor around him in his court would have chaplains who would train men of court, maybe aristocrats, maybe priests to be in writing, in reading, in poetry. Then there were, of course, cathedrals because every bishop absolutely has to have a working administration around him, training priests for his diocese, but also just, you know, clerks and people to run the services in the cathedral. So cathedrals were always very important folk-high places where you had to provide education of some sort. And then there are, of course, monasteries, monasteries where children were truly offered at a very, very young age at that period. So just the basic question of training them into adulthood, let alone, of course, giving them a

Christian education. And then there's a fourth venue, I think, which is as important, which is really training as a form of apprenticeship, perhaps lawyers in Italian cities or doctors in Italian cities would take up young men who want a career in those areas and train them almost like a pupilage would be today. So those four places, and although they're very different in terms of the social setting, one thing they all share, which is really important,

is a commitment to a curriculum that by then, say, around 1,000, is already hundreds and hundreds of years old. and that is the classical Greek-Roman system, which is known as the system of the liberal arts. They would all of those being committed to some extent to those seven arts, which are the three arts, the trivium arts of expression, of the use of language, how to write, how to speak, how to construct a good sentence,

and the quadrivium, the four topics that are arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music, which is about competus calculation. You didn't say anything about the courts of the caliphs at that time, a thousand years ago, because they had similar systems, didn't they? And they were breeding, encouraging enormously powerful scholars and translators. That's extremely important, of course, in the Muslim world.

It's particularly important for Europeans, because, of course, in those areas of Europe, where Christianity meets Islam, that is, in southern Italy, of course in the Arborean peninsula there is a true cross-fertilisation or I shouldn't say cross, just going in one direction really where the Christians are watching and learning and translating.

So they're powerful and they would have had a powerful influence too and of course what you said takes us right back even further than Plato and Aristotle's academies so they come out of a long tradition but they do arrive as a sort of new thing in a way why did you think they emerged when they did

in Bologna and Harris and then later Oxford? Well the whole process is extremely mysterious because at the vital stages we don't have much evidence. But I think as we see universities developing through the 13th century historians have come up with a range of explanations. One approach is to focus on conflict and to note the way in which groups of scholars fall into dispute with local church authorities or with townspeople and it's when that that conflict gets resolved. that they gain privileges, formal privileges, from authorities of one kind or another,

either ecclesiastical authorities or secular authorities. So one approach is to say, it's all about conflict. So without being benal, please, but you're saying there are these scholars and teachers around from the places that Mir has been talking about, and they independently took umbrage at what they're being told to do and set up independent bodies.

Well, there tend to be particular flashpoints, with the townspeople, of course, it can be simply crowds of young men being disorderly in the streets and that being resented by townspeople and then it spirals out of control from there. With local church authorities, it's a question usually of who actually decides who's going to teach. Eventually, as degrees become established, it's about who gives the formal license to teach. But what I'm trying to get out here is that we have a feeling of the early middle ages of being under the iron control of the Roman Catholic Church, the template for authoritarian iron control in every aspect of everybody's life for all time, as it were.

But you're saying, which I think is fascinating, is no, these teachers and some students were free enough to say, we will not go that way, we'll just get together, and it was just much of getting together, a group of people, and we'll go the way we want. So I'm just interested in the margin they had for opposition. Well, the support of the church was extremely important, but the church wasn't a single power that dominated everyone. The church was fragmented at this point.

So there is the Pope, and very often say scholars in Paris like to deal with the Pope because he was a long way away. So it gave them freedom. What they didn't want was to get their privileges from the bishop or the agents of the bishop because he was on the spot and really could control what they were doing. So there was a great deal of freedom, notwithstanding that there being a support from the church. And indeed, one of the other explanations is to say it's not conflict. It was not conflict that shaped everything. It was debate amongst different scholars about what education should be like. And the university emerged as an institution that expressed the ideals that won out

through a process of debate amongst scholars who were committed to discovering new truths and educating young men. So what difference did they have from the institutions that Mary Rubin mentioned in her opening remarks? What crucial differences? One of the crucial differences would have been the changing nature

of the academic career in the world that Mary was just describing in the early 12th century, if you wanted to make yourself an academic career, you attacked your own teacher and you tried to steal his students. and one of the big shifts that takes place in the early 13th century was that now if you wanted to make your career

you competed with your fellow students for the approval of your master so suddenly there was the introduction of what we might call academic generations and that was a big shift in the culture of the university and this business of giving degrees how important was that and how was that a huge differentiator sorry I thought were you taking to Mary Orwell? Now as such, do you. Yes, I mean, it was the reward that masters held out

so that they could control their students. I mean, that's why they stopped competing with their masters, because the masters could hold them back, saying there is this reward eventually on offer. Peter Denley, Bologna is often cited as the oldest university, although he in way has said that strangely, murky evidence should have thought they'd have got meticulous records of these people when they're starting these important things.

we could talk about them very much more clearly. But still, how did that come about and what was its impact? Yes, Ian's right. It is murky. And it's murky because you only get written records on this when the institutions have emerged. And what Ian was talking about was the phase in which there's still a struggle to get to that stage. What's interesting about Bologna, which is not founded. It just emerges, as was said,

is that it is effectively a magnet for the one subject that doesn't come under the churches per view, which is civil law and specifically Roman law. And what you get in already the late 11th century is a simple gravitation towards Bologna as opposed to some of the other centres, some of the older centres in which Roman law was taught, Ravenna, classically, the home of the exorcate and Pavia, the home of the Lombards.

And Bologna, which is strategically in a better position, seems to attract better teachers or more famous teachers who begin to get round them whole swarm and thousands rather than hundreds of scholars from across Europe. And they are encouraged by the emperor who wishes to see Roman law established as a counterweight to church law apart for anything else. But then they're added to by the church's own dimension to this,

which is canon law, church law. And in the first half of the 12th century, both canon law and civil law reach a level of, if you like, codification and professionalisation, which means that students really have to go through a syllabus, as Mary was suggesting earlier, some set texts which were essential if they were to become professionals, professional lawyers. Two or three things that I'm sure interest me,

and therefore I'd hope interest our listeners there. You talk about thousands of students coming up. Now that, even to death, that's a lot of people. I'd like to develop that a bit. And you talk about it just happening, and the words you've been using in your notes of three of you, well, it was organic, it was magnetic, a magnetic group of intellectual. It's fascinating as to what you're really talking about.

I think it's partly that Europe is getting larger. There are more people, there are more urbanised people, and therefore more... Society is simply getting more complex. There is a greater need for greater sophistication in all the major disciplines, the higher disciplines of theology, law and medicine, as well as the fundamentals of the art subjects,

which Mary was talking about. So there is simply an enormous increase in demand, and I think that leads to not exactly a pressure for institutionalisation, but institutionalisation comes as the inevitable response because of the need to control the many, many students and indeed teachers, and to make some sense of that. And I think that's what

happens at Bologna and indeed, of course, also at Paris. I'm going to sort of promulgior out this a bit more, Mary. So what exactly did this word university mean? When did the word come into play? And did they use the word to make the fact? Yes, well, Universitas, In Latin, it means any totality, any wholeness of something. And it's often used actually to describe, say, corporate bodies like a guild, the Universitas of carpenters or whatever. And in a way, that's a really useful entry into this world, because be it the model of Bologna, where students associated as an Universitas to hire their teachers, or be it the model of Northern Europe, France, Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, where the Universitas, the corporate body is a student.

body of those who teach. This is the concept that together, we bind together and we negotiate together, we set standards together as a corporation. So Universitas, let's think of it like the English word corporation. Now this is really important in terms of setting the

standards for degrees in terms of negotiating both with church and state, whoever your relevant patron is. It's also in terms of representing yourself in the world. And so sort of saying a person has a degree from this place, it means something. At the same time, we must remember that a lot, since you asked about degrees, a lot of people went through the

universities and never graduated, as it were. You got such useful transferable skills by studying for the arts degree. You could write, you could write speeches, you could be a secretary, you could be a tutor, you could be a teacher, that often students would stay, say, for two years, get the fundamentals of that, have clearly the skills to go on and get a job. in the world. So the issue of graduation was most pertinent for those who clearly wanted to go on in an academic degree, as it would be today, but also those who clearly wanted a very high-powered job in the administrations of church and state, which Peter, of course, mentioned before. Ian, can you just develop what Mary said a little for us? So they're not offering, they're offering

qualifications to some, but they're offering learning, really. And this learning is being taken into society in larger numbers, as we've just heard from Peter than before, by larger numbers of people than before, in a more organised way. Can we just develop that and refer to the fact that they're all singing from the same curriculum and learning in the same language,

European language of Latin? Well, that's true. European academic language of Latin. Yes, it is all in Latin and they all started by tackling the arts. So whatever advanced subject you went on to, you had a common grounding, which made very easy for specialists,

notwithstanding their specialism, still to keep talking to each other. So I think debates were quite integrated in a way which it's sometimes hard to recognise now. It did let's develop this because it was something that was very much in the air years and years ago. People have sort of rather abrushed out of history. You did have these people all over Europe

who were all over Europe. And so a Dutchman would talk to an Englishman in Latin and a Frenchman would talk to it. And so there's that to start. And they'd studied the same stuff. And what's striking about the first universities is that they were very much international institutions. People came from all over the world, not the world,

Christendom to Belongia and Paris. Yes, indeed, particularly Paris. Why particularly Paris? That is a really tough question to answer. It's much easier to do that. To describe that it was the case. but I think they one of the reasons would be

and it relates back to a very important point that you raised earlier about freedom that in Paris there were several schools which were supported by competing ecclesiastical authorities so that you could go to Paris and say what you want

if you fell out with the bishop if you were teaching in the cathedral school you could go to Mont Saint-Gunvieve and start to teach there So I think it's actually freedom, the point you made earlier, that's critical in the early development of Paris. Not just freedom, though. They have to be able to eat. They have to be able to find a place to stay. There is a practical plant. It's a big city, Paris. It's massively well connected through its rivers and so on. So there is also the infrastructure, as it were, in that city to provide.

Very much. I'm going to come back there, but I just want to go on to this curriculum, which fascinates me, Peter Denley. Can you talk a bit more about it? And am I right in that sort of generalisation, same curriculum? Is that just too sweeping an office? No, you are right. I think it is a canon, and it goes hand in hand with the notion that the degree for that minority who takes it is actually a, in Latin,

lichena, ubiqudo-cendia, a licence to teach everywhere. So the one thing that really is internationalised about the universities and remains so, to a considerable degree, is the curriculum, the syllabus. That doesn't mean that different universities don't develop different strengths

and perhaps variance on the main curriculum, but essentially... For long you for law, for instance. Yes, but even within that, there are five or six universities already at the end of the 13th century where you could do law or medicine. And the core subjects would have been taught by everyone. The knowledge that you need to become a lawyer or a medic is accepted. It's part of a canon, and that's very, very strongly. That's actually embodied in all the statutes which declare what a student has to have done before he can put himself forward for a degree.

Can you give us some idea of the sort of working day of a student? What time they start? Was it lectures? What was it? It's a mixture of lectures, which can be two kinds. Ordinary, which are the mainstream lectures, and extraordinary, which are slightly less, or perhaps more peripheral text. There would be other forms of debate like disputations, because after all, if this is teacher training as well, then students need to learn how to articulate to debate, to discuss, and indeed the teach.

And the disputation is the dialectic, really, is? Yes, yes. It is. It comes again in, various forms. On one side, the other side, then somebody comes in and says this is the... Yes, and all punitive teachers have to learn how to do that, how to defend a position that they've been told to defend, and that's in fact what happens in the

degree examination. We've rather skimmed on the subjects, Mary. In your introduction, you said that, can you just put a bit more flesh on me, what they're studying and where they're getting the information from, for instance?

Well, in some ways, These are very, very old texts, the texts that are used in the schools in order to teach the liberal arts. So truly, when we're talking about studying geometry, it's going back to Euclid. When we're studying, when it's music, it's through Boethius of the 5th century, back to harmonies that were discussed by the Greeks already. And in the study of philosophy everywhere, it's Aristotle, Aristotle, Aristotle by the 13th century, truly. So the idea is that what Aristotle provides these students with is a set of categories, how to analyze anything if you're observing an elephant or if you are talking about a case in law, some basic categories to pass and divide phenomena of the world to describe them and to debate them.

So, for example, the terms that we use in order to study medicine were often the same terms that we use to discuss philosophy or to discuss law. But, for example, utility. Is there something, or how you categorize things, what is the main category, but as a subcategory, say like we would categorize flowers or species of animals and so on, ways about going and discussing. So is a chair a chair, a type of furniture, or is a chair a type of wood,

the way you observe the world and divide it into categories. And there's a lot of disagreement about it, These are basic tools that all these students will have. And then they'll develop a method of discussion, as you said, dialectical. You take any preposition, even outrageously, for example, does God exist? And then you say, what's the evidence pro? What's the evidence contra? And you use all these clever tools in order to reach some sort of accommodation.

And what was outrageous about this system to some was that you could discuss anything. Anything was open to discussion. Of course, in a Christian universe, there were those who would like to put certain topics aside, which are not open to discussion. Would you agree that anything was open to discussion in a way? Anything. I mean, are we bounded by the good phrase of Merrizzar, the Christian universe?

Is that where he said, and even Aristotle is to be absorbed into it and sort of Christianized by Aquinas before he becomes the rubber the green in terms of the discourse? I think there were boundaries either formally established or implicit, it which you were best not to cross. So, for example, Miry's raised the question of universals, and so if one's thinking about tables and chairs, is there an ideal table or chair that actual tables and chairs reflect,

or are there just individual things we make up words for? Now, that's fine if you're talking about tables and chairs, but if you start to say this is going to be a way into talking about the Trinity, by analogy I can understand a mystery of the faith, well then you could find yourself getting into trouble. From whom? Well, in the 12th century, it was very much from, so this is immediately before the universities,

the monastic critics of the schools tended to try to police this and to take cases before bishops or the pope. In the 13th century and onwards, say, in Paris, you could get committees of theologians brought in. But this was rare. But there were certain issues, like, for example, the eternity of the world, that could get you into trouble. Can we go back to the students, Peter? Where did they live? How were they fed? What impact did they have in the cities? What was it sort of like, as it were, for them then?

Well, I think it varies quite a lot. In the early days of the rapid expansion of the universities of Paris and Bologna, although really quite rightly says that the facilities were there. they had to be paid for. So the precondition was that students either brought with them enough money or could acquire some funding whilst they were there. Both of those universities expand so quickly that they cause problems. And indeed in the first century and a half or so of the oldest universities, they are marked by long, repeated episodes of town gown conflict with enormous problems and tensions,

which are indicative of how difficulty it was and how problematic the relationship between the town of the university might be. there are several ways in which that situation gets improved. The most obvious is that universities start to develop colleges and residential hospitals. Because of the first century or so, sorry to interrupt you, there were just groups of people, they rented rooms, they were nomadic in the sense. If they didn't get on with the city, they pushed off to another city, or they could and threatened to, and so on.

And they could, they could still get a degree, having studied in three or four different places, at a fifth place, where the degree might be cheaper. So indeed, there was a lot of mobility, there's a lot of emphasis on mobility. the infrastructures develop only over time and that's a combination of some of the things that Ian was talking about earlier, the need to try and regulate and to control. And also the pious characterative impulse to try and help students and a lot of the college and residential hall foundations of the 13th and particularly the 14th century

are there to try and, if you like, tame students, but also to give them more opportunities, more people opportunities to come and study. Mary, could you tell us about the age at which young man, it was always man, of course, went to universities and what sort of what life they led down we can't imagine they're supposed to have started studying

about five or six in the morning they didn't just sit at their desks all day there were young men growing up so what happened? Yes well the age at which people come to university usually about 14, 15 probably and they will have had already

some sort of training before although strangely enough there isn't some sort of entrance requirement really or test probably they would turn up at the master they want to study with and that master would then assess, you know, would this person do the course, although, of course, masters wanted to multiply the number of their students.

So to some extent, it wasn't actually very rigorous at the point of entry, which is interesting. But what you would have to be able to do is to support yourself in the university. And that would affect the structure of your day, because if at the same time you're also working as a scribe or as a tutor or as a secretary in the city doing some sort of job or copying out, even copying books out, then, of course, your day would look quite different, people who had a bit more leisure to pour over their books or to take part in a city like Paris and all the extraordinary activities that are going on, scholastic, musical, ecclesiastical, and of course,

just fun. So they would arrive at that age. And it's also important to remember that the universities tried to, they understood that at that age it's important also to keep an eye on these people and to give them some sort of moral, ethical formation. So formally speaking, the conscientious master in the university will also be a sort of moral tutor, older brother, uncle, or all of those combined, looking over their well-being. Of course, in some families who could afford it, they might even send their son to university

with some sort of valet or some representative of the family, maybe a chaplain to sort of them out in the first years. Are we talking three terms as we talk now? Yep. Three times as vacationed sort of Christmas Easter summer. Long vacations. And those were also maintained, in another interesting area of training in England, for example, the terms of the courts.

So the inns of courts that trained young lawyers would also observe those. So there's a sort of way in which the professional annual cycle was structured, yes. Ian, it's been mentioned two or three times by the others, but can you just be a bit more detailed about who was paying for this? Who was paying? Yeah. There were a number of sources of income. for some students, their families paid, as Mary's just mentioned. But the church also provided...

Was it expensive in those terms? Sorry to be so integrated, but just as a matter of interest. Did they have to stump up a lot? Well, I don't know if for Italian universities we have figures. For Paris, we don't. But the general impression is that it was expensive and became more expensive. So it was a major commitment for someone to come to Paris. So families could pay if they were wealthy. but also the church provided livings.

And the church allowed people to hold church livings to be parish priests or canons in the cathedral and to be absent to come to university, to use part of their income to pay for a substitute, but to take the rest as money with which they could pay fees and live with. And I should just say that money is crucial in all of this. If this hadn't been an era in which there was a... a growing money economy, none of this would have been

possible. You couldn't travel to university, you were talking quite rightly about mobility, you couldn't turn up with a flock of sheep. You needed to be able to take some kind of banker's draft to have your family send you money, have your home church send you money. Without a money economy, none of this would have happened. I've read about

there are certain entry points for very poor students. They don't seem to have been many, but such as they were, could you tell us what they were? Certainly. One of the issues that we're not clear about and that we debate is the extent to which universities generated a degree of social mobility. And certainly for some students who are genuinely poor, there were scholarships and charitable foundations to support them.

They might get scholarships from their local church, so you might be picked out by your local parish priests, sent up through local schools and end up at university. But also as something that Peter mentioned, as colleges were set up, they were set up as charitable foundations, and very often that was a mechanism by, by which a really talented young man who did not have family support could find a way of continuing to study at the university.

Briefly, Mary, can you just tell us the part that the church played in the disciplining and organization of the students at the university, the church courts? This is very interesting. The courts that control the behavior and, indeed, the pronouncements of scholars, did not act so much directly as church courts, but they delegated it to this all-important figure at the head of the university,

the Chancellor. So they allowed the Chancellor in a way to run something that we might even call the sort of autonomous church court, which involved, and this is really important, not only, to try not only members of the university who are clerics, but actually those with whom they were in dispute. So if you were sort of a hapless townsman in Oxford who happened to offend a student, you were dragged into the university court in order for that case to be heard. So this was a tremendous privilege of all these young men out there, by definition, the most violent element in any society at the worst time in terms of, you know, perpetration of disruption and so on, being tried within courts that were clearly favorable to them. And because these were

ecclesiastical courts, they didn't use all sorts of, they didn't use torture, they didn't use corporal punishment and so on. So this was a very benign privilege, but it wasn't sort of directly a church court run by a bishop. It was one of the privileges that was accorded to universities to run their own courts. So they were very heavily protected, weren't they? And that was one of the basis of friction between the local authorities, the civil courts and the church courts. They literally, one or two occasions, I know it's a bit melodramatic, but they literally got away with murder. Indeed, indeed. And they pulled back into the church courts. But there's another very interesting element to this competition that you raise, and that is that, uh, we

Royal patrons, and in England it's very evident in the 13th century, give great sort of economic privileges also to the universities. The universities do not have to buy, for example, through the local markets. They can bring in food. The colleges can bring food and other supplies from elsewhere. So in a lot of ways, although there are a lot of students in the university city, there may be economic privileges that protect them so that the townspeople don't fully benefit from the presence of this great. body of consumers. Peter Dendley. I just wanted to add that Italy is a bit different because not only does Bologna start out as a much more

secular university, but right through the Italian system you have far more students who are not clerics and don't have clerical status, particularly the law students. And by and large, from the mid-13th century onwards, it's the towns that are actually running the universities, actually salering, paying the teacher's salaries.

That began in Italy, didn't it, paying the teacher's salary? Or did it well? Well, it took hold in Italy more than anywhere else, but certainly by the late 13th century it was very very widespread. That was one thing that students no longer had to pay. They didn't have to pay fees, but they still had to pay in the sense of not being in work somewhere else, and that

of course is still expensive. How quickly did this become thought of as an educational model in Europe, this university, if we take Bologna, Paris, Oxford, and then how quickly did it spread? Very quickly in the sense that lots of people want to imitate it. In those early years when you have these

dramatic tensions within the towns that we've been talking about, lots of other try to suborn or try to exploit the moments of dissent, and Cambridge indeed was founded in 12 and 9 by a migration from Oxford, and there are plenty of other places like Padua and all over Europe, in fact, which would benefit from a moment of crisis, a strike, closure of a university or whatever. There are also plenty of universities that are set up,

not with that specific kind of model, but they didn't get as far. And eventually, because of the universality of learning that we were talking about, the universality of the degree, and the curriculum and so on, even those universities that tried to be different fell into line and tried to imitate either

one or other of the main models, either Paris or Bologna. One of the curiosities to me reading about this, Mary, that I didn't realize how fast the university notion had spread in parts of Europe compared with Otsova here who had Oxford and Cambridge full stop for a very long time.

Yes, I mean, as a model, it's really interesting because when you really notice in the 14th all of a sudden Europe moves eastward, that is the political, the Eastern Europe, what today is central and Eastern Europe, becomes incorporated into sort of European culture, European economy. And of course, the sign of that is the creation of universities. When Emperor Charles IV in the mid-14th century founds his capital in Prague and develops it, he has bridges, he has a cathedral, he has a university, indeed, which carries its name.

his name until today, Charles University, and he looks very much to the Parisian model. Indeed, he imports scholars from there. The same thing would happen in Vienna. And in the 15th century, a whole explosion of tens of new universities on a smaller scale to serve local rulers, to serve regions, maybe a Saxon university and so on,

but in order to provide really training for people who will run the local state. But not over here. Well, we get the Scottish. The Scottish universities in the 50s. I was going to say we must remember the Scottish universities. I'm saying, yes, the Scottish universities, but in terms of proliferation, I mean, it's no contest.

They're racing ahead with numbers. Quality is another thing, but they are racing ahead with numbers. Can I come to you in? I'd like to talk about the ideas that were fermenting there. What was the influence of the universities beyond the immediate realm of the subjects they were studying? That is, were they great issues of the day that they were engaging in and setting the agenda for, challenging the same. set agenda, can we go into that area?

Yes, certainly. It's hugely important, and it explains the enormous status that they had. Certainly the University of Paris, for example, became a player in high politics. It was an institution that helped shape opinion in the political classes

well beyond the university. In what way? Well, for example, when the king fell out with the Pope and what date are we talking about? We're talking about the end of the 13th century. Right. So when Philip the Fair and Boniface the 8th fell out,

the French Royal Government wanted to get rid of Pope Boniface the 8th and came up with various reasons saying that the Pope could or couldn't be deposed. And this was an issue debated in the university. And really the French rule government shaped its propaganda line according to what washed in the university. If an idea was rejected by the masters, it wouldn't abandon its line of argument, who wouldn't change its policy, but it would play down that line. It would come up with a new reason for attacking the Pope.

They also played along, didn't they, the scholars, if we think of the trial of, say, Joan of Arc. That was also the advice of the University of Paris and so on, and they get really involved in these debates, and then the body of scholars itself can be divided across political lines. This is true, and I think one pattern that we should observe is that as this process of expansion took place, universities became much more local and national,

as opposed to international. But throughout, in different ways, they remained political players. They also fed in to the pastoral mission of the church. So they were addressing issues about money and usury, and what types of contract, financial contract were illicit, what types of contract were illicit. And this was going out through sermons. It was communicated also through confession.

So they were having major impact on the, the moral behaviour of the populace. Peter, you understand. It's just one thing I wanted to add to that, which is, I think the most spectacular example of university influence comes in the late 14th century with the great crisis of the schism, split in the church, with first two popes and then three. The whole of Europe is divided and has to establish which was the right pope, as it were,

in its belief system. And at that point, academics really come to the fore, because they need expert opinions, everyone. Every government needs a legal view, a theological view, a canon law view, of what is the, which Pope was the correct one. And the culmination of that process, after four decades, in the Council of Constance, could actually even be seen as a sort of academic conference.

University people really came to the fore in a big way in helping to resolve that crisis. Can I ask you to answer this briefly, which is a terrible thing to do, but what people I don't think, is realize how subversive they could be. For instance, to take Oxford, if you've left out of the air,

you have Wickcliff there going right through to Tyndall. And these scholars are doing something which is against the church, against the state, at great risk to themselves, translating the Bible into English, taking tremendous risks and their students are copying them. Mary talked about getting extra money by copying. They're copying out these books of the Bible and taking them around the country and being caught and burnt and so on. So we've got inside this, as it were, thought of as a co-sysm,

there's room for a seriously subversive and character-changing, national character-changing element. The potential is there, but it's unusual because tabs are kept on it, and the authorities come crack down on it as quickly as they can. Wicloff is the one who got away by dying before he could be prosecuting. But the whole large inspired actually kept going for another hundred years. Yes, but not in the universities. No, they went out to the world.

But the big exception there is Prague, which you've mentioned, which becomes the first and the most dynamic of the universities in the empire, and which for 30, 40 years becomes, if you like, a hotbed of reform, of religious reform. It's a place where things were openly debating. that most academics in other universities wouldn't dare to talk about. And Prague is a university which has unusually

exceptionally integrated with the town. There's no town versus gown. It's quite the opposite. You go to your academics for an opinion and treat them as normal people, not as an ivory tower. So that's an example of the opposite. Was the influx of humanism?

Did it spell the end of a big phase in the medieval university, Mary? And how? I think by the late 14th century, in the university, there is a certain sense of exhaustion that people actually write about. They write about, we have the great text since the 12th and 13th century. They have been commentated upon piles and piles of commentaries, be it on law, be it on philosophy, everyone, and we study them and we study them.

And there is a sort of sense of this has become elephant time. This has become almost losing the core of what the education is about. And there's a tremendous thirst for something new. The Italians, because of this connection between university, scholarship, and the utility of the city-state, have always had much more of a sort of applied and sensible way for the teaching to match the needs of the polity. And that is really important into England,

if we think of someone like Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, very, very impressed, the founders of the Bodleian Library and so on, those great collections of Italian books. It's because people were looking for something, fresh and new. But what's coming in are the classical texts, mainly via the Arabic civilization, which has advanced

them and translated them and added to them. And this is having a huge influence. There are these other books, new books, with an idea of the way the world works and how you make the world work, which is at odds with, fundamentally, although they try to absorb it, the Roman Catholic notion. Excuse me, Roman Catholic notion.

Absolutely crucial to everything we've been talking about has been the discovery of rediscovery of new texts and ideas about new ideas about ways of reading. So if we go back to the late 12th century and the 13th century, the universities were getting hold of new translations of Aristotelian texts. And so as a young master, you didn't have to be arrogant to think that you had progressed beyond your own teacher. You had new research material. But then if we move to the end of the Middle Ages, it's not really

the universities that are getting the new texts or developing the new ways of reading. That's really happening elsewhere, I think. Yes, but it gets integrated very rapidly in the universities. Actually, again, because of student demand. So the many students who come from Germany to study in Italy, partly do so

to do the official subjects like law, but actually they want a humanistic education. So the university lay it on. They provide it. You can't get a degree yet in humanism. In poetry. Or poetry, but you can study and you can make connections and contacts. And the universities are definitely places where Germans, again, in their thousands. English is true.

Do we see this medieval span now and setting a template which we can still see evidence of today? Very much so. I think even in you go to the United States today, for example, all those thousands of little colleges for BA degrees, liberal arts colleges, absolutely reflect that breadth the students have to take arts subject. but also science subjects and quite frankly another important issue. Sports, development of the body as well as of the mind. That is an ideal that's there.

And also until really I think only maybe two generations ago, there's a way even in this country people who led this country. You know, we're all trained in the classics right or left or whatever. There was a sort of common language. And that's very much like it was, I think, in the Middle Ages, this ability for people also to develop careers across Europe because of this joint education. Do you still see a strong influence here?

Well, I think when people refer, to the medieval university now, they often underestimate the extent to which these communities were dysfunctional and there were constant conflicts and tensions, and it was a community of many communities. So it is a very complex template.

Thank you very much indeed. Thank you, Mary Rubin, Ian Way and Peter Denley. Next week we'll be talking about the dawn of the Iron Age about 3,000 years ago. Thank you very much for listening.