Inaugural Professorial Lecture delivered to the School of Philosophical, Historical & International Studies, Monash University, 31 May 2011.
the demand that a new professor deliver an inaugural lecture is older than the history of the University itself. The earliest known inception address is that of Stephen Langton (c. 1150-1228), delivered in 1180, some thirty-five years before the word universitas was applied to the Parisian schools.1 Stephen was then about thirty years old, an Englishman who had gone to Paris to study arts and then theology — a discipline that he would transform by the rigour of his analysis of linguistic problems presented by the Bible. In 1206 he would be appointed a cardinal by Pope Innocent III and elected archbishop by the monks of Canterbury — only to spend the rest of his life in protracted struggle with King John of England, helping to draft the Magna Carta in 1215.2 In many ways, Stephen’s career embodied the much larger themes that I wish to explore: the Parisian schools, political authority and the cause of liberty and royal power. While the fact that he gave an inaugural address to announce himself as a professor suggests an emerging collective identity within those schools, they still lacked a collective institutional framework. Even in 1207, the bishop of Paris addressed them just as a community of students.3 The phrase ‘universitas of teachers and students’ was first used 1215 by the papal legate, Robert of Courçon, to bind them to a fixed curriculum in arts and theology.4 The term universitas, which refers not to an institution, but the collectivity of teachers and students gathered for a common goal, only begins to be widely used after a ruling of Honorius III, issued in 1219.5 For better or worse, we inherit terminology and structures formulated in the early thirteenth century, even if we have lost sight of their original meaning. I wish to explore the various ways in which University has been imagined. Is it a community of learning, bringing
1 Nancy K Spatz (1994), ‘Evidence of Inception Ceremonies in the Twelfth-Century Schools of Paris’, History of Universities, 13, 3–19. Langton’s sermon is in Phyllis B. Roberts, ed. (1980), Selected Sermons of Stephen Langton (Toronto: Pontifical Institute for Mediaeval Studies), pp. 17–34. 2 On Stephen Langton’s involvement in the Magna Carta, see John Baldwin (2008), ‘Master Stephen Langton, Future Archbishop of Canterbury: The Paris Schools and Magna Carta’, English Historical Review, 125, no. 503, 811–846. 3 Heinrich Denifle and Emile Châtelain, eds (1964), Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis [CUP], 4 vols (Brussels: Culture et Civilisation, originally published Paris,1889–1897), no. 6, 1:65: ‘et cummunitati [sic] scolarium’. 4 CUP, no. 20, 1:79: ‘Ut autem ista inviolabiliter observentur, omnes qui contumaciter contra hec statute nostra venire presumpserint, nisi infra quindecem dies a die transgressionis coram universitate magistrorum et scolarium, vel coram aliquibus ab Universitate constitutes … vincula excommunicationis innodavimus.’ This key document is translated in Lynn Thorndike, ed. (1975), University Records and Life in the Middle Ages (New York: Octagon Books; originally published 1944), pp. 27–30. 5 CUP, no. 31, 1:90: ‘in ipsorum universitatem tales audeat sententias promulgare …’.
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together teachers and students or is it an institution, centrally directed from above? What is the relationship of the University to the Academy and to the town or city in which it exists? Did the University open up opportunities for education, fostering freedom of thought, or was it an ecclesiastically controlled structure that imposed theological orthodoxy and clerical authority? The symbols evident in a modern graduation ceremony might suggest that the University has always been defined by structures of authority. A graduation procession opens with a beadle, carrying the University Mace — a very medieval weapon — on behalf of the chancellor. Academic dress tends to assert rank and status, as well as the identity of a specific university, rather than the notion of belonging to a single community. Yet the term ‘academic’ is still invoked by University staff to indicate not just a particular kind of employment, but an ideal of scholarly commitment, independent of externally imposed authority. The historian cannot find solutions to contemporary problems in the past. Nonetheless, a historical perspective can help us appreciate how the present structures and concerns of a University have themselves been shaped by the imagination of the past. My concern here is to explore what makes for intellectual vitality: unstructured communities of learning, often in competition with each other, or the discipline of a corporate structure? This lecture is necessarily only a survey, but I hope to suggest why the history of higher education has continuing relevance today. Before embarking on this survey, I shall consider three different perspectives on the history of Universities, all generated in the nineteenth century, but which still shape our thinking. The first of these is one that the modern University takes for granted, that it is committed to both teaching and research. This was a vision first formulated by Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), an educational reformer committed to the classical ideal of Bildung, or what the Greeks call paideia. In a paper that he produced as Prussian Minister of Education, when planning the foundation of the University of Berlin in 1810 (although not
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published until 1900), he defended the ideal of Wissenschaft (translated here as science and scholarship) as serving the moral fabric of the nation:6 The idea of disciplined intellectual activity, embodied in institutions, is the most valuable element of the moral culture of the nation. These intellectual institutions have as their task the cultivation of science and scholarship (Wissenschaft) in the deepest and broadest sense. It is the calling of these intellectual institutions to devote themselves to the elaboration of the uncontrived substance of intellectual and moral culture, growing from an uncontrived disciplined necessity.7
In idealistic terms, Humboldt argued that intellectual institutions had a responsibility to effect a transition from ‘the mastery of transmitted knowledge at the school stage’ to ‘the first stages of independent inquiry’. While recognising the conventional distinction between Universities, committed to teaching, and Academies, existing to advance scholarship (Wissenschaft), von Humboldt argued that this definition failed to recognise the important scientific research being done within Universities. If one assigns to the University the tasks of teaching and dissemination of the results of science and scholarship and assigns to the Academy the task of its extension and advancement, an injustice is obviously done to the University. Science and scholarship have been advanced as much — and in Germany, even more — by University teachers as by members of Academies. … Science and scholarship cannot be presented in a genuinely scientific or scholarly manner without constantly generating independent thought and stimulation; it is inconceivable that discoveries should not be frequently made in such a situation. University teaching is moreover not such a strenuous affair that it should be regarded as a distraction from the calm needed for research and study; it is rather a help to it. At every large University, there are always some men who teach little or not at all and who devote themselves entirely to solitary study and research. It would be entirely safe to entrust the growth of scientific and scholarly knowledge to the Universities as long as they are properly conducted; this is why the Academies can be dispensed with.8
6 Wilhelm von Humboldt , ‘Uber die innere und äussere Organisation der höheren wissenschaftlichen Anstalten in Berlin’, first published in Adolf von Harnack, Geschichte der königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, vol. II, Urkunden und Aktenstücke (Berlin: Reichsdruckerei, 1900; repr. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1968), pp. 361–67; cited here from a translation by Eric Ashby (1970), ‘On the Spirit and the Organisational Framework of Intellectual Institutions in Berlin’, within ‘Reports and Documents. University Reform in Germany’, Minerva, 8, 242–250. On von Humboldt’s educational reforms (which also included primary and secondary education), see Paul R. Sweet (1988-90), Wilhelm von Humboldt: A Biography, 2 vols (Columbus : Ohio State University Press), vol. 2, pp. 55–71. 7 Humboldt, ‘On the Spirit and the Organisational Framework’, trans. Ashby (1970), 242–243. 8 Ibid., 248.
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Humboldt was scathing about the intellectual vitality of Academies in Germany. Yet after seeming to argue that Academies could be dispensed with, he moves to argue that ‘the idea of an Academy must be maintained as the highest and ultimate sanctuary of science and scholarship and as that corporation which is freest of the control of the state.’9 While he recognised that Academies had the right to exist as institutions committed to research without engaging in teaching, he argued that many individuals would have a common membership of both institutions. In Humboldt’s vision, there was no place for the cosy conservatism of the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, or the theological dogmatism of the Sorbonne. Driven by respect for the discovery of objective scientific knowledge, Humboldt imagined God-like professors, free to profess their discipline by delivering the fruits of their research to those students assigned to them (or by engaging junior Mitarbeiter to teach, while they pursued research). His system elevated individual disciplines around the research seminar as providing the core of his ideal University with professors as its high priests. It would be of enormous influence on newly founded Universities across Europe, North America and even Australia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Humboldt’s vision of a University as a vehicle of intellectual progress was given a historical lineage in France by the educational reformer and historian of philosophy, Victor Cousin (1792 –1867). The son of a watchmaker, who benefited from the radical educational reforms put in place by Napoleon, he sought to combine the best of educational reforms in Prussia with those of France.10 Whereas Humboldt, raised a Protestant, had little sympathy for the medieval University (many of which continued into the eighteenth century as often cosy, but uninspired gentlemen’s clubs), Cousin was interested in including the best of medieval culture within his overview of philosophy. Not only did he translate the works of Plato and edit the writings of Proclus, but he believed that there was much to be gained from medieval philosophy as well as from the writings of Descartes and thinkers in the early modern period. Cousin effectively pioneered the study of philosophy in the Middle Ages — rejecting the notion (still prevalent in some departments of philosophy)
9 Ibid., 249. 10 On his educational philosophy, see Walter Brewer (1971), Victor Cousin as a Comparative Educator (New York: Teachers College Press).
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that there could be no critical thought in the age of scholasticism.11 He was particularly fascinated by the figure of Peter Abelard (1079 –1142), whose educational philosophy is summed up in the prologue to his Sic et Non: ‘Assiduous and frequent questioning is indeed the first key to wisdom ... for by doubting we come to inquiry; through inquiring we perceive truth ... .’12 Whereas Humboldt privileged the pursuit of research, Cousin was fascinated by the medieval way of thinking about intellectual inquiry as manifest through the process of continuous questioning. Cousin’s vision of Abelard and medieval thought generally emphasised this questioning process more than any theological synthesis he and his contemporaries sought to create. Even if Cousin’s tendency to sidestep the theological dimension of Abelard’s thought might seem to us naïve, his interest in medieval thought as structured around a spirit of inquiry countered those who maintained that it was always subservient to religious faith. In mid nineteenth-century England, there was little comparable interest in medieval scholastic educational culture prior to a pioneering series of lectures delivered by John Henry Newman (1801–1890) in Dublin in 1852, subsequently published as The Idea of a University. In its opening sentence, he outlined an argument that would certainly not win approval today from the Australian Research Council: The view taken of a University in these Discourses is the following: —That it is a place of teaching universal knowledge. This implies that its object is, on the one hand, intellectual, not moral; and, on the other, that it is the diffusion and extension rather than the advancement of knowledge. If its object were scientific and philosophical discovery, I do not see why a University should have students; if religious training, I do not see how it can be the seat of literature and science.13
Whereas Humboldt had identified his ideal University with the Academy, dedicated to the pursuit of learning, Newman saw its primary mission as to teach, through colleges. Research he saw as the province of Academies
11 Victor Cousin, ed. (1836), Ouvrages inédits d’Abélard pour servir à l’histoire de la philosophie scolastique (Paris : Ladrange). 12 Peter Abelard (1976-77), Sic et Non, ed. Blanche Boyer and Richard McKeon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. 103: ‘Haec quipped prima sapientiae clavis definitur assidua scilicet seu frequens interrogatio; … Dubitando quipped ad inquisitionem venimus; inquirendo veritatem percipimus.’ Translated in Alistair Minnis (1988), Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism c. 1100-c. 1375 (Oxford: Clarendon Press), p. 99 (translating veritatem as the truth, rather than truth). 13 John H Newman (1976), The Idea of a University, ed. I T Ker (Oxford: Clarendon Press), p. 5.
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and professional societies — which might or might not intersect with a University. While Newman was not opposed to progress or hostile to scientific enquiry, his first commitment was to education. He shared Humboldt’s profoundly moral vision of the University as about shaping the individual to live within society, but considered that its first mission was to teach. For Newman the University was not a centrally directed institution, as it was for Humboldt and Cousin, but a community of learning, embodied in the residential college — as Simon Caterson has argued in a paper that traces the legacy of Newman’s vision to the present.14 These different perspectives, those of Humboldt, Cousin and Newman, raise a question that is not yet resolved. Is a University a place primarily concerned with teaching or is it a place of intellectual inquiry? My concern is not to idealise the medieval University, but rather to explore the forces and ideas that shaped its genesis and development. Rather than seeing the University as a unified institution, I shall argue that it was more like a network of communities of learning seeking to find a common structure. While the University as it emerged in the thirteenth century, initially in Paris and then in many other places across Europe, did extend educational opportunities to certain sectors of society, it remained a clerical institution, not catering at all for women, Jews or heretics. The development of medieval Universities in the thirteenth century was closely linked to the remarkable urban expansion in Europe in this period. Just as Bologna became a great centre of legal education (indeed had already been so in the twelfth century), so Paris attracted students in arts and theology from all over Europe. Yet not every town developed a University. While many cathedral towns in twelfth-century France could boast flourishing schools, Paris developed a University for reasons that were as much political as intellectual. The French king, Philip Augustus, knew that promoting the international character of its schools helped strengthen France in its wars against England and Germany. The papacy also saw the importance of educating clerics in theological
14 Simon Caterson (2011a), The Idea of a Residential College: Image & Reality from John Henry Newman to Harry Potter and ‘The Social Network’ (Melbourne, Mannix College); see also Caterson (2011b), Daniel Mannix, John Henry Newman, Catholic Higher Education and the Idea of a Residential College, Mannix College Occasional Paper, 2 (Melbourne: Mannix College).
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orthodoxy. When the papal legate first imposed a common curriculum in 1215, the great cathedral of Notre-Dame was just being completed in a revolutionary new style that we now call Gothic. The recognition by both papacy and crown of ‘a universitas of teachers and students’ provided a unifying structure for intellectual life in the city, in the same way as the Gothic cathedral was perceived as unifying the ambitions and aspirations of a prosperous city. There is a well-established, perhaps dangerously simplistic convention of identifying the scholastic culture of the thirteenth century as qualitatively different from the monastic culture associated with the Early Middle Ages. In The Love of Learning and the Desire for God — first delivered as lectures to young Benedictine novices in Rome — Dom Jean Leclercq, a great Benedictine scholar, contrasted what he saw as the contemplative ethos of monasticism, still dominant in the twelfth century, with what he saw as the disputatious character of scholastic theology, for which he had little sympathy.15 Leclercq was hugely important in suggesting that monastic writers like St Bernard (1090–1153) offered a spiritually creative alternative, focused around meditation on the Bible, to what is broadly classified as ‘scholastic theology’— by which he was referring to desiccated neo-Thomism, then still influential in Catholic seminaries. Yet I am uneasy with such a binary classification, as it stereotypes scholastic thought, while also imposing a non-existent uniformity to monastic culture. Very often the questioning treatises of Peter Abelard (including the Sic et Non) are preserved within monastic libraries. Twelfth-century monks were interested in asking questions. I would suggest that we need to see the evolution of the University in the thirteenth century as one particular effort to impose order on a maelstrom of competing communities of learning, male and female, that were emerging in the twelfth century. But before we consider the particular dynamism of the twelfth-century schools, it will help us to recall those elements in both ancient and early medieval culture that helped shaped what would become the University.
15 Jean Leclercq (1962), The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, trans. C Misrahi (New York : New American Library).
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A n t i qu i t y a n d t h e Ea r ly M i d d l e Ag e s
There were no Universities as such in the ancient world. There were some celebrated schools — most famously, the Academy, established by Plato in Athens to pursue philosophical enquiry, and the Lyceum, established by Aristotle. These were more like research institutes, however, than places of instruction for the whole of society. In the Roman world, education was focused above all on grammar and rhetoric, essential for government and the law. The Roman tendency to leave logic, science and medicine to Greek-speaking scholars, meant that these disciplines would not be developed in the Latin West until the twelfth century, when Latin scholars, often aided by multi-lingual Jewish savants, translators uncovered in Toledo the vast corpus of Greek learning, that had been translated and developed by Islamic scholars between the eighth and twelfth centuries of the Common Era. Memory of the ancient Platonic Academy was preserved in the Latin West by Boethius (c. 480–524), whose influence would be pivotal to creating the intellectual core of a University. At a time when knowledge of Greek was disappearing in the Latin West, Boethius conceived the impossibly ambitious project of translating into Latin all the works of Plato and Aristotle. He succeeded in only a small part of this enterprise, producing translations and commentaries on just a few texts of Aristotle on logic, that would provide a foundation for philosophical inquiry until the late twelfth century. He was also an authority on music (understood as natural harmony) and arithmetic or number theory. Unable to complete his pedagogical ambitions, however, he devoted the last years of his short life to The Consolation of Philosophy, a classic of incalculable influence for its vision of philosophy as the goal of intellectual enquiry in a changeable world. Boethius was a Christian layman, who recognised the primacy of rational reflection in discussing theological doctrine. In this he was effectively challenging the perspective of Augustine (354–430), a Roman orator turned Christian intellectual and bishop, who argued in his De doctrina Christiana (On Christian teaching) that education was useful if it helped one understand the Bible better. Sceptical of the elitism of ancient philosophy, Augustine argued that what mattered most was turning the mind to God, and realising that without divine grace, one could not do anything. He did not even like the term theology. 8
While Boethius never explicitly criticised Augustine as a thinker, he was implicitly challenging Augustine’s educational theory and pessimistic view of human nature. In The Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius never referred to the authority of the Bible, but rather emphasised the primacy of reason in investigating the divine wisdom that underpinned the universe. Above all Boethius reminded the Latin West of the pre-eminence of philosophia (the love of wisdom) as the goal of intellectual enquiry. Contrary to a common stereotype, it was never common practice in the Middle Ages to describe theology as queen of the sciences. While individual theologians praised theologia — in the sense of divine contemplation, as the supreme form of intellectual inquiry, it was (as Bernard McGinn has observed) a much more contested term, reserved to graduate study after education in the arts and sciences had been completed.16 There was far greater consensus that philosophia was not a specific discipline (as it is in the modern University), but the goal of enquiry, able to be pursued through intellectual study of a specific discipline. Through the influence of Boethius, medieval thought always maintained a profound continuity with its source in late antique philosophy, which was, as Pierre Hadot puts it, a vocation or way of life.17 This vision is preserved in the title of the highest degree a University can offer, that of doctor of philosophy. Our contemporary enthusiasm for interdisciplinarity reflects a belated sense of nostalgia for a lost unified vision of philosophy. For Boethius, research — or the fruit of knowledge (scientia) was not a goal in itself, but the path to wisdom. Between the fifth and eleventh centuries, urban life in the Latin West was reduced to a shadow of what it remained in the Byzantine and Islamic worlds. In a politically unstable environment, the one structure that was able to maintain a framework for learning (and above all libraries, without which learning was not possible) was the monastery. While there were schools attached to major churches throughout the early medieval period, the monastery provided a secure structure for the pursuit of higher learning. Yet its primary function was not — at least in theory — educational. In Benedict’s vision, it was meant to be a schola caritatis — a school of love. In practice, the monastery functioned 16 Bernard McGinn (2008), ‘Theologia quondam’, Speculum 83, 817–839. 17 Pierre Hadot (1995), Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, ed. Arnold I Davidson; trans. Michael Chase (Malden, MA: Blackwell).
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as the Christian equivalent of a Platonic Academy, but with no prescribed curriculum, beyond common study of the Bible, various writings of the Church Fathers and perhaps a sprinkling of classical and late antique literary texts. Monasteries often ran schools for the local community. While monastic communities for women were fewer in number than those for men, and tended to be reserved for those of more privileged social background, they did provide an opportunity for a few gifted women to develop their skill in letters. One such community was the royal abbey at Argenteuil on the Parisian outskirts, where Heloise (d. 1164) was brought up as a child, before she chose to follow classes with a brilliant new teacher in Paris, Peter Abelard.18 After the dramatic end to their physical relationship in around 1117, Abelard became a monk at St-Denis, while Heloise became a nun at the abbey where she had been raised. After she and her fellow nuns were expelled from Argenteuil in 1129 by Suger, abbot of St-Denis, she took over the Paraclete, a foundation that Abelard had tried to establish after escaping from St-Denis. Heloise, having been denied an opportunity to study alongside men at the schools of Paris, created a new kind of community of learning, one accessible to women, under the patronage of the Holy Spirit. Another such remarkable woman of the twelfth century was Herrard of Hohenburg (1135–1195), who prepared for her nuns a wonderful visual encyclopedia, the Hortus Deliciarum or Garden of Delights.19 Her community followed the Rule not of Benedict, but of Augustine. The texts that she chose to illustrate demonstrate how she sought to communicate both traditional patristic and more recent scholastic theological learning to the women in her community. On one page we see Philosophy as the goal of all learning, represented by the seven liberal arts — those of language (grammar, dialectic and rhetoric) and of the natural world (arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy). Herrad presided over a community of learning just as significant — and pedagogically more imaginative— than any of the schools of Paris. It took many
18 Abelard (2003) tells the story in his Historia calamitatum, translated by Betty Radice within The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, ed. Michael T Clanchy (London: Penguin); see also Constant J Mews (2008), The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard, 2nd edn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan). 19 Although the original manuscript was tragically destroyed in 1870, enough drawings survive of the original to permit close appreciation of its vision. See Fiona Griffiths (2007), The Garden of Delights: Reform and Renaissance for Women in the Twelfth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press).
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centuries for the Boethian vision of education to be implemented, and synthesised with the emphasis of Augustine on the wisdom of the Bible. Yet when the University of Paris evolved out of its schools in the early thirteenth century, there would be no place in it for such women. When tracing the genesis of higher education in the Latin West, we should not forget how much of its curriculum was shaped by the Academies of the Islamic world. The Bait al-Hikma or House of Wisdom founded in ninthcentury Cordoba was itself intended to rival that founded by Harun al-Rashid in Baghdad on the model of the Sassanian Imperial Library.20 The House of Wisdom was not a University in the modern sense, with a commitment to mass education, but effectively an Academy, sponsored by the caliph, in which scholars translated into Arabic vast reams of Greek philosophy and science (often mediated by Syriac Christian scholars). The imperial library amassed at the same time by Charlemagne, encompassed just a fraction of the learning available to elite scholars in Cordoba or Baghdad. This knowledge became known to the Latin West only after the Christian capture of Toledo from the Moors in 1085, an event much less bloody than the fall of Jerusalem to the Crusaders in 1099. Initially, this conquest facilitated the importation into France of luxury goods from the Arab world. The Latin discovery of its intellectual achievement would only filter into the West in the second half of the twelfth century, through the translations produced by Gundissalinus and Gerard of Cremona, with the help of Jewish scholars, fluent in Arabic.21 It would be the explosion of knowledge generated by a remarkable community of learning in Toledo that provoked the ecclesiastical authorities to insist on a fixed curriculum in the Parisian schools, the reason behind the creation of a University.
20 Jan Willem Drijvers and Alasdair A. MacDonald, eds (1995), Centres of Learning: Learning and Location in Pre-modern Europe and the Near East (Leiden: Brill). 21 On this remarkable period, see the papers of Charles Burnett and Alexander Fidora in Constant J Mews and John N Crossley, eds (2011), Communities of Learning: Networks and the Shaping of Intellectual Identity in Europe 1100 –1500, Europa Sacra (Turnhout: Brepols).
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If I were to single out just one thinker who creates the intellectual framework on which the Latin University was based it would be Ibn Sina (980–1037) — Avicenna in Latin — a Persian polymath who wrote some 450 works, of which 240 have survived — covering almost every discipline known to Aristotle and more. A significant portion of these were translated into Latin in the second half of the twelfth-century, as part of that cultural explosion that followed Latin scholars realising the cultural depth of Islamic scholarship.22 Like many Islamic and Jewish intellectuals, Ibn Sina was a physician, rewarded by the Persian emir by being allowed access to the royal library. This is not the place to go into detail about his intellectual achievement. Suffice it to say that his genius was to synthesise a vast range of philosophical and scientific knowledge, Indian as well as Persian, into a series of systematic treatises that in thirteenth-century Paris would impress Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas by the sheer scale of their comprehensive vision. By their elite status, these Academies, with their great libraries, were vulnerable to fire and military destruction, exactly as in the ancient world. While they certainly helped maintain educational standards within Islamic society, their prime purpose was to serve the caliph or emperor, not Islamic society as a whole. The philosophical tradition of Ibn Sina was as elitist as that of Boethius. It relied on a knowledge of Plato, Aristotle and Hellenistic thought that existed alongside that of Quranic tradition, rather than one that combined philosophical and sacred knowledge. It was the clear distinction that he preserved between falasafiya (philosophy) and kalam (Islamic theology), that made it possible for Christian translators — often working with the help of Jewish intermediaries, fluent in Arabic — in Andalus to read Ibn Sina and other Islamic philosophers, without any sense that their religion was getting in the way. Ibn Sina’s medical writing provided a core foundation for the medical schools in the Latin West until the Renaissance.
22 For an introduction to Avicenna and his thought on the Latin West (as also many other themes rehearsed in this lecture), see Marcia L. Colish (1997), Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition (New HavenLondon: Yale University Press), pp. 142–144.
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T h e T w e l f t h - C e n t u ry Sc h o o l s
The Platonic Academy, the libraries developed by the caliphs of Bagdhad and Cordoba, and the more modest monastic libraries of the Latin West were thus all important indirect influences in shaping the intellectual culture of the University of Paris at the dawn of the thirteenth century. There is one other force, however, that must be singled out as shaping higher education in Western Europe: suburban growth. In Paris, the old city, located on the Île-de-la-cité was expanding, both onto the right bank (where merchants and artisans were based), and on to the left bank (where there were an increasing number of schools attached to its numerous churches). On the western part of the Île-de-la-cité stood the royal palace (now the préfecture de police), while on the other side of the city stood the cathedral of Notre-Dame. There was a Jewish quarter around the central market place (now completely razed and turned into a flower market), the heart of the old city. The significant growth of Parisian schools in the twelfth century was not at the cathedral school of Notre-Dame, but on the schools located on the hill of the left bank, known as the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, because they were protected by the ancient royal abbey of Sainte-Geneviève, in turn under the protection not of the bishop of Paris, but of the king. Since Victor Cousin initiated scholarly enquiry into the Parisian schools of the twelfth century, it has been conventional to interpret their increasing dominance in higher education within ideological terms, as embodying the cause of reason, unlike monastic schools, commonly assumed to be much more focused on matters of faith. To support this claim, Cousin (and many scholars after him) have pointed to a series of celebrated scholastic thinkers, whose persecution by monks seems to illustrate an ideological conflict between two opposing patterns of thought: Abelard’s teacher, Roscelin of Compiègne (often celebrated as the first nominalist philosopher), accused of heresy by St Anselm at Soissons in 1090; Peter Abelard, accused of heresy by jealous rivals at Soissons in 1121, and then by St Bernard of Clairvaux at Sens in 1141.23 Yet St Anselm was in fact a pioneer of reason in theological enquiry, who may actually have inspired Roscelin to take his arguments a step further. St Bernard was supporting the 23 Constant J Mews (2002), ‘The Council of Sens (1141): Bernard, Abelard and the Fear of Social Upheaval’, Speculum, 77, 342-82.
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views of other teachers, not monks, who disliked the views of Abelard. Rather than reading these conflicts as pitting monks against scholastics, we should see them rather as generated by competition between rival teachers, each with their own schools, competing over how best to formulate Christian doctrine. St Anselm reports with respect an argument that he had heard Roscelin give for questioning traditional ways of explaining Christian doctrine: ‘The Jews defend their law, as do the pagans, therefore we Christians need to defend our faith.’24 This comment raises an issue central to the development of higher education in France in this period. Just as Christian scholars were realising the need to study the Bible like any literary text, Rashi (d. 1105) was revolutionising attitudes towards the Hebrew Bible by his emphasis on its literal or historical sense in a way that would only subsequently be picked up by Christian scholars, in particular Hugh of St-Victor (d. 1141) — who became the leading theologian of Paris in the 1130s. Hugh’s community had been founded on the left bank of Paris by Abelard’s teacher, William of Champeaux as a way of competing with the schools of Sainte-Geneviève, where Abelard taught. The canons of St-Victor followed the Rule of Augustine, imitating monks in respecting a contemplative goal around the cloister, while remaining free to move about the city. Perhaps the most serious limitation of Leclercq’s monastic/scholastic binary is that it fails to accommodate the distinct contribution made by canons regular in combining contemplative ideals with a fascination for scholastic disputation. It was thus quite possible for Hugh of St-Victor to benefit from discussion with learned Jews, who informed him about the meaning of difficult words in the Bible.25 Great debates were then taking place within the Jewish community, provoked not least by two grandsons of Rashi, Rashbam and Rabbeinu Tam, who helped initiate a school of enquiry known as tosafot — a form of Jewish scholasticism. Rabbeinu Tam, who would be consulted on biblical matters by the count of Champagne suggests that alongside a current of ecclesiastical suspicion towards Jews (exacerbated by the Crusades), there were clerics keen to discuss matters of interest with learned Jews —whose
24 Anselm, Cur deus homo 1.5, ed. F S Schmitt (1946), Anselmi Opera Omnia, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Nelson), p. 285. 25 Rebecca Moore (1998), Jews and Christians in the Life and Thought of Hugh of St.Victor (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press). 26 Constant J Mews and Micha Perry (2011), ‘Peter Abelard, Heloise, and Jewish Biblical Exegesis in the Twelfth Century’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 61, 3–19.
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network of contacts often extended deep within the Islamic world, as well as across Europe. Abelard was one such cleric, as his sympathetic portrayal of a learned Jew in dialogue with a philosopher and a Christian makes clear.26 These exchanges provided an intellectual foundation for Christian study of the Bible in the thirteenth century, even though scholars in Paris could no longer interact so easily with their Jewish counterparts after their temporary expulsion from France (1182–98) and resettlement on the right bank, away from their traditional home at the centre of the Île-de-la-cité. Abelard was not, as Victor Cousin liked to think, the founder of the so-called scholastic method. Its core method of proceeding dialectically through any problem had already been practised in the late fifth century by Cassiodorus and Boethius, who were in turn imitating methods derived from the Hellenistic world. Yet Abelard does provide particular insight into the vigour of debate and competition between rival masters and communities in France in the first half of the twelfth century. In his autobiography, Abelard describes his early life as one shaped by continuous conflict with other teachers. Yet we can also look at the dramas in his life as resulting from conflict between rival institutions, each with their own community: the prestigious cathedral school of Notre-Dame and the suburban church of Ste-Geneviève on the left bank, where Abelard did much of his teaching. Abelard created scandal through his affair with the young Heloise, with whom he exchanged intimate love letters in which they discussed the nature of love and friendship. His struggle, however, was as much with other schoolmen as with monks. Bernard of Clairvaux was an equally original thinker, but in a totally different domain. He was fascinated by the way in which individuals grew in the experience of love. More interested in the emotions than Abelard’s form of linguistic analysis, he feared that Abelard did not sufficiently respect divine power.
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The seven liberal arts, in the Hortus deliciarum of Herrad of Hohenburg (copy from the lost manuscript).
To put it simply, the city, Jewish as much as Christian, was as important as the Academy in laying the foundations for creating that competitive intellectual culture without which the University of Paris could not exist. This intellectual culture was not entirely theoretical, in his Didascalicon Hugh of St-Victor presented a summary of the entire curriculum (and a model for equivalent thirteenth-century summaries) divided into that which is theoretical, practical and mechanical.27 Whereas Abelard created an intellectual synthesis based around language and theology, Hugh of St-Victor had a much more practical vision— as is evident in his inclusion of natural science and the mechanical arts in his framework of learning. For Hugh, theoretical subjects involved theology (understood as reflection on divine nature), mathematics and physics, or as he put it, intellectible, intelligible and natural knowledge. As practical disciplines, Hugh included ethics, economics and politics, and as mechanical sciences: fabric making, the making of armaments, commerce, agriculture, hunting, medicine and theatrics. Hugh did not devote entire courses to each of these subjects, but he conceived all of them as arts or skills that could be misused unless they were directed towards the goal of wisdom. Whereas the Boethian synthesis had been purely intellectual in character, that of Hugh of St-Victor extended its Platonic gaze to contemplation of the urban economy as all part of the manifestation of wisdom. The visual equivalent of this vision of universitas can be found in the great urban cathedrals being rebuilt in the twelfth century to cater for an expanding urban population, like that of Chartres, where images of the seven liberal arts were sculpted on to its archway. In the first half of the twelfth century, its great teacher, was Thierry of Chartres, a polymath interested in promoting newly discovered texts that deepened knowledge of all these traditional disciplines. In the stained glass windows of its cathedral we see what would become a standard pattern in Gothic cathedrals — a guild demonstrating the contribution of its particular craft to a biblical theme, whether it be wine or carpentry. In the bronze doors of the cathedral of Płock in Poland (now preserved in Novgorod), we see both male and female bronze workers depicted in one of its frames.
27 Hugh of St-Victor (1991), The Didascalicon of Hugh of St Victor: A Medieval Guide to the Arts, trans. Jerome Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press).
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Long before universitas was imagined as an educational institution, these great new urban buildings were seeking to resolve a pressing social problem, how to bring together the various skills of society into a harmonious whole. The particular attractiveness of the intellectual culture of the twelfth century, lies in the way theorists of language and theology like Abelard, scientists and natural philosophers like Thierry of Chartres, or great philosophical poets like Bernard Sylvester, created a literary vision of the universitas of intellectual disciplines, just as the builders of cathedrals sought to incorporate different skills into architecture. In political life, the emergence of towns as self-governing bodies, with elected leaders, encouraged the development of guilds each of which could contribute its skill and economic resources to the town. Bishops had to realise that they could not govern towns in the manner of a feudal lord. They had to recognise that individual guilds could have authority over their particular domain, establishing educational standards, while also contributing to the governance of the city. T h e Em e r g e n c e o f t h e U n i v e r s i t y
By the late twelfth century, the number of students coming to study in Paris from all over Europe was causing problems for the authorities, both secular and ecclesiastical. Who had authority over all these students? The document given a place of honour in the official memory of the University was a royal decree of Philip Augustus, issued in 1200 after an urban disturbance in which students were arrested by the civic authorities. It does not use the word universitas, but it guarantees that students were given immunity from prosecution by authorities of the city, and instead placed under ecclesiastical law.28 Yet which churchman would administer this law? The cathedral school at Notre-Dame was under the ultimate jurisdiction of the bishop of Paris and his chancellor, but the royal abbey of Ste-Geneviève on the left bank was under the authority of its dean — whose appointment was in the gift of the king. The schools expanded on the Montagne Ste-Geneviève because they were outside the chancellor’s
28 CUP, no. 1, 1:59–61.
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official jurisdiction. There was no common salary, as teachers essentially relied on fees from students, as well as from any ecclesiastical benefices they enjoyed. Through his legate, the Pope identified a universitas of teachers and students to resolve a jurisdictional problem, not to offer new opportunities for employment. Some measure of the incapacity of the ecclesiastical authorities in Paris to impose discipline on this turbulent network of teachers and students is an episcopal ruling from 1210 on various matters. It began by insisting that the body of a teacher, Amaury of Bene (celebrated for his fascination with the natural universe) be removed from the cemetery where he had recently been buried, and identifying a string of disciples to be deprived of their positions and thrown into prison. The notebooks of another teacher, David of Dinant, were to be burned, while the books of Aristotle on natural philosophy were forbidden to be studied, either publically or in private. All theological writings in the Romance language, excluding saints’ lives, were to be submitted to the episcopal authorities.29 We see vividly how individual masters, who had absorbed themselves in Aristotelian science (which took for granted the eternity of the world) were seen as a threat to orthodoxy. The prohibition on theological writings in the vernacular is particularly significant, presumably because such texts were perceived as aiding and abetting Waldensian and Cathar heretics. The legal status of the University was devised in an atmosphere of panic. The initiative for creating a coherent corporate structure, that transcended the local interests of the bishop and the abbot of Ste-Geneviève came from Pope Innocent III (who had himself studied in Paris and was thus familiar with these problems) as well as a remarkable group of advisors. These were men like Robert of Courçon, who saw that it was necessary to impose a common set of rules as for any other guild. Between 1210 and 1215 there was on-going friction between the teachers of the University on the one hand, and the bishop’s chancellor on the other. These quarrels were clearly central to creating a common sense of identity among teachers and students. The key document, establishing strict rules about the study of arts, was delivered in August 1215 by the papal legate, Robert of Courçon. No-one was to lecture in arts subjects
29 CUP, no. 11, 1:70–71; trans. Haskins (1975), pp. 26–27.
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before the age of twenty-one, and had to have been studying for six years. A lecturer had to promise that he would teach for two years, and had to demonstrate his capacity to teach to examiners, as laid down in a written agreement between the bishop’s chancellor and the students.30 While students were always expected to study the whole curriculum (what we would now call arts and sciences), the 1215 decree clearly stipulated where the emphasis should lie. On ordinary, non-feast days, the focus was on grammar and dialectic or logic. Plato’s Timaeus and Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, as well as rhetoric and quadruvalia (briefly, science subjects including the theory of music) were to be read on feast-days, which might represent a fifth of the average cycle of the year. These rulings however, give a clear insight into an official policy of focusing more on linguistic than scientific subjects. Aristotelian writings on natural science were prohibited because they were perceived as accepting the eternity of the world. The Metaphysics of Aristotle was also banned. The edict also clarifies the statute of theologians. No-one could teach theology before the age of thirty-five; they had to have done at least eight years of University study, including five in theology. By contrast, graduate studies of law and medicine, subsequently incorporated into the universitas, were not mentioned in the 1215 decree. It does not clarify the process of issuing degrees, or making students qualify as bachelors, except in clarifying when someone was qualified to teach. Most students tended study in Paris for as long as they could afford it, without ever taking a final exam. The 1215 document only refers in passing to the universitas of teachers and students in Paris. It does not in fact envisage an institution as much as a set of corporate regulations that bestowed a common identity on teachers and students: I quote: In the inceptions and meetings of the masters and in the confutations or arguments of the boys or youths there are to be no festivities. But they may call in some friends or associates, but only a few. We also advise that donations of garments and other things be made, as is customary or even to a greater extent, and especially to the poor. No master lecturing in arts is to wear anything except a cope, round and black and reaching to the heels-at least, when it is new. But he may well wear a pallium. He is not to wear under the round cope embroidered shoes and never any with long bands. 31
30 CUP, no. 20, 1:78–79; trans. Haskins (1975), p. 28. 31 CUP, no. 20, 1:79; trans. Haskins (1975), p. 29.
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The black academic gown was intended as a sign not of ostentation, but of modesty. Clearly some university teachers were wearing very fancy shoes, and they needed to be restrained. Of particular interest is the ruling that every student should have his own teacher. This was not a situation in which students picked and chose the courses they wished to study. Each student had to identify their teacher, who had jurisdiction over his students. In particular the edict insists that ‘No one is to receive a license from the chancellor or anyone else through a gift of money, or furnishing a pledge or making an agreement.’ Since before the Third Lateran Council in 1179 it had been a bone of contention for the Pope that the chancellor of Paris had been making money by charging for the right to bestow the licence to teach. The University was to be a self-governing body, but understood as a corporation of both masters and students, ‘who can make among themselves or with others agreements and regulations, confirmed by a pledge, penalty or oath, about the following matters: namely, if a student is killed, mutilated or receives some outrageous injury and if justice is not done; on fixing rents, concerning the dress, burial, lectures and disputations; in such a manner, however, that the University is not scattered nor destroyed on this account.’32 The rulings of 1215 were clearly drawn up after a long process of negotiation. Yet they were clearly inadequate to cater for all the educational needs of the student body. Responsibility for organising exams lay not with the Faculty of Arts, but with four nations — English, French, Norman, and Picard, perhaps reduced from a larger number of less formally structured nations. German students had to join the English, Italians to join the French. Only gradually did these nations start to have their own treasuries, through imposing fees on their members, in return for the nations looking after their students. The faculty of theology was effectively a graduate school with older students and more senior professors. The great bulk of students and teachers were those in arts, but they lacked the status of those engaged in the study of theology, medicine and law.
32 Ibid.
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In this situation, students — officially meant to be under the jurisdiction of a single teacher — could easily become lost. There were a few efforts to create what we might call halls of residence, generally through philanthropic foundation, but they could never reach a large number of students. One of the earliest of these was the College of 18 — founded in 1180 by an Englishman, who arranged for 18 poor clerics to find lodging in the hospital of Paris in return for singing psalms in the evenings for those who had died.33 Most students, however, had to fend for themselves. This was the situation when the two newly founded mendicant orders, the Dominicans and the Franciscans, established communities in Paris, teaching theology to their novices. When Hugh of St-Cher, a regent master of theology at the University, joined the Order of Preachers in 1226, the unity of purpose that had united secular masters of theology was broken, as Hugh’s loyalty was now to another community. The first master of theology to join the Franciscans was Alexander of Hales in 1236, damaging that consensus even further. In a sense the mendicant orders in the thirteenth century were doing no more than continuing a precedent set a century earlier by the foundation of St-Victor in the growing suburbs of the left bank. The characteristic feature of the mendicant houses — like the abbey of St-Victor — was that they created the atmosphere of a cloister within the bustle of the city. Other religious orders also established houses of study within Paris. Sometime before 1229, the great royal abbey of St-Denis, situated some ten kilometres north of Paris, established a house of study for their best students in the city. As the abbot was a senior advisor to the king, establishing a college was a skilful way of ensuring that gifted monks could improve their education. Their example was followed by other monastic orders. In the twelfth century, a few monks may have complained about the growing influence of the Parisian schools. By the thirteenth century, however, they had realised that the educational reform of the University was here to stay. In the process, they helped establish a precedent for a University college — a practice that Oxford and Cambridge would continue, while Parisian colleges ceased to exist after the French revolution.
33 CUP, no. 40, 1:49–50; trans. Haskins (1975), pp. 21–22.
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Conflicts with authority helped generate a corporate identity to the University. One of the first of these disputes came to a head in 1229, as the result of a conflict ostensibly between the crown on one hand and the teachers and students of the University on the other. While the real issues in this conflict are not easy to discern, there was certainly tension about the curriculum, in particular about the official prohibition on the teaching of Aristotle. The twenty-one provisors or guardians of the University were outraged at physical atrocities committed against students by the civic authorities.34 In a sense it was about a conflict between the left and right banks of Paris, with the bishop caught in the middle. These provisors decreed a general strike of the University, with teachers abandoning the city. This explosion had the effect of developing other Universities, as far afield as Toulouse. The English king, Henry III, took advantage of the situation by inviting masters to establish themselves in England. The strike in Paris was not resolved until 1231, when Pope Gregory issued fresh regulations for a University that now included the graduate faculties of law and medicine, alongside theology, but which did not explicitly identify any prohibited texts. Instead, Gregory let it be known in a separate document that a commission was established to examine the writings of Aristotle, to purge them of any potential for error.35 Nothing more was heard of the commission. The study of Aristotelian texts quietly gained ground. The papacy was forced to accept that it could not control the curriculum of the University. By 1255 the masters of the Faculty of Arts had decided to lay down precisely how many weeks should be devoted to each book of Aristotle. I am inclined to think it was more an ambit claim, than followed in detail by every teacher. There was an on-going dispute within the University about the role of the mendicant orders. In 1270 the bishop, Stephen Tempier, issued a list of ten heretical propositions being taught in the Faculty of Arts. This was expanded to 219 dangerous heresies by 1277. It was simply very difficult to impose any rules about what was to be taught.36
34 CUP, no. 71, 1:128–129. 35 CUP, no. 79, 1:136–139 and no. 87, 1:143–144; trans. Haskins (1975), pp. 36–39 and 39–40. 36 CUP, nos. 432 and 473, 1:486–487 and 543–558. The 1270 list is translated by Haskins (1975), pp. 80–81, but not that of 1277, on which there is a new edition and French translation by D Piché, ed. (1999), La condemnation parisienne de 1271.Texte latin, traduction, introduction et commentaire (Paris: Vrin).
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I have no time to review the substance behind these accusations, often used as evidence for an image of the thirteenth-century University as riven by a continuous struggle between the forces of reason and of authority, until stabilised by the achievement of Thomas Aquinas. I am uneasy with such simplistic claims. Within the Order of Preachers, there was a great variety of perspectives, some suspicious of Aristotle, others more enthusiastic. Thomas Aquinas sought to create his own synthesis of philosophy and theology that was quite distinct from that of his great Franciscan contemporary, Bonaventure. Within each of these religious orders, we find teachers struggling to formulate their synthesis, often in disagreement with their own brethren. The Franciscans, often more critical of Aristotle, were more inspired by an Augustinian and Victorine tradition that emphasised the priority of love over reason. Another research project on which I am engaged is exploring how in the late thirteenth century these currents are transformed by Franciscans writing for aristocratic women, in a way Aquinas never imagined.37 Inevitably there was friction between rival communities. I would be very cautious, however, about claiming that the conflicts that emerged were all between monks and schoolmen. There was a continuing competition to formulate the most effective synthesis, as well as to define the boundary between orthodoxy and heresy, the acceptable consensus and an extreme partisan position.
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Conclusion
Let me conclude. Although the term University was first used to mean the community of teachers and students in the thirteenth century, it reflects a vision of universality that went back to Boethius and other writers of late antiquity. I have argued that its scholastic culture was not forged in opposition to a monastic culture, as often claimed. Rather, I would suggest that the University was influenced by a host of factors, political, demographic and intellectual. The University in the Latin West looked back to the Platonic Academy for its inspiration, but it was also shaped by the culture of monasticism and in particular that of the canons regular, as at St-Victor. In protecting the notion of a cloister as essential to a contemplative ideal, the canons followed a quasi-monastic style of life, but they were also open to the intellectual vitality of the city. The University of Paris certainly came to embrace (albeit slowly) many new ideas, under the impact of translations made in al-Andalus in the second half of the twelfth century, but it also imposed a new effort of centralised control. It witnessed the atrocious burning of copies of the Talmud in 1246. This did not stop Thomas Aquinas and later Meister Eckhart from drawing on the ideas of Maimonides to develop their own vision of Christian theology, but they were doing so in an attitude of hate and distrust that would take centuries to repair. There was no opportunity for learned women to pursue education, in the manner of Heloise in the early twelfth century, or of Hildegard of Bingen, who was aware of the Parisian schools, but preferred to trust in the inspiration of her own visions of the human person as a microcosm of the divine macrocosm.
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I return to the question with which I opened this lecture. Is the University a place primarily for teaching, or is it a place for both teaching and research? I would argue that Newman was quite right to identify its prime mission as to teach. The advancement of knowledge he saw as the task of the Academy — which might intersect with a University, but not always. He over-idealised the medieval University, not appreciating how it excluded various groups in society. Today, we are more aware that learning can take place in a great variety of communities, whether attached to schools, mosques, churches, professional associations or cultural venues. Humboldt’s vision of a University as a place of teaching and research, promoting the betterment of society is certainly part of our present identity. Yet the University may not always be the best place to pursue academic ideals. The vitality of the University of Paris was at its best when it embraced a great diversity of schools and communities of learning within a structure based on principles of dialogue and questioning rather than the imposition of educational reform from on high, principles formulated with particular clarity by Abelard. Perhaps we need to move away from discussing teaching, to reflecting on learning. Whether we are undergraduates or university professors we are all part of an extended community of learning. In that sense, I refer back to the motto of Monash University, Ancora imparo — I am still learning.
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REFEREN C ES Primary Sources belard, Peter in Victor Cousin, ed. (1836), Ouvrages inédits d’Abélard pour servir A à l’histoire de la philosophie scolastique (Paris: Ladrange). ---- ( 1976–77), Sic et Non, ed. Blanche Boyer and Richard McKeon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). ---- (2003) The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, ed. Michael T Clanchy (London: Harmondsworth). Denifle, Heinrich and Emile Châtelain, eds (1964), Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis [CUP], 4 vols (Brussels: Culture et Civilisation, originally published Paris, 1889–1897). Hugh of St-Victor (1991), The Didascalicon of Hugh of St Victor: A Medieval Guide to the Arts, trans. Jerome Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press). Langton, Stephen, in Roberts, Phyllis B., ed. (1980), Selected Sermons of Stephen Langton (Toronto: Pontifical Institute for Mediaeval Studies). Minnis, Alistair, ed. (1988), Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism c. 1100– c. 1375 (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Piché, David, ed. (1999), La condemnation parisienne de 1277:Texte latin, traduction, introduction et commentaire (Paris: Vrin). Thorndike, Lynn, ed. (1975), University Records and Life in the Middle Ages (New York: Octagon Books; originally published 1944). Secondary Sources Baldwin, John (2008), ‘Master Stephen Langton, Future Archbishop of Canterbury: The Paris Schools and Magna Carta’, English Historical Review, 125, no. 503, 811–846. Brewer, Walter (1971), Victor Cousin as a Comparative Educator (New York: Teachers College Press). Caterson, Simon (2011a), The Idea of a Residential College. Image & Reality from John Henry Newman to Harry Potter and ‘The Social Network’ (Melbourne, Mannix College) ---- (2011b), Daniel Mannix, John Henry Newman, Catholic Higher Education and the Idea of a Residential College, Mannix College Occasional Paper, 2 (Melbourne: Mannix College). Colish, Marcia L (1997), Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition (New Haven-London: Yale University Press).
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Drijvers, Jan Willem and Alasdair A. MacDonald, eds (1995), Centres of Learning: Learning and Location in Pre-modern Europe and the Near East (Leiden: Brill). Griffiths, Fiona (2007), The Garden of Delights: Reform and Renaissance for Women in the Twelfth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). Hadot, Pierre (1995), Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, ed. Arnold I Davidson; trans. Michael Chase (Malden, MA: Blackwell). Humboldt, Wilhelm von, cited here from a translation by Eric Ashby (1970), ‘On the Spirit and the Organisational Framework of Intellectual Institutions in Berlin’, within ‘Reports and Documents. University Reform in Germany’, Minerva, 8, 242–250. Leclercq, Jean (1962), The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, trans. C Misrahi (New York : New American Library). McGinn, Bernard (2008), ‘Theologia quondam’, Speculum 83, 817–839. Mews, Constant J (2002) ‘The Council of Sens (1141): Bernard, Abelard and the Fear of Social Upheaval’, Speculum, 77, 342–82. ---- (2008), The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard, 2nd edn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan). ---- and Cal Ledsham, ‘Franciscan Thinking on Charity, Practical Theology, and Salvation 1270–1320’, in Constant J Mews and Claire Renkin, eds (2010), Interpreting Francis and Clare: from the Middle Ages to the Present (Melbourne: Broughton Publishing), pp. 152-76. ---- a nd Micha Perry (2011), ‘Peter Abelard, Heloise, and Jewish Biblical Exegesis in the Twelfth Century’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 61, 3–19. ---- and John N Crossley, eds (2011), Communities of Learning: Networks and the Shaping of Intellectual Identity in Europe 1100–1500, Europa Sacra (Turnhout: Brepols). Moore, Rebecca (1998), Jews and Christians in the Life and Thought of Hugh of St.Victor (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press). Newman, John Henry (1976), The Idea of a University, ed. I T Ker (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Spatz, Nancy K (1994), ‘Evidence of Inception Ceremonies in the Twelfth-Century Schools of Paris’, History of Universities, 13, 3–19. Sweet, Paul R (1988–90), Wilhelm von Humboldt: A Biography, 2 vols (Columbus : Ohio State University Press).
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Constant J. Mews gained his BA and MA from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and his DPhil from Oxford University. He is Professor within the School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies, Monash University where he is also Director of the Centre for Studies in Religion and Theology. He has published widely on medieval thought, ethics, and religious culture, with particular reference to the writings of Abelard, Heloise, Hildegard of Bingen and their contemporaries, including Abelard and Heloise (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005) and The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard. Perceptions of Dialogue in Twelfth-Century France, 2nd edn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). His research interests range from the early middle ages to late medieval religious and intellectual culture, as well as the interface between various religious and ethical traditions, including issues of usury and financial ethics.
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A missionary endeavour of the Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne, Mannix College is a residential college affiliated with Monash University.
Correspondence may be addressed to: Dr Simon Caterson, Mannix College Publications PO Box 8076, Monash University LPO Clayton VIC 3168 Australia simon.caterson@monash.edu
Imagining University: Communities of Learning, the Academy and the City Text © Constant J Mews 2011 Design © Akiko Ueda 2011
Published by Mannix College Wellington Road Monash University VIC 3800 The publisher wishes to acknowledge with gratitude the kind assistance of Dr Kate Murphy.
Also published in this series: Simon Caterson, The Idea of a Residential College: Image and Reality from John Henry Newman to Harry Potter and ‘The Social Network’