How did medieval universities come into being - and how similar are they to our own universities?
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How did medieval universities come into being - and how similar are they to our own universities?
The founder of the medieval university is often considered to be Peter Abelard, who was a very charismatic and influential teacher in Paris in the early part of the 12th century. Peter Abelard attracted to himself a group of students who were very loyal to him and who followed him. Paris itself had already been known as a center of learning by the time that Peter Abelard set up shop there, so really the first universities are not so much founded by someone like Abelard but come about as a process of accretion. Teachers are attracted to places like Paris or Oxford or Cambridge, they come together, more students are attracted to the fact that there is more than one teacher, that there is a variety of fascinating intellectual perspectives on offer, and so they come to these particular towns where there are many intellectuals gathered together.
Eventually, two models of the university emerge in Europe. The word, university, means "corporation" and these corporations can be formed either by the teachers or by the students. And this is very fascinating because in Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge, the universities of northern Europe, the corporation is one of teachers. It is the teachers who set the curriculum, who decide what should be offered in the classroom, and who really make the rules, decide what the tuition will be, etc. In the southern European universities like Bologna and Montpellier, in southern France, Italy, and Spain, it's the students who are the Universitas, who are the corporation. It's the students who decide what they want to learn, it's the students who hire the teachers, and it's the students who fire the teachers if they think the teachers aren't doing a very good job, so here you have these two very different models. And it's still the case that, in modern Italy today, the universities still run along that southern model more than along the northern one.
In many other respects, these universities were very similar and the degrees they granted (Bachelor of Arts) are still the degrees that we get in medieval universities today. Moreover, if we try to think about if there is any continuity or similarity between these medieval universities and modern universities, there absolutely is, particularly when we think about the student life. Obviously, there were no women, or very few women, in most medieval universities but we're still talking about adolescents getting together and living in the same place with not a lot of money and getting into a lot of trouble. And we have a lot of university regulations that tell us a lot of things that are features of university life now were features of university life then: excessive drinking, skipping lectures, rebelling against the authority of one's teachers. So even though many medieval universities came about in a way that is different from our own, which tend to be founded by a different kind of authority, there is still a lot of continuity there.
Why is it sometimes difficult to tell the difference between holiness and heresy? (How do you become a saint?)
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Why is it sometimes difficult to tell the difference between holiness and heresy? (How do you become a saint?)
There are probably two main reasons why, in the 12th and 13th centuries, it becomes very difficult to make this distinction and both of these reasons have to do with the growing power of the Papacy.
First, it's really only in the 12th century that the Papacy tries to control who is called a saint. It's only in this period that a formal canonization process is put in place, which is meant to establish who is or is not a saint. And this process is still in use today. Essentially, what it means is that a court is set up and in that court are lawyers arguing either for the sanctity of a particular person or against the sanctity. In fact, our term, "the Devil's advocate," comes from this procedure. In other words, this is the lawyer assigned to the Devil, the negative case, who is meant to try to argue that this person is not a saint. In order to prove anyone's sanctity, you have to be producing evidence, so the Papacy was going about this in a very scientific way. Part of the evidence you had to provide was that not only was this person holy during their lifetime but that this person was so holy that they could continue being holy after death by performing miracles. To take a contemporary example, the English theologian, John Henry Newman, who died in 1890, is undergoing this canonization process now. But until we find one more piece of evidence proving he has performed a miracle after his death, he cannot go all the way to becoming a saint. So that is the first reason: the canonization process.
The second reason is that the Papacy is also trying to control what types of everyday behavior that Christians are doing - which are considered holy and which are considered heretical. For example, if we take two people: Francis of Assisi, who we all now regard as a saint, and a guy we know less about whose name is Peter Waldo. These guys both had the exact same kind of upbringing, were both merchants, had both lived dissolute lives in their youth, had both had a sudden conversion experience in midlife, and both became charismatic preachers who had huge groups of followers. The difference is that Saint Francis agreed to put himself under the jurisdiction of the Pope and to toe the line when it came to certain kinds of doctrinal teachings of the church, whereas Peter Waldo's followers weren't able to conform to this, and so they were called heretics.
Thus, people in this period would often find themselves outside the church without really knowing why and being labeled as heretics when they thought they were following this perfectly saintly person.