Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

17

The Spread of Learning and the Rise of Accuracy

On 11 June 1144, twenty archbishops and bishops gathered in the abbey church of St Denis, in Paris, where as many altars as there were senior clerics present were dedicated that day. Most of the bishops, who had not visited St Denis before, were astonished by what they saw. It is no exaggeration to say that Abbot Suger, the man in charge of the church, had created there the first completely new architectural style in 1,700 years. It was an aesthetic and intellectual breakthrough of the first order.¹

Traditionally, ecclesiastical buildings had been erected in the Romanesque style, an elaboration of eastern Mediterranean basilicas, essentially enclosed structures designed for use in hot countries, and which had originated using primitive materials. Suger’s new St Denis was quite different. He used the new architectural understanding, which combined the latest mathematics, to create a vast edifice, where the horizontal emphasis of Romanesque churches was replaced by perpendicular planes and ribbed vaulting, where ‘flying buttresses’, on the outside of the buildings, supported the walls, enabling the immense nave to be largely free of pillars, and where huge perpendicular windows allowed in great swathes of light to illuminate the hitherto murky interior and to shine upon the altar. Not the least impressive feature of the cathedral was the stained-glass rose window over the main entrance. The iridescent colours and the intricate lacelike pattern of the stone-work were as breathtaking as the ingenuity shown by the craftsmen in using the glass to display biblical narratives in this new art form.

Though not himself of high birth, Suger had been the king of France’s childhood playmate and that friendship helped guarantee him a place at the highest tables. Later in their lives, when Louis was absent on an ill-fated crusade, Suger acted as his regent and acquitted himself well enough. Though a Benedictine, he was not persuaded that renunciation of the world was the correct path. Instead, he thought that an abbey, as the very summit of earthly hierarchies, should display a magnificence that did no more than reflect that fact.² ‘Let every man think as he may. Personally I declare that what appears most just to me is this: everything that is most precious should be used above all to celebrate the Holy Mass. If, according to the word of God and the Prophet’s command, the gold vessels, the gold phials, and the small gold mortars were used to collect the blood of the goats, the calves, and a red heifer [in the Temple, in ancient Israel], then how much more zealously shall we hold out gold vases, precious stones, and all that we value most highly in creation, in order to collect the blood of Jesus Christ.’³ Accordingly, between 1134 and 1144 Suger totally rebuilt and readorned the abbey-church of St Denis, using all the resources at his command to create this new setting for the liturgy.

Suger proudly wrote up his achievement in two books, On His Administration and On Consecration. These tell us that he thought St Denis should be a summing up, a summa, of all the aesthetic innovations he had encountered in his travels across southern France and that it should surpass them. He took as his inspiration the theology of the saint after whom St Denis was named – Dionysius the pseudo-Areopagite (so called because, besides claiming to be one of Paul’s first Greek disciples, he also identified himself as one of the officials of the Athenian court of law, the Areopagus).⁴ Dionysius is traditionally held to be the author of a medieval mystical treatise, which had been given to St Denis by the pope in the eighth century, in which the main idea was that God is light. Every living thing, according to this theology, receives and transmits the divine illumination, which ‘spills down and irrigates the world’ according to a divinely ordained hierarchy. God is absolute light, whereas all creatures reflect His light according to their inner radiance. It is this concept that lay behind the very form of the twelfth-century cathedrals, of which Abbot Suger’s was the prototype.⁵

In addition to the general concept of light, Suger introduced several new features. The two crenellated towers set in the façade were meant to give the cathedral a military feel, a symbol of militant Christianity and the king’s role in defending the faith. The portal was triple, reflecting the doctrine of the Trinity. The rose window lighted three high chapels, ‘dedicated to the celestial hierarchies’ – the Virgin, St Michael and the angels. At the far end of the choir there was a semi-circular sequence of chapels (the apse), which both enabled many monks/priests to say mass at the same time and endowed the choir with a glow of light which complemented that from the rose window. And, with the supporting buttresses now outside the church, there was room for an ambulatory, around the nave, from which side chapels, again lit by daylight, led off. These too enabled more and more monks/priests to say mass. But above all, the whole church was now open – especially as Suger removed the rood screen – all of it bathed in one light, so as to make the entire structure a single mystical entity.⁶ The theology of light was responsible not only for the advent of stained glass but for the role in the liturgy of the new cathedrals of precious stones and metals – jewels, idl, crystal – which so dominate medieval art. Precious stones were believed to have a mediating power, a moral value even, each one symbolic of some Christian virtue. All of these light-related entities were designed to help the faithful – gathered together as one enormous congregation – approach God.

Suger was more successful than perhaps even he anticipated. Between 1155 and 1180 cathedrals were built at Noyon, Laon, Soissons and Senlis. The rose window at St Denis inspired similar structures at Chartres, Bourges and Angers. The bishops of England and Germany soon imitated the cathedrals of France. They have lost none of their magnificence in the millennium that has passed since.

It was not only for liturgy that the early cathedrals were used. Experienced bishops allowed the guilds to meet there, and other lay meetings. So many locals had worked on the construction of the cathedrals that they all knew the building well. In Chartres, every guild wanted its own stained-glass window.⁷ It was in this way, with cathedrals attracting citizens as the monasteries never had – for they were well outside the cities, in the country – that they also became schools. The area of a town near the cathedral was usually known as the cloister, even though it was open, and this is where the pupils now began to congregate, along with artists and craftsmen. Moreover, the bishops’ schools were different from the monastic ones. Being in the cities, they were more open, more of this world, and the education they offered reflected that. In the monasteries, tuition had been a matter of pairs – a young monk was attached to an older one. But in the cathedral schools it was quite different – a group of students sat at the feet of a master. To begin with, most of the pupils were still clerics, and for them learning was primarily a religious act. But they lived in the city, among lay people, and their eventual jobs would be pastoral, amid the people rather than world-renouncing, as in a monastery.

In such an environment, word travelled much faster than it had done at the time of the monasteries, and would-be clerics or would-be scholars quickly learned which masters were cleverer, who had the most books, in which schools the debate was liveliest. When contemporaries mentioned schools with distinctive doctrines, they usually referred to a renowned teacher. For example, the ‘Meludinenses’ were named after Robert of Melun, while the ‘Porretani’ were pupils of Gilbert of Poitiers.⁸ In this way, first Laon, then Chartres, then Paris offered the best opportunities. By now the word schola was applied to all the people of a monastery or cathedral ‘at its work of worship in the choir’.⁹ What happened in the twelfth century was that the number of pupils mushroomed and extended well beyond the normal numbers required to man a church.

In these contexts, at least to begin with, the main skills taught were reading and writing Latin, singing, and composing prose and verse. But what the new students wanted, the students who were not going to become clerics, were more practical skills – law, medicine, natural history. They also wanted to learn to argue and analyse, and to be exposed to the main texts of the day.

Paris had a population of some 200,000 in the early thirteenth century and was growing fast, no longer confined to the Île de Paris. Its advantages were extolled on every side, not least the abundance of food and wine, and the fact that, within a hundred miles of the city, there were at least twenty-five other well-known schools. This made for a critical mass of educated people which helped fuel further demand. There were also many churches in the city, whose associated outbuildings often provided board and lodging for the students. Everard of Ypres, who studied at both Chartres and Paris, says he was in a class of four pupils in the former school but that in Paris he was in a class of three hundred, in a large hall.¹⁰

The sheer size of Paris was what counted. By 1140 it was the dominant school in northern Europe, by far, though ‘schools’ is a better word than the singular. Its reputation was based on the fact that there were many independent masters there, not just one, and it was these numbers which provided the interplay out of which scholastic thought developed. ‘By 1140, it was possible to find nearly everything in Paris. True, it was necessary to go to Bologna for the higher flights of canon law, and to Montpellier for the latest and best in medicine; but for every branch of grammar, logic, philosophy, and theology, and even for a respectable level of law or medicine, Paris could provide everything that most ambitious students could desire.’¹¹ From contemporary documents, R. W. S. Southern has identified seventeen masters in Paris in the twelfth century, including Abelard, Alberic, Peter Helias, Ivo of Chartres and Peter Lombard.

By the middle of the twelfth century hundreds of students arrived in Paris every year from Normandy, Picardy, Germany and England. Teaching was still carried on in the cloister of Notre Dame but it was beginning to spread, in the first instance to the left bank of the Seine. The new masters, Georges Duby tells us, rented stalls on the rue de Fouarre and on the Petit Pont. In 1180 an Englishman who had studied in Paris founded a college for poor students and south of the river a whole new district was growing up opposite the Île de la Cité where, in the narrow lanes, Paris University was born.

The intellectual life of the schools, and then of the universities, was very different from that in the monasteries. In the latter locations, it was not so different from contemplation, solitary mediation on a sacred text, though they did seek to build up good libraries: Fulda in Germany, for example, had two thousand books at the service of scholars and Cluny close to one thousand, including a Latin translation of the Qurʾan. But in Chartres and Paris they debated, masters and students faced each other in the mental equivalents of knightly combat, with outcomes that, in the context of the times, were just as thrilling and equally unpredictable – the masters didn’t always win. The basis of the curriculum of the schools was still the seven liberal arts that had been set down in the early Middle Ages but now the trivium came to be seen as the elementary – or preparatory – part of the course work. The main aim of the trivium was to prepare the cleric for his principal function, to be able to read the Bible and make critical interpretations of the sacred text so as to extract the truth. In order to do so, however, pupils had to understand the finer points of Latin and for this some of the classical/pagan authors were studied – Cicero, Virgil and Ovid in particular. Teaching in the schools therefore leaned to classicism and this fuelled a renewed interest in ancient Rome and antiquity in general.¹²

Even more important, however, was the emergence of logic, through the rediscovery of the translations of Aristotle. ‘Beginning in the 1150s, Latin editions of the rediscovered writings began to flood the libraries of Europe’s scholars.’ In the twelfth century, logic evolved as the most important discipline in the trivium – one cleric went so far as to say that reason was what ‘did honour to mankind’. (The only Platonic work known then was the Timaeus and that not fully.)¹³ Logic, it was felt, would make it possible for man to gradually penetrate God’s mysteries. ‘Since it was believed that the principle of all ideas sprang from God veiled and concealed under terms that were obscure and sometimes even contradictory, it was incumbent on logical reasoning to dispel the clouds of confusion and clarify the contradictions. Students must take words as their basis and discover their deepest meaning.’¹⁴ At the root of logic lay doubt, because in doubt began dialectical reasoning – argument, debate, persuasion (which was another basis of science). ‘We seek through doubt,’ said Abelard, ‘and by seeking we perceive the truth.’ One of the chief features of the ‘old logic’ was ‘universals’, the essentially Platonic idea that there is an ideal form of everything, ‘chairs’ or ‘horses’, say, the underlying principle being that, if these could be arranged in a systematic (logical) order, God’s purpose would be understood. The ‘new’ logic, put forward in the first place by Peter Abelard in Paris (who is described by Anders Piltz, in his study of medieval learning, as ‘the first academic’), argued that many episodes in the Bible were contrary to reason and, therefore, could not be just accepted, but should be questioned. The real way of thinking, he insisted, should reflect Aristotle’s writings and be based on syllogisms, such as: all a’s are b; c is an a; therefore c is a b. Abelard’s book Sic et Non epitomised this approach by identifying and then comparing contradictory passages in the Bible with the aim of reconciling them where he could. Alongside Abelard, Peter of Poitiers said ‘Although certainty exists, nonetheless it is our duty to doubt the articles of faith, and to seek, and discuss.’ John of Salisbury, an Englishman who had studied in numerous places, including Paris, placed logic central to understanding: ‘It was the mind which, by means of the ratio [reason], went beyond the experience of the senses and made it intelligible, then, by means of the intellectus, related things to their divine cause and comprehended the order of creation, and ultimately arrived at true knowledge, sapentia.’¹⁵ For us today, logic is an arid, desiccated word and has lost much of its interest. But in the eleventh and twelfth centuries it was far more colourful and contentious, a stage in the advent of doubt, with the questioning of authority, and offering the chance to approach God in a new way.

But the cathedrals were themselves part of a larger change in society which encouraged not just the creation of schools but also their evolution into what we call universities. The cathedrals, as we have seen, were urban entities and the towns were places where practical as well as religious knowledge was needed. Mathematics, for example, which had been much expanded thanks to the translations of Arabic books, which were themselves versions of Greek and Hindu works, was central to the very building of the cathedrals. Flying buttresses, invented in Paris in the twelfth century, owed their conception at least in part to the science of numbers. The new towns, where more and more people lived in close proximity, also had a great need of lawyers and of doctors, and these needs also stimulated the evolution of the schools into universities.¹⁶

Let us remind ourselves of the concept of the liberal arts.¹⁷ For the Greeks the notion of liberal studies was that of an educational system suitable for the free citizen, though there were at least two versions – Plato’s, which took a philosophical and metaphysical view of education designed to imprint moral and intellectual excellence, and Isocrates’ version, which advocated a curriculum more suited to practical engagement with community and political life. This was refined first by the Romans, in particular Varro who, in the first century BC, compiled his De Novem Disciplinis, which identified nine disciplines – grammar, logic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, music, medicine and architecture. As was described in Chapter 11, in the early fifth century, Martianus Capella compiled his strangely entitled The Marriage of Mercury and Philology, which reduced Varro’s nine liberal arts by two, making medicine and architecture the first professions to become organised separately.¹⁸ Capella’s classification was widely adopted and over the intervening centuries it became customary to divide the seven liberal arts into the trivium – grammar, logic and rhetoric – and the more advanced quadrivium – arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. Before 1000, according to Alan Cobban, in his history of medieval universities, quadrivium subjects were relatively neglected, as they were deemed less important for the training of a body of literate clergy. ‘The need to master enough arithmetical skill to calculate the dates of movable Church festivals was often the sum total of quadrivium expertise absorbed by the average student priest.’¹⁹ Education was mainly a literary experience which did not challenge the trainee-priest’s analytic abilities (writing was taught on wax tablets).²⁰ The transition from grammar and rhetoric to logic as the main intellectual discipline was a major intellectual metamorphosis and marked the break from ‘an education system based upon the cumulative knowledge and thought patterns of the past to one deriving its strength from a forward-looking spirit of creative inquiry’. The idea that the liberal arts be regarded as a prelude to higher studies, and especially to theology, may strike us today as odd – such subjects had a tangential bearing on theology at best.²¹ But it was part of the Greek legacy of liberal studies, reflecting the idea that the mind should be enlarged over a range of disciplines as a necessary preparation for a full life in a responsible democracy. The main difference was that theology became the crowning glory in the hierarchy of medieval education, a position which philosophy had occupied in the Greek world.

Another aspect of that legacy was the buoyant optimism in the schools. All the masters shared the view that man, even in his fallen state, was ‘capable of the fullest intellectual and spiritual enlargement’, that the universe was ordered and therefore accessible to rational inquiry, and that man’s mastery of his environment through his intellect, cumulative knowledge and experience was possible.²² Outside the realm of revealed truth, it was believed, man’s capacity for knowledge and understanding was almost unlimited. This, as Alan Cobban puts it, was a major reorientation in the thinking of western Europe. It was shown clearly by the encounter between the Italian Anselmo, better known as St Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury, and the monk Gaunilo. Anselm had sought proof – logical proof – for the existence of God in the fact that, because we can imagine a perfect being, that perfect being – God – must exist. Otherwise, if it did not, there would be a being more perfect than the one we have conceived. This seems mere wordplay to us, as it did to Gaunilo, who dryly pointed out that we can imagine an island more perfect than any that exists, but that doesn’t mean that the island actually exists. The point about the exchange, however, is that Anselm, a senior figure compared to the monk, published Gaunilo’s response, together with his own rejoinder. The debate assumed that one could talk about God in terms that were ‘reasonable’, that God could be treated like anything else, and that rank had little to do with authority.²³ This was new.

The four areas of inquiry which propelled the early universities were medicine, law, science and mathematics. Medicine and law became very popular in the High Middle Ages.²⁴ They were practical, offering well-paid careers with a stable position in the community. The ars dictaminis or dictamen, the art of composing letters and formal documents, became a specialised offshoot of law and rhetoric, and together the applied subjects of law, medicine and dictamen soon became the natural enemies of literary humanism, since they reflected the practical side of the emergent universities, in strong contrast to the quiet and disengaged nature of the study of classical antiquity. Thus the earliest universities were not planned – their vocational nature arose out of practical needs. So far as science was concerned, however, the universities had an uncertain birth owing to persistent clerical distrust of pagan authors. For example, Peter Comestor, chancellor of Notre Dame of Paris from 1164, preached that the classical authors might be useful background in the study of scripture but that many of their ‘outpourings’ were to be avoided. Around 1200, Alexander of Villedieu vilified the cathedral school of Orléans, an important centre of humanist studies before the mid-thirteenth century, dismissing it as a ‘pestiferous chair of learning . . . spreading contagion among the multitude’. He insisted that ‘nothing should be read which is contrary to the scriptures’.²⁵

This attitude spread and in the early years of the thirteenth century, Aristotle himself came under attack. From the early studies of logic, Aristotle’s books had been translated in growing numbers, especially his ‘nature’ books, about science, until his works formed what amounted to a complete philosophy and synthesis, compiled without any input from Christian beliefs. One historian says that the recovery of Aristotle’s works was a ‘turning point in the history of Western thought . . . paralleled only by the later impact of Newtonian science and Darwinism’.²⁶ At the University of Paris, certainly, the most intellectually exciting and troublesome community was the liberal arts faculty, where ‘philosophy was king’, where ‘the masters of arts were the permanent element of intellectual unrest and the driving force of intellectual revolutions’.²⁷ In fact, the liberal arts faculty almost became a university within a university, and as Aristotle’s works became available in Latin, the masters modified the curriculum to take account of this. Integrating the Philosopher’s works on logic was one thing, but problems soon loomed with his books on ‘nature’. In 1210 a local synod of bishops in Paris commanded that all study of Aristotle at Paris be halted. He was to be read neither privately nor taught publicly, ‘under penalty of excommunication’.²⁸ The pope supported this ban, in 1231 and again in 1263, and the bishop of Paris added his voice once more in 1277. Later, private study was allowed but not public instruction. The ban that the Church tried to exercise over Aristotle was yet another aspect of thought-control to add to those described in the previous chapter.

Other techniques of control were added. In 1231 it became a punishable offence to discuss scientific subjects in vernacular languages – the Church did not want ordinary people exposed to such ideas. But no ban could be total – after all, for some people banning works only made them more alluring. And Aristotle was not banned elsewhere – Toulouse, for example, or Oxford. The ban began to break down more comprehensively after 1242 when Albertus Teutonicus, remembered today as Albertus Magnus – Albert the Great – became the first German to occupy a chair of theology at Paris. A strong opponent of heresy, Albert was nonetheless very interested in Aristotle’s ideas – he thought the whole corpus should be available across Europe. For Albert, there were three ways to the truth: scriptural interpretation, logical reasoning and empirical experience. The latter two were of course both Aristotelian approaches, but Albert went one further: while allowing the Creator a role in the creation of the universe, he insisted that research (as we would say) into natural processes should be unhindered by theological considerations because, so far as these natural processes were concerned, ‘only experience provides certainty’.²⁹ ‘The proper concern of natural science is not what God could do if he wished, but what he has done; that is, what happens in the world “according to the inherent causes of nature”.’³⁰ Aristotle had said that ‘to know . . . is to understand the causes of things’.³¹

We see here, in Albertus, the first glimmerings of the separation of different ways of thinking. Albertus had a strong faith and it was that strong faith which allowed him to consider what Aristotle could add to orthodox belief to enrich understanding.

Others, however, were more radical. For example, one very controversial effect of this devotion to Aristotle was the so-called ‘double truth’ theory of the two scholars Siger of Brabant (d. 1284) and the Dane Bo, or in Latin, Boethius of Dacia. The ban on Aristotle at Paris University did not apply elsewhere in the city and this enabled the development of philosophy based on the Greek master’s ideas. The most important innovation of these two men, which anticipated the great divide which was to come, was to consider the possibility – radical for the time, for any time – that one thing could be true in philosophy, and another in theology. Boethius in particular argued that the philosopher should enjoy the fruits of his intelligence, to explore the world of nature – this world – but that these skills did not entitle him to explore, say, the origin of the world, or the beginning of time, or the mystery of creation, how something can come from nothing. These matters, like what happens at the Day of Judgement, matters of revelation, not reason, are therefore outside the realm of the philosopher – there are two sets of truth, those of the natural philosopher and those of the theologian. As with Albertus, this was a distinction between two areas of thought that represents a stage in the development of ideas about a secular world.

Many in the Church, however, found Siger even more troublesome, and this was because he seems to have relished the more disconcerting aspects of Aristotle’s teaching: that the world and the human race are eternal, that the behaviour of objects is governed by their nature, that free will is limited by necessity, that all humans share a single ‘intellective principle’. In his teaching he refused to spell out the implications of all this but it didn’t take a genius to read between the lines: no Creation, no Adam, no Last Judgement, no Divine Providence, no Incarnation, Atonement or Resurrection.³² This, of course, is what the orthodox clerics were worried about, this is why Aristotle had been banned, for where it might lead. In particular, Giovanni di Fidenza, who took the name Bonaventure and was another professor of theology at Paris, was disturbed by Aristotle’s insistence that, although God is the first cause of everything that exists, natural beings have their own causes and effects, which operate without divine intervention.³³ To Bonaventure, and many like him, such reasoning pointed to a Godless world and he therefore tried to amend Aristotle so that, for example, when a tree’s leaves turned brown, this was, he said, not due to some natural process but due instead to certain qualities built into the tree by God.

As these paragraphs show, the mid-thirteenth century was the high point of scholastic theology at Paris University, the high point of scholastic thinking in many ways, and it culminated in the great syntheses of Thomas Aquinas, the man who has been called ‘the most powerful western thinker between Augustine and Newton’. Aquinas’ great contribution was his attempt to reconcile Aristotle and Christianity, though as we shall see throughout the rest of this book, his Aristotelianisation of Christianity was more influential than his Christianisation of Aristotle. Born between Rome and Naples, the son of a count, Aquinas was a big man, deliberate in his movements and his thoughts and, at least to begin with, easy to underestimate. But Albertus, his teacher and master, appreciated his gifts and the big man did not disappoint.

In Aquinas’ view, there were only three truths that could not be proved by natural reason and therefore must be accepted. These were the creation of the universe, the nature of the Trinity, and Jesus’ role in salvation.³⁴ Beyond this, and more controversially and more influentially, Aquinas took Aristotle’s side against Augustine. Traditionally, as Augustine had argued, because of the Fall men and women are born to suffer in this world, and our only real hope for happiness is in heaven. Aristotle, on the other hand, had argued that this world, this life, offers countless opportunities for joy and happiness, ‘the most lasting and reliable of which is the joy of using our reason to learn and understand’.³⁵ Thomas amended this to say that we can use our reason to have a ‘foretaste’ of the afterlife – with relative happiness – right here on earth. The natural world, he said, ‘is not in any respect evil’.³⁶ How, he asked, could the body be evil when God had sanctified it with the incarnation of His Son? Moreover, Thomas thought that the body and soul were intimately linked. The soul was not a ghost in the machine, but took its form from the body as, say, a metal sculpture takes its form from the mould. This last was perhaps the most mystical aspect of his thinking.

In his day Aquinas was not seen as a radical, like Siger. For many, however, that made him more dangerous, not less. His was the reasonable face of medieval Aristotelianism, in particular his idea that this life was more important – because capable of more enjoyment than traditionalists allowed – and because Aristotle had so much to say about how this life might be enjoyed. By implication Aquinas downplayed the relative importance of the afterlife and clearly, over the ensuing decades and centuries, that had a big effect on the weakening authority of the Church.

To some extent, the universities were anticipated by the philosophical schools of Athens, dating from the fourth century BC, by the law school of Beirut, which flourished between the third and sixth centuries, and by the imperial university of Constantinople, founded in 425 and continuing intermittently until 1453. Medieval scholars were aware of these institutions and Alan Cobban says there was a notion of the translatio studii, which appeared in the Carolingian age, and which held that the centre of learning had passed from Athens, to Rome, to Constantinople, to Paris. ‘In this scheme the new universities were also the embodiment of the studium, one of three great powers by which Christian society was directed, the others being the spiritual (Sacerdotium) and the temporal (Imperium).’³⁷

The modern term ‘university’ appears to have been introduced accidentally, taken from the Latin universitas. But in the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries this word was used ‘to denote any aggregate or body of persons with common interests and independent legal status’ – it could be a craft guild or a municipal congregation, often with dress requirements.³⁸ It was not until the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that universitas came to be used in the sense we understand it today. Instead, the equivalent medieval term was studium generale. Studium meant a school with facilities for study, whereas generale referred to the ability of the school to attract students from beyond the local region. The term was first used in 1237 and the first papal document to employ the phrase dates from 1244 or 1245, in connection with the founding of the University of Rome.³⁹ Other terms in use were studium universale, studium solemne and studium commune but by the fourteenth century studium generale was used in connection with Bologna, Paris, Oxford, Padua, Naples, Valencia and Toulouse. The Siete Partidas (1256–1263), the legislative code of Alfonso X of Castile, lays out the legal basis of the early studium generale. Schools must have masters in each of the seven arts, for canon and civil law, and authority for the school could be granted only by the pope, the emperor or the king.⁴⁰ There was no mention of what later came to be regarded as a further requirement: faculties of theology, law and medicine as postgraduate centres of excellence. At the turn of the thirteenth century only Bologna, Paris, Oxford and Salerno offered consistent teaching in the higher disciplines.⁴¹

The first imperial university, in fact the first university of all to be founded by a deliberate act, was installed at Naples in 1224 by the emperor Frederick II. The first papal university was at Toulouse, authorised by Gregory IX in 1229 and founded, in part, to combat heretical belief. These gave birth to the notion that the authority to found studia generalia was vested only in papal or imperial prerogative, a concept that was accepted doctrine by the fourteenth century.⁴² This constitution was more important then than it would be today because the fledgling universities had earned a number of privileges which were not inconsiderable – two in particular are of interest. First, beneficed clergy had the right to receive the fruits of the benefice while studying at the studium. Since some courses of study lasted as long as sixteen years, this was no small thing. The second privilege was the ius ubique docendi, the right of any graduate from a studium generale to teach at any other university without further examination.⁴³ This went back to the idea of the studium – learning – as a ‘third force’ in society, which was understood to be universal, transcending the boundaries of nation and race. This idea of a commonwealth of teachers, moving around Europe, never really materialised. Each of the new establishments regarded itself as superior to the others and insisted on examinations for the graduates of other universities.⁴⁴

The earliest universities were those at Salerno, Bologna, Paris and Oxford. Salerno, however, was rather different from the other three. Though not as important as Toledo, it played a role in the translation of Greek and Arabic science and philosophy texts but it did not provide superior faculty teaching in any discipline other than medicine.⁴⁵ It was in fact noted more for its practical medical skill rather than for anything else (it was surrounded by mineral springs where the lame and blind foregathered). The school was an assembly of medical practitioners, and though there must have been some kind of teaching there was no formal guild association. Nonetheless, the first signs of a medical literature occur at Salerno in the eleventh century – encyclopaedias, treatises on herbalism and gynaecology (a number of women doctors, including Trotula, practised in the town). There were also numerous works of Arabic science and medicine and some Greek medical texts which had been translated into Arabic.⁴⁶ These texts were made available mainly thanks to Constantine the African, a scholar of Arabic descent who settled in Salerno c. 1077 before moving north to the monastery of Monte Cassino where he continued translating until his death in 1087. The most influential Arabic treatises which he rendered into Latin were the Viaticus of al-Jafarr, Isaac Judaeus’ work on diet, fevers and urine and the comprehensive medical encyclopaedia of Haly Abbas compiled in Baghdad one hundred and fifty years before. Constantine’s translations provided a new impetus for the study of Greek medicine which resulted in the Salernitan doctors writing scores of new medical works in the following century. Salerno thus developed a medical curriculum that, after it was exported to Paris and other universities, was expanded under the influence of the new logic and scholasticism.⁴⁷ These advances progressed most at Bologna and Montpellier. The earliest reference for human dissection occurred at Bologna c. 1300. This may well have been due to forensic investigations necessary for legal processes. (In due course the post-mortem examination became a convenient part of anatomical study.) The earliest text on surgery is the anonymous treatise now titled the Bamberg Surgery (c. 1150). Among the conditions described are fractures and dislocations, surgical lesions of the eye and ear, diseases of the skin, haemorrhoids, sciatica and hernia.⁴⁸ There is a description for the treatment of goitre with substances containing iodine, and for a form of surgical anaesthesia, a ‘soporific sponge’ soaked in hyoscyamus and poppy.⁴⁹

Bologna, the oldest studium generale of all, belies the overall picture of medieval universities, in that it was a lay creation designed to meet the career needs of laymen who wanted to study Roman law. Only in the 1140s was canon law, the preserve of clerical teachers and students, introduced at Bologna.⁵⁰

A boost to law was provided by the polemical turmoil arising from the Investiture Struggle. ‘As Roman law was the best available ideological weapon with which to confront papal hierocratic doctrine, this system became the natural concern of laymen involved in generating an embryonic political theory to refute the claims of papal governmental thought.’⁵¹ But it was the teaching of one of these early jurists, Irnerius (possibly a Latinisation of the German Werner), who taught at Bologna around 1087, which enabled Bologna to surpass the other fledgling Italian law schools, such as Ravenna or Pavia. In commenting on Justinian’s Corpus iuris civilis, Irnerius used a method of critical analysis similar to Abelard’s Sic et Non and in so doing succeeded in synthesising Roman law better than anyone had done before. The basic Roman legal texts were made widely available in a form suitable for professional study, as a particular area of higher education, and this established Bologna as a pre-eminent centre for civilian studies to which students began to migrate from distant parts of Europe.⁵² Bologna’s reputation was further enhanced when, only a little later, in the 1140s and the 1150s, canon law studies were added as a major academic counterpart. This development was spearheaded by Gratian, who was a teaching master of canon law at the Bolognese monastic school of San Felice. His Concordia Discordantium Canonum (the Decretum), completed c. 1140, paralleled in canon law what Irnerius had done for Roman law – producing a convenient synthesis appropriate for academic consumption. The impact of these changes may be seen from the fact that, in the two centuries following, a high percentage of popes were jurists, several of whom had been law professors at Bologna.⁵³

A different achievement of Bologna was the Habitas – an academic constitution issued by the emperor Frederick I at Roncaglia in November 1158, apparently at the request of the scholars of the studium, and which was confirmed by the papacy. This came to acquire a fundamental academic significance which far outweighed the original intention, leading to a system of scholastic privilege which eventually ranked alongside the older-established privilegium clericorum.⁵⁴ In fact, the Habitas was ever after venerated as the origin of academic freedom ‘in much the same way as Magna Carta became an indispensable reference point for English liberties’.⁵⁵ It began as an attempt by the Crown to reinforce the lay lawyers against the gains being made by the canon lawyers, which fuelled the Investiture Struggle. In the Habitas the emperor is referred to as the minister or servant of God, a doctrine which reflects the idea that imperial power was derived directly from God, not through the intermediary of the Church.⁵⁶ This set of ideas was refined as time passed to deny the bishops any power over the universities.⁵⁷

The papal/imperial struggles brought added civil strife to several Italian cities, Bologna being one of them. These near-anarchical conditions promoted the formation of mutual protection associations, known as tower societies or confraternities. It was in this context that the schools of Bologna were founded and this is why Bologna University had the flavour that it did – i.e., controlled by students. The student-university idea at Bologna owes a great deal to the contemporary concept of Italian citizenship. In a country increasingly fragmented by war, this was a valuable commodity. In a situation where the status of citizen provided personal protection, noncitizens – lacking such security – were vulnerable and it was only natural for foreign law students to band together to form a protective association, or universitas. Later, these subdivided into national associations, under the direction of rectors.⁵⁸

If the papal/imperial rivalry was one factor giving Bologna its special character, another was economics. The city, realising the economic advantages of having a university in the commune, soon passed statutes prohibiting the masters from decamping anywhere else.⁵⁹ The students, aware of the power this gave them, responded by setting up, in 1193, a universitas scolarium, the intention of which was to establish a regime where students held on to power in all its guises. Under this system, contractual arrangements between individual students and doctors were replaced by organised (and frequently militant) student guilds (universitates). Such was the success of this arrangement that the universitates were eventually recognised by both the commune of Bologna and the papacy.⁶⁰ It is worth pointing out that ‘student power’ in those days owed something to the fact that a good number of Bologna law students were older than students are now. Many were in their mid-twenties and some were closer to thirty. Many already had an undergraduate arts degree before arriving in Bologna and a good few held ecclesiastical benefices. On top of this, their legal studies might last for up to ten years and, because of their benefices, many were well-off, so that their presence was a significant economic factor in city affairs.⁶¹ All of which had a major impact on university life. Students elected their teachers several months in advance of the academic year and upon election the doctors had to take an oath of submission. A lecturer was fined if he started his lectures even a minute late or if he continued after the allotted time.⁶² At the start of the academic year the students and doctors agreed on the curriculum to be followed and terms were divided into two-weekly puncta so that students knew when particular material was due to be taught. The students continuously rated the masters’ performances, and could fine anyone they felt fell below par.⁶³ Any doctor who didn’t attract at least five students to his course was deemed absent and fined anyway. If a teacher had to leave the city for some reason he was forced to lodge a deposit against his return.⁶⁴ As other universities proliferated, Bologna found that this strict regime was losing its allure – for teachers at any rate – and, from the late thirteenth century, the commune began offering salaries for lecturers. From then on the students gradually lost power.⁶⁵

The form of the lecture also became established in the twelfth century. Beginning with the Bible, the texts were studied from four points of view: subject matter, immediate aim, underlying purpose, what branch of philosophy it belonged to. The master began by discussing these aspects before giving a gloss on individual words and expressions, the whole process being known as the lectio (‘reading’) or lectura. To begin with, students were not allowed to take notes but as topics became more complex it became necessary to write down what was said.

The studium generale at Bologna was closed several times in the Middle Ages. The reasons varied from plague to papal interdict. Given the inherent conflict between canon and civil law(yers), this was perhaps inevitable. But as a direct result several daughter studia were founded: Vicenza: 1204; Arezzo: 1215; Padua: 1222; Siena: c. 1246 and Pisa: 1343.

Paris, the next-oldest studium generale after Bologna, differed (as we have seen) in that its dominant speciality was theology. ‘Paris university provides both the earliest and the most dramatic example in European history of the struggle for university autonomy in the face of ecclesiastical domination.’⁶⁶ In this case the immediate ecclesiastical barrier to the exercise of university freedom was the chancellor and chapter of the cathedral of Notre Dame whose schools, dating from the eleventh century and situated in the enclosed area known as the cloître, were the primordial root of the studium. ‘As these schools grew in reputation they were infiltrated by numerous outside students and this led to disorder. When the bishop and chapter curtailed the opportunities for study in the cloister, the students migrated to the left bank of the Seine, the present Latin Quarter. By the twelfth century there were many schools, dispersed on and around the bridges of the Seine, specialising in theology, grammar and logic.’⁶⁷

Paris, unlike in Bologna, was from the first a university of masters. Grouped around Notre Dame, the Paris scholars were content with their clerical status because of the privileges and independence this gave them (they were exempt from certain taxes and military duty). This meant that the university in Paris was an autonomous enclave, protected by both the king and the pope. This autonomy, within the Paris urban area, helps account for the university’s pre-eminence in theology and, later on, put it at the forefront of the debate for academic freedom.⁶⁸ As in Bologna the Capetian kings of France quickly recognised the economic value of the academic population and from the start pursued a tolerant and positive attitude towards both students and masters.⁶⁹

In Paris, the arts faculty was much the largest. And in fact, because Paris was so large, each nation of students had its own school, with a rector who collected the fees. These schools were located, mainly, on the left bank, in the rue de Fouarre. In these different schools – French, Norman, Picard, English-German – lay the germ of the idea of colleges. The impact of the Hundred Years War hit Paris University badly, as foreign students drained away. Partly as a result of this, universities sprang up elsewhere – Spain, Britain, Germany and Holland, Scandinavia.

The original English universities, Oxford and Cambridge, differed from those on the continent in that they grew up in towns which had no cathedrals.⁷⁰ Oxford, in a way, evolved where it did by accident. In the twelfth century there were several places in England where a studium generale might have developed – there were, for example, good cathedral schools in Lincoln, Exeter and Hereford. York and Northampton were other possibilities.⁷¹ One theory has it that Oxford was initiated around 1167 by an exodus of scholars from Paris.⁷² Another theory contends that at first the Northampton school was pre-eminent but the town was hostile, so the scholars left en masse and decamped, around 1192, to Oxford, which was conveniently located, being a meeting point of several routes between, for example, London, Bristol, Southampton, Northampton, Bedford, Worcester and Warwick.⁷³

It is also possible – some would say likely – that the Northampton scholars were attracted by the remarkable teachers who already existed at Oxford. These included: Theobaldus Stampensis in 1117 and possibly as early as 1094; Robert Pullen, a pupil of John of Salisbury, in 1133; and Geoffrey of Monmouth, who was resident at Oxford between 1129 and 1151.⁷⁴ ‘The earliest specific evidence for the existence of several faculties and a large concourse of masters and students at Oxford derives from the account of Gerald of Wales c. 1185 of the reading of his Topographia Hibernica before the assembled scholars, a feat which occupied three days. In c. 1190 Oxford is described as a studium commune by a Freisland student then studying [in the town] . . . This is reinforced by the known presence in Oxford, towards the end of the century, of a number of celebrated scholars, including Daniel of Morley and Alexander Nequam.’⁷⁵ Basically, Oxford was modelled on the Paris system (i.e., led by masters, not students), but it never attracted an international cache of students like Paris did. In organisational terms a distinction was made between northerners (boreales) and southerners (australes, south of the river Nene in what is now Cambridgeshire).⁷⁶

Whereas Bologna’s main speciality was law and in Paris it was logic and theology, so Oxford became known for its expertise in mathematics and the natural sciences.⁷⁷ As was mentioned briefly earlier on, this was due in no small part to a number of itinerant Englishmen in the twelfth century who had travelled widely to familiarise themselves with scientific data, revealed through the great translations in Toledo, Salerno and Sicily. Oxford was also the beneficiary of the papal ban on the teaching of the New Aristotle imposed at Paris in the early thirteenth century.

Robert Grosseteste is now seen as the key figure in the Oxford scientific movement (he made the study of Aristotle required reading). Bishop of Lincoln from 1235 to 1253, he was also an early chancellor of the university.⁷⁸ Grosseteste’s translations (he knew Greek, Hebrew and French) and his assimilation of the new Aristotelian material led to two advances, both of which had a seminal influence on the growth of science in the Middle Ages. These were, first, the application of mathematics to the natural sciences as a means of description and explanation; and second, a stress upon observation and experiment as the essential method of testing a given hypothesis. ‘These principles transformed the study of scientific data from a fairly random exercise to an integrated mathematical inquiry into physical phenomena based upon the tripartite cycle of observation, hypothesis and experimental verification.’⁷⁹

He was followed by Roger Bacon, who runs him close as the first scientist in the sense that we now use that term. Having studied under Grosseteste at Oxford, Bacon lectured at Paris, where he was every bit as contentious as Abelard before him. He was convinced that, someday, scientific knowledge would give humanity mastery over nature and he forecast submarines, automobiles and airplanes (together with devices for walking on water). Like Grosseteste he thought that mathematics was the hidden language of nature and that light, optics, then called ‘perspective’, would give access to the mind of the Creator (he thought that rays travelled in straight lines and had a finite, but very fast, speed). Bacon’s thinking was a definite step forward, between the religious mind and the modern scientific way of thinking.

Between the early fourteenth century and 1500 the number of universities grew from about fifteen or twenty to about seventy, though Germany and Spain lagged behind elsewhere.⁸⁰ Most of the fifteenth-century universities were founded as secular institutions, by municipalities, and were only confirmed by the papacy. They included Treviso (1318), Grenoble (1339), Pavia (1381), Orange (1365), Prague (1347–1348), Valence (1452) and Nantes (1461). This multiplication enabled far more students to attend a local establishment, which in turn helped confirm the secular nature of the newer universities. Many of the fifteenth-century French studia – among them Aix (1409), Dôle (1422), Poitiers (1431) and Bourges (1464) – escaped ecclesiastical interference from the beginning, as was the case in Germany, Bohemia and the Low Countries. Vienna (1365), Heidelberg (1385) and Leipzig (1409) were founded by local rulers, whereas Cologne (1388) and Rostock (1419) were sponsored by town authorities. In the main, the northern universities were organised on Parisian lines, as a masters’ university, whereas the southern European establishments were modelled on the Bolognese pattern, as a students’ university.⁸¹

Medieval universities had no formal entrance requirements. A prospective student simply had to demonstrate a proficiency in Latin sufficient to understand the lectures. (He was also expected to converse in Latin while inside the university precinct.) There was no obligation to sit a written examination for a degree, but the student was assessed at every point in his academic career. ‘Wastage was higher than today and universities felt no responsibility to shepherd someone to a dubious degree.’⁸² Apart from attending lectures (obligatory, in the mornings, with no distractions), a student was also required to attend the public disputations which each master delivered once a week in the afternoon. These disputations fell into two types: de problemate, which comprised logical matters; and de quaestione, which related to mathematics, natural sciences, metaphysics and other areas of quadrivium study. Advanced students had to contribute to the magisterial disputations as a requirement of their degree. Even if many of the undergraduates were too young to make much of a contribution to the formal disputations, their very presence at these firework displays helped them transcend the rigid straitjacket of their hitherto ‘authority-dominated’ education. The most liberating of these occasions were the disputations de quolibet.⁸³ At these times, any proposition, regardless of authority, could be argued and any question, ecclesiastical or political, and however controversial, could be considered. They were open to everyone.⁸⁴

Parallel with the rise of the universities, another major change was overtaking Europe, less coherent, less specific, less sensitive in either religious or political terms, but ultimately just as practical and certainly no less profound. This was the rise of quantification. In the half-century between, say, 1275 and 1325, a whole raft of innovations were made right across the board in Europe that totally changed man’s habits and the way he thought about the world. According to Alfred W. Crosby, ‘there was nothing quite like this half century again until the turn of the twentieth century, when the radio, radioactivity, Einstein, Picasso, and Schönberg swept Europe into a similar revolution’.⁸⁵ During this narrow isthmus of time, and everywhere one turned, life was becoming more quantified and quantifiable. Some historians see in this a major change, which propelled Europe to advance over China, India and the Islamic world.

Until this point, space and time had been vague. For historical and religious reasons that were ‘obvious’ to Europeans, Jerusalem was the centre of the world, which was divided into four kingdoms derived from a passage in the book of Daniel. Time was still not universally understood as divided into BC and AD. Some preferred a threefold division – the Creation to the Ten Commandments, the Commandments to the Incarnation and the Incarnation to the Second Coming.⁸⁶ It was widely understood that salvation was impossible for those who had lived before Jesus – which is why, in The Divine Comedy, Dante places Homer, Socrates and Plato in Limbo, rather than in Purgatory or Paradise. Although ‘hours’ existed, the medieval day was in practice divided into seven canonical ‘hours’ – matins, prime, tierce, sext, none (from which the English word ‘noon’ derives), vespers and compline, when prayers were to be said.⁸⁷ Everything below the heavens was made of the four elements and was changeable. But the heavens were perfect, formed a perfect sphere about the earth and were made of the fifth and perfect element, ‘which was changeless, stainless, noble, and entirely superior to the four elements with which humans were in contact’.⁸⁸ This idea is reflected in our modern English word quintessence.

Number itself was an approximate notion in the Middle Ages. Recipes for making such things as glass, or the metal parts of organs, rarely included precise numbers – instead phrases such as ‘a bit more’ or ‘a medium-sized piece’ were accepted as sufficient. A large group of buildings, such as in the city of Paris, were described as like ‘the stalks in a field’. Roman numerals were still in use, making arithmetic difficult and they were not always written as we understand them: MCCLXVII might be: x.cc.l.xvij. It was the practice to end large numbers with a ‘j’ so that additions could not be fraudulently introduced. Cardinal and ordinal numbers would be represented thus: v^o and v^m.⁸⁹ In finger reckoning beyond ten, someone pointed to the joints of his or her fingers for multiples of ten, and for very large numbers – for instance, 50,000 – one pointed one’s thumb at one’s navel. ‘Complaints were made that the higher numbers required “the gesticulations of dancers”.’⁹⁰

But, and this is the main point, at the end of the thirteenth century society in Europe changed from one where ideas mainly concerned qualitative perception to quantitative in all aspects. This may have had something to do with population changes – the West’s population at least doubled between 1000 and 1340. Either way, there was introduced what Jacques le Goff has called ‘an atmosphere of calculation’ into European life.⁹¹ This too had a great deal to do with the rediscovery of Aristotle. Alfred Crosby draws attention to Peter Lombard’s standard textbook of theology, Summa sententiarum, written in the mid-1100s, which had only three quotations from secular philosophers, amid thousands from the Church Fathers, whereas Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa theologiae, written between 1266 and 1274, had 3,500 quotes from Aristotle alone, 1,500 of them from works unknown in the West a hundred years before.⁹²

It was now, for instance, that literacy surged, partly stimulating and partly caused by changes in writing (the stabilisation of word order – subject–verb–object – was also achieved). The best-known example of this is the change between Innocent III (1198–1216) who dispatched at most a few thousand letters a year, and Boniface VIII (1294–1303) who wrote as many as 50,000. M. T. Clanchy reports the extraordinary detail that, on average, England’s royal chancery in the 1220s used 3.63 pounds of wax per week for sealing documents, but that this had risen to 31.9 pounds per week in the late 1260s. At that stage there were few or no divisions between words, sentences or paragraphs (the Romans had abandoned word separation). In general, this meant that reading was difficult and conducted aloud. It was only in the early fourteenth century that the new cursive writing (see here) was combined with word separation, punctuation, chapter headings, running headlines, cross references and other devices we now take for granted (plus some that we don’t, like a half-circle, ⊃, to indicate that a word was continued on the next line). Around 1200 Stephen Langton (a future archbishop of Canterbury) devised the chapter and verse system for the books of the Bible, which until then were almost entirely undifferentiated. Libraries had traditionally been organised along religious lines – the Bible came first, then the Church Fathers, with the secular books on the liberal arts last. But beyond this broad agreement the actual order of many texts was arbitrary and unreliable, and so it was now that the scholars introduced alphabetisation. Everyone understood it and the order implied no doctrinal significance.⁹³ In the same way scholars also introduced the analytic table of contents. Each of these innovations changed the experience of reading, in particular from reading aloud to reading in silence. In 1412 Oxford and in 1431 Angers introduced the regulation that libraries were to be quiet places – hitherto they had been anything but. In the same way, book learning displaced the emulation of charismatic figures as the central feature of education. This was extremely important, in that reading became a private and therefore a potentially heretical act (especially important in fifteenth-century England). There is also evidence that the privacy provided by silent reading led to an increase in erotica.⁹⁴

The first clocks in towns had no faces or hands but were just bells. (‘Clock’ is related to the French cloche and the German Glocke, which mean ‘bell’.) Bell clocks were very popular from the start. A petition for a city clock at Lyons read: ‘If such a clock were to be made, more merchants would come to the fairs, the citizens would be very consoled, cheerful and happy and would live a more orderly life, and the town would gain in decoration.’⁹⁵ Many towns, even small ones, agreed to tax themselves so that they could have a clock. The mechanical clock was probably invented in the 1270s (the same decade as spectacles), and Dante refers to clocks in Paradiso, written about 1320. Although China had clocks before Europe, it was the West’s enthusiasm for equal hours that changed perceptions of time – equal hours were in general usage in Germany in the 1330s.⁹⁶ Jean Froissart, historian of the Hundred Years War, began his chronicle using canonical hours, but shifted to equal hours in the course of his narrative. It was not long before the town clock determined when the working day should start and end.

The discovery of perspective (considered later in more detail in Chapter 19, on ideas about beauty), and its relation to mathematics, was another aspect of the quantification of life that took place about this time. We see the first hints of it in Giotto (1266/7 or 1276–1337), then with Taddeo Gaddi (d. 1366) and it was firmly in place by the time of Piero della Francesca (1410/1420–1492). Each of these discoveries and applications complemented one another, so much so that Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) was moved to remark ‘God is absolute precision itself.’⁹⁷ This form of thinking would result in the work of Nicholas Copernicus (1473–1543), which helped start the scientific revolution and made space both much bigger and yet more precise.

Al-Khwarizmi’s book on Hindu numerals, and algebra, was translated into Latin by Robert of Chester in the twelfth century and from then on the influence of the new numerals began to grow (the last mathematics textbook to use Roman numerals was written in 1514).⁹⁸ There was, however, a curious cross-over period when people in Europe used both systems. One writer wrote the year as MCCCC94, that is, two years after Columbus discovered America, while Dirk Bouts dated his altarpiece at Louvain as MCCCC4XVII, which probably means 1447. The operational signs for arithmetic came later. In the last half of the fifteenth century Italians and others were still using for ‘plus’ and for ‘minus’. The familiar ‘plus’ and ‘minus’ signs, + and –, appeared in print in Germany in 1489. Their origins, Alfred Crosby says, are obscure: ‘Perhaps they sprang from the simple marks that warehousemen chalked on bales and boxes to indicate they were over or under weight.’⁹⁹ In 1542, Robert Recorde in England announced that ‘thys figure +, whiche betokeneth to muche, as this lyne, – plaine without a crosse lyne, betokeneth to little’. And it appears to be Recorde who, in the sixteenth century, invented the ‘equals’ sign, =, to avoid repetition of the words ‘is equal to’ and because ‘noe 2 thynges can be moare equalle’.¹⁰⁰ The × sign for multiplication was not settled for centuries: to begin with in medieval manuscripts it had as many as eleven different meanings. Fractions were a function of trade and, in the Middle Ages, could be very complicated, such asand, in one case,. – Decimals existed in embryo but the system was not finally completed for another three hundred years (see Chapter 23).

With the arrival of Hindu-Arabic numerals, algebra was at last capable of development. In the early thirteenth century Leonardo Fibonacci used a letter in place of a number, but never developed this idea. His contemporary, Jordanus Nemorarius, used letters as symbols for known and unknown quantities but he had no signs for plus or minus, or multiplication. It was the French algebraists in the sixteenth century who fully codified this system. Francis Vieta used vowels for unknowns and consonants for knowns, and then, in the seventeenth century, Descartes introduced the modern system, a and b and their neighbours at the beginning of the alphabet for knowns, and x and y and their neighbours at the end of the alphabet for unknowns.¹⁰¹

Alongside these changes in writing and mathematics ran parallel developments in music notation. Gregorian chant, the most famous form of medieval church music, is characteristically nonmensural: the structure of its musical line is determined by the flow of the Latin words. However, by, roughly speaking, the tenth century the number of different chants had grown so much that no one person could remember them all and a system was needed to record them. To begin with they produced what one scholar has called ‘pneumatic notation’ – a system of marks to indicate breathing, when the voice should rise in pitch (an acute accent, ´), or drop (grave, `), or rise and fall (circumflex, ˆ). This was improved when the monks lightly traced one and then two or more horizontal lines across the page to make the high and low notes easier to recognise – this was the beginning of the staff or stave. The staff is traditionally credited to the Benedictine choirmaster, Guido of Arezzo, who, whether or not he invented it, certainly standardised it. He famously remarked, about his fellow choristers, ‘we often seem not to praise God but to struggle among ourselves’.¹⁰² With the new methods Guido said he could produce a good singer in two years rather than in ten. It was Guido who noticed that in the familiar hymn Ut queant laxis, sung for the feast of John the Baptist, the tones rose as in the staff:

Ut queant laxis Resonare fibris

Mira gestorum Famuli tuorum

Solve polluti Labii reatum

Sancte Iohannes¹⁰

The Italic notes above, ut, re, mi, fa, sol and la, became the basis of the elementary methods of teaching notes that all children now learn, with do replacing ut later on, possibly because the t of ut was unsingable.¹⁰⁴

The basics of Gregorian chant were the tenor voices (from the Latin tenere, to hold), which formed the cantus firmus (firm song) or, as we might say, the basic drone. From the late ninth century, other – higher – voices began to break away, though at first they kept in parallel. Later still, they broke away more dramatically and this formed the basis of Western polyphonic music, which also appears to have been the first music to have been specifically composed, written down, in note form, rather than evolved through trial and error with voices. This occurred most of all in Paris, where the profession of musician first emerged. Music was part of the quadrivium, one of the advanced mathematical arts in which all advanced scholars were trained in the Middle Ages. Perotin, of the Notre Dame school, introduced rests (a concept possibly derived from the zero), while Franco of Cologne codified the notation system, determining time values for all notes and rests. He outlined four single-note signs in music notation – the double long, the long, the breve and the semibreve, which were exact multiples of each other. The basic unit was a tempus, defined as ‘the interval in which the smallest pitch or smallest note is fully presented or can be presented’.¹⁰⁵ The new music – polyphonic music, written down, offering far more control over fine detail – became known as ars nova, compared with ars antiqua. Not everyone liked the new music, including – perhaps inevitably – the pope. In Docta sanctorum patrum, the first papal proclamation dealing with music, he raged against polyphony, which was forbidden in churches.¹⁰⁶

The final important element in the growth of quantification was the introduction of double-entry book-keeping and its associated techniques. A continuous record of the books belonging to Francesco di Marco Datini, a merchant of Prato, from 1366 to 1410, shows that Hindu-Arabic numerals began to appear about 1366 and that until 1383 the accounts were kept in narrative form. After that date, however, the practice changed and assets and liabilities began to be kept in parallel columns either on the same page, or on facing pages. From then on it was immediately obvious, as it had not been obvious before, whether a business was in profit or loss.¹⁰⁷ In Tuscany, the technique was known as alla veneziana, in the Venetian manner, suggesting it was in use there earlier. Balancing the books has since become a sacred ceremony of our age but it was an important innovation for the age of discovery, which enabled men to keep control over their enterprises as businesses ventured thousands of miles around the world.

The spread of quantification, no less than the spread of learning, was amplified and accelerated by the invention of printing. In the thirteenth century the majority of students could not afford to buy copies of the texts they studied, at least not without great sacrifice, because of high manuscript price levels. Consequently, the student was very dependent on the reading and expounding of the texts in the university schools. The situation was eased in the later thirteenth century by the growth of cheaper, utilitarian methods of manuscript production, encouraged and then closely controlled by the universities.¹⁰⁸ The system was based on the multiple copying of exemplars, which were accurate copies of the texts and commentaries used in teaching. Each exemplar was divided into separate pieces or peciae, usually of four folios each (eight pages), and relating to different portions of the text. Several copyists could therefore work on the same exemplar, each reproducing a different pecia. The system enabled students to buy or hire relatively cheap copies of that particular section. The freer circulation of texts relieved the student of his reliance on the lecturer’s every word, lessened the strain on his memory, and permitted study in a more relaxed and private environment.¹⁰⁹

Before the introduction of paper, vellum books were expensive but not that expensive. Claims by some modern scholars that as many as a thousand animal skins were needed for each book are wide of the mark. If the average area of a skin was about half a square metre, it would make, roughly, twelve to fifteen pages of 24 × 16 cm, meaning that ten to twelve skins were needed for a 150-page book. It was still a lot. As the appetite for reading grew, as the universities became more popular, and more populous, so the demand for books rose and, as edition sizes increased, vellum or parchment books became less and less practicable.¹¹⁰ In each university town a guild of scriveners or stationers was formed, which joined the scribes or copyists and the booksellers together and they often became quasi-official adjuncts to the university, with the right to be tried by university courts (this was partly to do with the fact that the university authorities insisted on inspecting texts for doctrinal accuracy).¹¹¹ The system was fairly efficient – more than two thousand copies of Aristotle’s works have come down to us from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It also suggests that a new reading public emerged in the thirteenth century.

Paper was in widespread use, at least in Italy, by the fourteenth century. Papermaking factories were generally upstream from towns, because the water was cleaner, and it was now that rag-and-bone men became familiar (it was a lucrative trade) and when even old rope became valuable (hence the phrase ‘money for old rope’). Paper-makers’ guilds were formed from the turn of the fifteenth century and they too, like scriveners and booksellers, had a close association with the universities.¹¹²

The ‘discovery’ of printing in the West depended on three innovations: movable type cast in metal; a fat-based ink; the press. Among the precursors we may mention the goldsmiths, who knew how to make stamps which were used to ornament the leather covers of books; pewter makers, who had die stamps, and thirteenth-century metal founders, who knew how to use punches engraved in relief to produce clay moulds from whose hollow matrices they made the relief inscriptions on crests.¹¹³ And of course the production of coins had used dies struck by a hammer. The principles of printing were there for everyone to see.

With this as background, we may move on to the famous lawsuit which took place in Strasbourg in 1439. The somewhat enigmatic documents which have survived indicate that a certain Johann Gensfleisch, also known as Gutenberg, a goldsmith, had entered into a partnership with three others, Hans Riff, Andreas Dritzehn and Andreas Heilmann, whereby he was perfecting a number of secret processes and they were supporting him financially. The lawsuit arose after Dritzehn died and his heirs wanted to take his place. These secret processes included the polishing of precious stones, the manufacture of mirrors and a new art which involved the use of a press, some ‘pieces’ or Stücke, either separate or cast together, some forms made of lead, and finally ‘things related to the action of the press’. Gutenberg was not the only one experimenting with printing. Another goldsmith, Procopius Waldvogel of Prague, entered into an agreement with the citizens of Avignon in the mid-1440s to construct some ‘iron forms . . . pertinent to writing’. This too is enigmatic and the first undisputed mention of printing is found in the Cologne Chronicle of 1499, where the writer says he has been in touch with one Ulrich Zell, the first printer in Cologne, who was in touch with Schoeffer, one of Gutenberg’s partners. He wrote: ‘The noble art of printing was first invented at Mainz in Germany. It came to us in the Year of Our Lord 1440 and from then until 1450 the art and all that is connected with it was being continually improved . . . Although the art was discovered in Mainz, as we have said, the first trials were carried out in Holland in a Donatus printed there before that time. The commencement of the art dates from these books; actually it is now much more authoritative and delicate than it was in its first manner.’ This controversy, as to whether Holland or Mainz was the site of the first printing, has never been satisfactorily resolved.¹¹⁴ But Mainz was without question the cradle of the first printing industry.

Gutenberg appears to have returned to Mainz from Strasbourg in the late 1440s, where he teamed up with Johann Fust, a rich citizen who was his new backer, and Peter Schoeffer, an erstwhile student at the University of Paris who may have been a copyist before he turned printer. All seems to have gone well until 1455, when Fust and Gutenberg fell out and there was another lawsuit. Gutenberg lost, had to repay the interest on his loan, and what remained of the capital, and Fust and Schoeffer went on without him. On 14 October 1457, the first printed book that can be dated came from the new press. This was the so-called Mainz Psalter, the first product of a business that was to flourish for more than a hundred years. Lucien Febvre judges that the Psalter was of such a quality that it cannot have been the first attempt, and it is now more or less agreed among historians that other presses were in operation between 1450 and 1455 producing many books on a commercial scale – grammars, calendars, Missals, the famous 42-line and 36-line three-volume Bibles.¹¹⁵ Gutenberg later got into debt but after that he was ennobled by the archbishop elector of Mainz, for personal services – so perhaps he installed a printing press. There was no uniformity in letter formation and none was agreed until the eighteenth century in the French Enlightenment, when a standard measure, ‘the point’, was adopted. This was 1/144 the size of the king’s foot and is still in use today.¹¹⁶

At the time printing came in, four types of script were popular. These were ‘black letter’ gothic, favoured by scholars, a larger gothic, less rounded with more straight uprights, a ‘bastard gothic’, used in luxury books, and ‘littera antique’, the roman script used by the humanists. Inspired by the Carolingian miniscule, this was made fashionable by Petrarch. It was also associated with a cursive script, the Cancelleresca, based on the handwriting popular in the Vatican Chancellery – which was the origin of italic. Roman script was also made popular by Petrarch, who was an enthusiastic calligrapher; he and others wanted to give to classical texts – many newly discovered – a physical appearance closer to their original look.¹¹⁷ But the triumph of roman and italic had a great deal to do with the famous Venetian printer Aldus Manutius. He had roman type, and italic, cut in 1501 by Francesco Griffo after a cancelleria script, which dramatically shortened the space which text occupied. These Venetian types were quickly adopted in Germany and France and soon became standard. For a while the universities continued to stick with gothic but in the vernacular literatures roman was preferred. From the middle of the sixteenth century, however, roman encroached more and more on the scholars’ domain. Aldus also introduced pagination, though that didn’t become customary until the second quarter of the sixteenth century.

With printing, books ceased to be precious objects. In owning books, readers wanted to be able to carry texts with them on journeys, and so they were produced in smaller and smaller sizes. Quarto books (folded once, to provide four pages) and octavo (folded twice, to produce eight) were printed from the beginning but again it was Aldus who, anxious to ease the reading of classical authors, launched his famous ‘portable’ collection, a format which was widely taken up by others. By the sixteenth century, therefore, the book business was divided into ponderous learned tomes intended for libraries and smaller literary or polemical works designed for the general public.¹¹⁸

It was in the nature of publishing that daring books would sell better because of the scandals they caused, with the result that the early publishers often sheltered writers suspected of heresy. Since they were the first people to read new manuscripts, publishers naturally kept abreast of fresh ideas and frequently were the first to be convinced by new arguments. In this way, printers were among the first converts to Protestantism. But they were also the most vulnerable to victimisation – they had the plant, and their names were on the title-pages of their books. It was only too easy for the Inquisition to argue that the easiest way to root out heresy was to close down the presses that were disseminating these ideas. As a result, in the early sixteenth century many printers were forced to flee France in particular to avoid spies, informers and censors. Augereau was just one publisher burned at the stake. Étienne Dolet was the best-known ‘martyr of the book’, a writer-turned-bookseller-and-printer, who worked for Gryphe as well as writing his own books and carrying on a dispute with Erasmus. But in 1542 he published several suspect religious works and when the authorities, alarmed, searched his premises they found a copy of a book by Calvin. Dolet was burned at the stake in August 1544, along with his books.

To begin with, in the early days of printing, authors were not paid by publishers. They received several free copies of their works and would send them to rich patrons, with elaborate dedications, in the hope of receiving payment in that way. As often as not this worked and ‘as few authors starved as later’. Some authors were forced to agree with their publishers to buy so many copies of their own books, as did the author Serianus who in 1572 bought 186 copies (out of an edition of 300) of his Commentarii in Levitici Librum.¹¹⁹ By the end of the sixteenth, and certainly by the start of the seventeenth century, however, the modern practice had been introduced, of authors selling their manuscripts to publishers. As reading became more common, and more and more copies of books were sold, advances went up and by the seventeenth century they could be considerable (reaching, in France for example, tens of thousands of francs).¹²⁰ Copyright was introduced around the middle of the seventeenth century, beginning in England.¹²¹ Edition sizes were small by modern standards – as few as a hundred copies in some cases. Bibles might be issued in editions of 930, or 1,000, but these were very large edition sizes and publishers who risked this often got into financial difficulties.¹²² As technology improved, however, the cost of producing books dropped and it became safer to publish more copies – by the latter half of the sixteenth century edition sizes of 2,000 and more were common. Nicholas Clénard’s Greek grammar of 1564 and his edition of the Corpus Iuris Civilis, published in 1566–1567, were both released in edition sizes of 2,500. Some Bibles in Holland reached 3,000–4,000 copies.¹²³

The absence of a copyright law in the early years meant that pirated editions of many books were widely available. When attempts were made to stop the practice, with action by kings or parliaments, who tried to close down pirate publishers, this succeeded only in driving the pirate business underground. It was made worse by the attempts, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, to censor books. As early as 1475 the University of Cologne received a licence from the pope to censor printers, publishers and even readers of condemned books.¹²⁴ Many bishops tried to exercise the same power. In 1501 Pope Alexander VI published his bull Inter multiplices, which forbade the printing of any book in Germany without the permission of the ecclesiastical powers. At the Lateran Council of 1515 this power was extended to all Christendom and came under the Holy Office and the Inquisitor General. Censorship, of course, only makes the censored books more attractive, at least to some people, and in the course of the sixteenth century there was a rapid increase in the number of banned books and it became necessary to institute the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, which had to be continually updated. The first list of forbidden books for the entire Catholic Church was issued in 1559 by Pope Paul IV and, though it was taken seriously, it soon became clear that in many areas (such as Florence, not so very far from Rome) if it were implemented in full it would destroy the newly-flourishing book trade. As a result, in many places it was never enforced in more than a token way. For example, the Inquisition’s delegate in Florence agreed that books needed by lawyers, physicians and philosophers should be exempt.¹²⁵ The French tried a different system: each book published needed a licence from the king in advance. This too drove publishing underground as most publishers flouted the law and ‘banned’ books continued to circulate more or less everywhere with ease.¹²⁶

There is no question but that printing caught on very quickly, which tends to confirm that pre-print books were far from unknown among many people. It has been calculated that no fewer than 20 million books were printed before 1500.¹²⁷ Although to begin with the market was chiefly among universities and other academically minded souls, books soon reached out to the general public. An entirely new literature grew up to reflect and encourage popular piety – the cult of the Virgin, for example, was still extremely popular and works celebrating the life and virtues of the Mother of God were very popular, as were works on the saints. Coinciding with the growth of humanism (see the next chapter), printing helped promote a new interest in antiquity. There was also an enormous increase in the number of grammars available, and in the chivalric romances of the earlier Middle Ages. But science and mathematics evoked great interest too, especially the scientists and mathematicians of antiquity. Astrology and travel were also popular.

The arrival of printing, therefore, did not so much change the shape of the culture as make it far more readily available to many more people (as was to be expected). The further changes it brought about had more to do with, for example, standards of accuracy (in setting up type for the classics, scholars wanted to use the best examples available), in the propagation of the Reformation (considered in Chapter 22) and in the triumph of humanism. Printing made far more people familiar with classical – i.e., pagan – authors, and far more aware of purely literary and stylistic qualities (as opposed to doctrinal matters), contributing further to the secularisation of life. To become a homo trilinguis, to know Greek, Latin and Hebrew, was the aim of many humanists and here printing helped.¹²⁸ But by no means everyone was trilingual and another effect of the printed book was that, in stimulating a taste among the general public for the classics, it also stimulated a taste for the classics translated into the vernacular. These translations often played a more vital role than the originals in the diffusion of ideas and knowledge.¹²⁹ In the same vein, the vernacular translations also promoted an interest in national languages, a process that began in Italy but went furthest in France where, in 1539, the Ordonnances of Villers-Cotterêts made French the official language in the courts of justice. Latin as the international language did not finally die until the seventeenth century and by then national literatures were well on the way to splitting the book market.

A final impact of printing was on spelling, which now became fixed, corresponding less and less to pronunciation. In other words, spelling paid more respect to the etymology of words.¹³⁰ This too was reinforced by the development of national languages. It became noticeable that, after 1530, Latin began to lose ground. For example, in Paris, out of the 88 titles produced in 1501 only 8 were in French; but by 1530, when 456 titles were published, 121 were in the vernacular, a rise from 9 per cent to 26 per cent. This is not surprising – many readers were bourgeois merchants, newly prosperous, who had no ambitions to be homo trilinguis, but the process was further accelerated in some countries by the Reformation, with its anti-Rome bias, and championing of local cultures. Luther, with the aid of the press, played a decisive role in the evolution of the German language.

And of course, eventually, the Bible – not to mention the Book of Common Prayer – was printed in the vernacular languages, making the scriptures accessible as they had never been before. We shall be discussing the consequences of this throughout the rest of the book, but for now we may say that, by and large, printing fixed the vernacular languages. It was thanks to the process of translation that many languages had been enriched by foreign words and expressions, but now spelling and usage were stabilised. Printers deliberately introduced uniformity into the language, as these examples, taken from a translation of Ariosto, show:

Manuscript

Printed text

bee

be

on

one

greef

grief

thease

these

noorse

nurse

servaunt

servant¹³¹

The death of Latin was slow. Descartes wrote the Discours de la Méthode in French but his correspondence was usually in Latin. It was still imperative to write in Latin if one wanted to address a European audience. Latin did not finally succumb until the seventeenth century, after which French became the language of science, philosophy and diplomacy, when every educated European had to know French and when books in French were sold all over Europe.¹³²

Printing thus began the destruction of the unified Latin culture of Europe, the culture that had helped propel Europe ahead of India, China and the Arab world, and it also marked the origins of a culture belonging to the masses. It was a change of seismic proportions. But it would take centuries before these lineaments became visible.