Reviewing what our researches have shown thus far, recent scholarship suggests that the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries saw an increased interest in and demand for better preaching to the laity. This concern for better preaching, which may have been percolating within the Church for some decades, was expressed in an official directive of the Church at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. The call for better preaching was taken up by many but animated in a special way during the founding of the new mendicant orders, the Dominicans and Franciscans. The directives of the Lateran Council and various popes, in addition to the efforts of local bishops, scholars, and the efforts of the newly founded mendicant orders, led to the formation of a theology curriculum at the University of Paris designed to help train a new generation of preachers who could preach clearly, powerfully, and with doctrinal integrity to an increasingly educated laity where heretofore there had often been either no preaching or the preaching of heretical doctrines.