Sources of university learning

One of the most conspicuous purposes of the medieval university was that of providing an elite with the knowledge and skill needed to serve society, whether in an ecclesiastical or a secular role. When we examine the careers of university masters of theology, we are left in no doubt that this purpose was well fulfilled, and theological attitudes no doubt coloured attitudes to knowledge generally. The general medieval paradigm of knowledge was an inheritance, to be jealously purified of alien accretions and misunderstandings, and then commented on and passed on. This paradigm, however, fits the sciences of the quadrivium less well than it fits the ‘arts of expression’ (artes sermonicales) of the trivium. Even at the elementary level of the arts curriculum, there are signs of somewhat less rigidity in the teaching of arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. Perhaps this was a consequence of the fact that, being more advanced, the quadrivium was in the hands of more experienced masters in the schools. Certainly it seems to have often depended on the initiative of individuals – in Paris, as we shall mention later, teaching in mathematics was mainly on feast-days – and we know from the writings of many of those individuals that they were often infected with the excitement of discovery, discovery not only of new texts, but of new ways of elaborating on the contents of those texts. There was, in other words, an element of ‘research’, as distinct from teaching. Sometimes it was pursued in the pure spirit of the original text.