The urban setting o training of priests lawyers and

The urban setting
o Training of priests, lawyers and doctors
 Growth of the city and urbanized economy leads to a need for
more lawyers + possibly doctors
 More priests b/c church trying to discipline heresy
 Religious communities
o Theology is “queen of the sciences”
 Most prestigious subject- explains everything else- ultimate
form of knowledge
o Secular institutions – usually very tied with the church’s culture
The seven Liberal Arts
 Trivium :
o Grammar
o Logic (dialectic)
o Rhetoric
 All usually done at a younger age
 Quadrivium :
o Arithmetic
o Geometry

o Astronomy
o Music
 Moves on to the mathematical side when they are older
The University Curriculum
 The Arts Course (leading to MA)
o Rhetoric; + litterae humaniores (poetry, history, moral philosophy)
 Used as a way to write better in Latin -> in order to become a
good lawyer
o Philosophy, inc. logic and ‘physica’ (Aristotle)
 The “Higher” faculties
o Law (Civil law, Canon law) (Justinian, Gratian)
o Medicine (Galen, Hippocrates)
o Theology
 Bible
 Church Fathers (Greek, Latin)
 (Compilations: Peter Lombard)
o “Terminology used reveals what it (the university) had in common
with all other types of universitates (brotherhoods, guilds, trades,
communes) which multiplied in the West.”
o But: autonomy from local power is obtained from above
What universities bring:
 Systematic, organized and continuous training in fundamental speculative
and scientific disciplines, and in professions
 International education and a common academic culture (“Scholasticism”)
 Organization of learned professions (ex. Medicine, law)
Scholasticism
 Term used to refer to the predominate intellectual program that emerges at
the time of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)
o Dominican- teaching at the University of Paris
o Reinterprets Aristotle’s philosophy to harmonize it with Christian
theology
 Philosophy was term for what we think of as science
 Provided a scientific basis for the Church’s way of teaching
o “Thomism” becomes dominant philosophy until the 17 th century
o Canonized 1323
Black Death
14 th Century full of problems
 100 years of war

 Famine
 Disease
 Plague
 Papal Schism
 Peasant Revolts
Europe at the beginning of the 14 th Century
 Overpopulation- boom in economy that resulted in people having bigger
families
 Growth of towns and commerce and the rise in trade routes (especially by
overseas trade routes)
 Bad weather; Bad harvests; Bad Famine
Death
 Book of revelation: talks about the end of the world- 4 horseman of the
apocalypse coming in
Defining the Plague
 The most catastrophic disease of the Middle Ages
 But plague was not new: had been in Europe before
o Justinian’s Plague (541 CE)
o Fourteen more waves of plague
o Black Death (1348-1729s)
o Third Pandemic (1850s-1950s)
 Black Death: a 19 th Century term (probably a mistranslation of the Latin
alma, meaning both ‘terrible’ and ‘black’)
o Came in from a city called Caffa- people wanted to get away so sailed