chapter 1.

EDUCATION: University of Paris.

"The name of Abelard recalls the European celebrity and immense intellectual ferment of this school [of Paris] in the 12th century. But it was in the first year of the following century, the 13th, that it received a charter from Philip Augustus, and thenceforth the name of University of Paris takes the place of that of School of Paris. Forty-nine years later was founded University College, Oxford, the oldest college of the oldest English University. Four nations composed the University of Paris,--the nation of France, the nation of Picardy, the nation of Normandy, and (signal mark of the close intercourse which then existed between France and us!) the nation of England. The four nations united formed the faculty of arts. The faculty of theology was created in 1257, that of law in 1271, that of medicine in 1274. Theology, law, and medicine had each their Dean; arts had four Procurators, one for each of the four nations composing this faculty. Arts elected the rector of the University, and had possession of the University chest and archives. The preeminence of the Faculty of Arts indicates, as indeed does the very development of the University, an idea, gradually strengthening itself, of a lay instruction to be no longer absorbed in theology, but separable from it. The growth of a lay and modern spirit in society, the preponderance of the crown over the papacy, of the civil over the ecclesiastical power, is the great feature of French history in the 14th century, and to this century belongs the highest development of the University. ... The importance of the University in the 13th and 14th centuries was extraordinary. Men's minds were possessed with a wonderful zeal for knowledge, or what was then thought knowledge, and the University of Paris was the great fount from which this knowledge issued. The University and those depending on it made at this time, it is said, actually a third of the population of Paris; when the University went on a solemn occasion in procession to Saint Denis, the head of the procession, it is said, had reached St. Denis before the end of it had left its starting place in Paris. It had immunities from taxation, it had jurisdiction of its own, and its members claimed to be exempt from that of the provost of Paris; the kings of France strongly favoured the University, and leaned to its side when the municipal and academical authorities were in conflict; if at any time the University thought itself seriously aggrieved, it had recourse to a measure which threw Paris into dismay,--it shut up its schools and suspended its lectures. In a body of this kind the discipline could not be strict, and the colleges were created to supply centres of discipline which the University in itself,--an apparatus merely of teachers and lecture-rooms,--did not provide. The 14th century is the time when, one after another, with wonderful rapidity, the French colleges appeared. Navarre, Montaigu, Harcourt, names so familiar in the school annals of France, date from the first quarter of the 14th century. The College of Navarre was founded by the queen of Philip the Fair, in 1304; the College of Montaigu, where Erasmus, Rabelais, and Ignatius Loyola were in their time students, was founded in 1314 by two members of the family of Montaigu, one of them Archbishop of Rouen. The majority of these colleges were founded by magnates of the church, and designed to maintain a certain number of bursars, or scholars, during their university course. ... Along with the University of Paris there existed in France, in the 14th century, the Universities of Orleans, Angers, Toulouse, and Montpellier. Orleans was the great French school for the study of the civil law. ... The civil law was studiously kept away from the University of Paris, for fear it should drive out other studies, and especially the study of theology; so late as the year 1679 there was no chair of Roman or even of French law in the University of Paris. The strength of this University was concentrated on theology and arts, and its celebrity arose from the multitude of students which in these branches of instruction it attracted."

_M. Arnold, Schools and Universities on the Continent,