[Illustration: FIG 62. SEAL OF A DOCTOR, UNIVERSITY OF PARIS]
THE TEACHING FACULTIES. The students for a long time grouped themselves for better protection (and aggression) according to the nation from which they came, [15] and each "nation" elected a councilor to look after the interests of its members. Between the different nations there were constant quarrels, insults were passed back and forth, and much bad blood engendered. [16] On the side of the masters the organization was by teaching subjects, and into what came to be known as faculties. [17] Thus there came to be four faculties in a fully organized mediaeval university, representing the four great divisions of knowledge which had been evolved—Arts, Law, Medicine, and Theology. Each faculty elected a dean, and the deans and councilors elected a rector, who was the head or president of the university. The chancellor, the successor of the cathedral school scholasticus, was usually appointed by the Pope and represented the Church, and a long struggle ensued between the rector and the chancellor to see who should be the chief authority in the university. The rector was ultimately victorious, and the position of chancellor became largely an honorary position of no real importance.
[Illustration: FIG. 63. NEW COLLEGE, AT OXFORD One of the oldest of the Oxford colleges, having been founded in 1379. The picture shows the chapel, cloisters (consecrated in 1400), and a tall tower, once forming a part of the Oxford city walls. Note the similarity of this early college to a monastery, as in Plate 1.]
The Arts Faculty was the successor of the old cathedral-school instruction in the Seven Liberal Arts, and was found in practically all the universities. The Law Faculty embraced civil and canon law, as worked out at Bologna. The Medical Faculty taught the knowledge of the medical art, as worked out at Salerno and Montpellier. The Theological Faculty, the most important of the four, prepared learned men for the service of the Church, and was for some two centuries controlled by the scholastics. The Arts Faculty was preparatory to the other three. As Latin was the language of the classroom, and all the texts were Latin texts, a reading and speaking knowledge of Latin was necessary before coming to the university to study. This was obtained from a study of the first of the Seven Arts— Grammar—in some monastery, cathedral, or other type of school. Thus a knowledge of Latin formed practically the sole requirement for admission to the mediaeval university, and continued to be the chief admission requirement in our universities up to the nineteenth century (R. 186 a). In Europe it is still of great importance as a preparatory subject, but in South American countries it is not required at all.
Very few of the universities, in the beginning, had all four of these faculties. The very nature of the evolution of the earlier ones precluded this. Thus Bologna had developed into a studium generale from its prominence in law, and was virtually constituted a university in 1158, but it did not add Medicine until 1316, or Theology until 1360. Paris began sometime before 1200 as an arts school, Theology with some instruction in Canon Law was added by 1208, a Law Faculty in 1271, and a Medical Faculty in 1274. Montpellier began as a medical school sometime in the twelfth century. Law followed a little later, a teacher from Bologna "setting up his chair" there. Arts was organized by 1242. A sort of theological school began in 1263, but it was not chartered as a faculty until 1421. So it was with many of the early universities. These four traditional faculties were well established by the fourteenth century, and continued as the typical form of university organization until modern times. With the great university development and the great multiplication of subjects of study which characterized the nineteenth century, many new faculties and schools and colleges have had to be created, particularly in the United States, in response to new modern demands. [18]
NATURE OF THE INSTRUCTION. The teaching material in each faculty was much as we have already indicated. After the recovery of the works of Aristotle he came to dominate the instruction in the Faculty of Arts. [19] The Statutes of Paris, in 1254, giving the books to be read for the A.B. and the A.M. degrees (R. 113), show how fully Aristotle had been adopted there as the basis for instruction in Logic, Ethics, and Natural Philosophy by that time. The books required for these two degrees at Leipzig, in 1410 (R. 114), show a much better-balanced course of instruction, though the time requirements given for each subject show how largely Aristotle predominated there also. Oxford (R. 115) kept up better the traditions of the earlier Seven Liberal Arts in its requirements, and classified the new works of Aristotle in three additional "philosophies"—natural, moral, and metaphysical. From four to seven years were required to complete the arts course, though the tendency was to reduce the length of the arts course as secondary schools below the university were evolved. [20]
In the Law Faculty, after Theology the largest and most important of all the faculties in the mediaeval university, the Corpus Juris Civilis of Justinian (p. 195) and the Decretum of Gratian (p. 196) were the textbooks read, with perhaps a little more practical work in discussion than in Arts or Medicine. The Oxford course of study in both Civil and Canon Law (R. 116 b-c) gives a good idea as to what was required for degrees in one of the best of the early law faculties.
In the Medical Faculty a variety of books—translations of Hippocrates (p. 197), Galen (p. 198), Avicenna (p. 198), and the works of certain writers at Salerno and Jewish and Moslem writers in Spain—were read and lectured on. The list of medical books used at Montpellier, [21] in 1340, which at that time was the foremost place for medical instruction in western Europe, shows the book-nature and the extent of the instruction given at the leading school of medicine of the time. It was, moreover, customary at Montpellier for the senior students to spend a summer in visiting the sick and doing practical work. We have here the merest beginnings of clinical instruction and hospital service, and at this stage medical instruction remained until quite modern times. The medical courses at Paris (R. 117) and Oxford (R. 116 d) were less satisfactory, only book instruction being required.
[Illustration: FIG. 64. A LECTURE ON CIVIL LAW BY GUILLAUME BENEDICTI
(After a sixteenth-century wood engraving, now in the National Library,
Paris, Cabinet of Designs)]
Both Law and Medicine were so dominated by the scholastic ideal and methods that neither accomplished what might have been possible in a freer atmosphere.