Books and their makers during the Middle Ages

by George Haven Putnam

Fideliter et correcte, tractim et distincte, assignando paragraphos, capitales literas, virgulas et puncta, prout sententia requirit.[305] The practice also obtained in these universities of having texts dictated to the students by the magisters or the Bachelors of Arts. This was described as librum pronuntiare, and also as ad pennam dare.

In this phrase, Karoch sent word to Erfurt that ad pennam dabit his treatise Arenga.[306]

The text-books utilised in the German universities in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were as limited in range and in number as those of Bologna and of Padua. The instruction in the medical departments of Prague and Vienna was based in the main on the works of Hippocrates and Galen, with some of the later commentaries, principally from Arabian writers. In philosophy the chief authority was Aristotle, in mathematics Euclid, and in astronomy Ptolemy. A few works of later date were utilised, such as the Summula of Petrus Hispanus and the De Sphæra Mundi of Johannes de Sacro Bosco. Bosco is otherwise known as John Holywood or Halifax. He held the chair of mathematics in the University of Paris about the middle of the thirteenth century. The use of his treatise for classes in Prague is evidence of a certain interchange between the universities of books in manuscript.

An important reason for the very large membership of the universities of the Middle Ages as compared with their successors of to-day, is to be found in the fact that they undertook to supply not only the higher education which belongs to the present university curriculum, but also the training now furnished by the gymnasia or High Schools, which were at that time not in existence. We find, therefore, in their membership, thousands of students who were little more than boys either in their years or in their mental development.

The universities also, on the other hand, attracted to their membership very many students of mature age, who came sometimes for special purposes, but more frequently because it was only in the university towns that circles of scholars could be found, that books were available, and that any large measure of intellectual activity was to be experienced. As Savigny puts it: “The universities were, during the Middle Ages, practically the only places where men could study or could exercise their minds with any degree of freedom.” It was inevitable therefore, that, with the generations succeeding the discovery of printing, there should be a decrease in the influence and in the relative importance for the community of the universities. With the establishment of secondary schools, the training of the boys was cared for to better purpose elsewhere; and with the increasing circulation of printed books, it became possible for men to come into relations with literature in other places than in the lecture room. The universities were no longer the sole depositories of learning or the sole sources of intellectual activity. This lessening of the influence of the universities represented, or was at least coincident with, a wider development of intellectual activity and of interest in literature on the part of the masses of the people. The universities alone would never have been in a position so to direct the thought of the community as to render the masses of citizens competent to arrive at conclusions for themselves and sufficiently assured in such conclusions to be prepared to make them the basis of action. This was, of course, partly because, notwithstanding the large membership and the fact that this membership represented nearly all the classes in the community, the universities could at best come into direct relations but with a small proportion of the people. A more important cause for such lack of intellectual leadership is to be found in the fact that the standard of thought and of instruction in the universities concerned itself very little with the intellectual life or issues of the immediate time. As Biot puts it (speaking, to be sure, of a later century): “The universities were several centuries in arrears with all that concerned the sciences and the arts. Peripatetics, when all the world had renounced with Descartes the philosophy of Aristotle, they became Cartesians when the rest were Newtonians. That is the way with learned bodies which do not make discoveries.”

It was the dissemination of literature through the new art of printing rather than the diffusion of education through the university lecture rooms, which brought to the masses of the people the consciousness of mental existence and of individual responsibility for arriving at sound conclusions. Prior to the printing-press, this responsibility had been left by the people with their “spiritual advisers,” who were charged with the duty of doing the thinking for their flocks. It was this change in the mental status of the people which was the precursor (although at a considerable space of years) of the Reformation.

With the beginning in Germany of the movement known as Humanism, the representatives of the new thought of the time were not to be found in the university circles, and had not received their inspiration from the lecture rooms. Says Paulsen: “The entire traditional conduct of the universities, and in particular of the instruction in arts and theology, was rejected with the utmost scorn by the new culture through its representatives, the poets and orators, to whom form and substance alike of this teaching seemed the most outrageous barbarism, which they never wearied of denouncing.” In the Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum, which were issued about 1516 from the band of youthful poets gathered about Mutianus at Erfurt, the hatred and detestation felt by the Humanists for the ancient university system raised to itself a lasting monument.

Within a few years from the publication of the Epistolæ, the influence of the Humanists had so far extended itself as to have effected a large modification in the systems of study in all the larger universities. “The old ecclesiastical Latin was replaced by classical Latin; Roman authors, particularly the poets, were made the subject of lectures, and the old translations of Aristotelian texts were driven out by new translations on principles advocated by the Humanists. Greek was taken up in the Faculty of arts and courses in the language and literature were established in all universities.”[307]

An immediate result of these changes and extensions was an active demand for printed texts. The Humanistic movement, itself in a measure the result of the printing-press, was a most important fact in providing business for the German printers during the earlier years of the sixteenth century. The strifes and contentions of the Reformation checked the development in the universities of the studies connected with the intellectual movement of the Renaissance and lessened the demand for the literature of these studies. The active-minded were absorbed in theological controversies, and those who could not understand the questions at issue could still shout the shibboleths of the leaders. As Erasmus put it, rather bitterly, ubi regnat Lutheranismus, ibi interitus litterarum. The literature of the Reformation, however, itself did much to make good for the printing-presses the lessened demand for the classics, while a few years later, the organisation of the Protestant schools and universities aroused intellectual activities in new regions, and created fresh requirements for printed books. Within half a century, in fact, of the Diet of Worms, the centre of the book-absorbing population of Germany had been transferred from the Catholic states of the south to the Protestant territories of the north, and the literary preponderance of the latter has continued to increase during the succeeding generations.