I have absolutely no idea what medieval universities were like and especially in what way they differ from modern universities. I read quite a bit about universities in the early modern period but I imagine that they were quite different before printed books became available. So roughly from 12th to 14th century.
What subjects did the students learn? How were they taught? How long did they study for and how did they graduate? Did they have to take exams? What facilities did a university provide their students with? What were job prospects like after graduation? What did the students do outside of learning?
And if you have any interesting literature regarding the topic that gives a good overview you can recommend them to me too.
Life in the Medieval university world was enormously different from the lives of undergraduates around the world. However, there are still some places where the lived experience of college life has not changed totally in the better part of a millennium since the Medieval university system was established.
Origins
If you google "what was the first university" you will get the following answer:
The University of Bologna (Università di Bologna), founded in 1088, is the first university in the sense of: Being a high degree-awarding institute. Having independence from the ecclesiastic schools, although conducted by both clergy and non-clergy. Using the word universitas (which was coined at its foundation).
Now this is a bit of an oversimplification. The university system as we know it today, and as the Medieval world experienced it, was not the product of a unique development in the year 1088 (given as the founding year for the university of Bologna), but rather the culmination of several centuries worth of developments that resulted in the creation of universities in major cities in Europe.
Education in the late Antique world was increasingly the purview of the Church. As Roman institutions withered on the vine, deprived of institutional support from tax revenue, many of the state's functions were absorbed by the new civic and social organizations that were cropping up during the collapse of Imperial capacities. Many of these were dominated by the Church, and contrary to the beliefs of many internet dwelling know-it-alls, the Church was extremely invested in creating a system of education and formation for its clergy. Starting in the 6th century, first in the Mediterranean urban centers and diffusing northwards, many of the largest Church institutions, cathedrals and their bishops, started to create what we now call, creatively, "Cathedral Schools" these were institutions that were headed by clergy for the purpose of creating and training new members of the clergy.
Now this by itself was one way that the Church was continuing the education of its members, but there were also monastic schools which also trained and educated people for the Church. These institutions were created for the formation of future clergy, monks, and other ecclesiastical figures, and likewise the major areas of knowledge were titled towards ecclesiastical matters. Knowledge of Latin in particular was key, and it is thanks to the studiousness of medieval monks that the surviving corpus of classical literature survived to the modern day. Other subjects that were taught to future monks, priests, and bishops, were the "Liberal Arts" of the day, though we would not classify them as such, more on these later, but the majority of the focus of study was on Latin literacy and spiritual formation.
Over time these systems of schooling were somewhat rationalized and expanded with the support of secular rulers. Charlemagne, for one, was keen to promote clerical education and orthodox religious formation in his realm and encouraged educational reforms and establishments in the various ecclesiastical regions of his empire. The medieval universities were the product of both secular power and ecclesiastical need. Later in the Medieval period, secular powers, Church powers, and the logistical demands of the Church (and state) all combined to produce the educational institutions of the Middle Ages.
Over time the hodgepodge mixture of cathedral schools, monastic schools, state sponsored institutions, ecclesiastical teaching, and so on resulted in the establishment of what we recognize today as universities starting in the 11th century. This too was the result of shifting attitudes towards education, particularly the education of Church functionaries, and not just priests and bishops or monks. The reforms of the 11th century that the Church was undertaking, such as trying to mandate confession once a year, enforce peace between Christian rulers, crusading, clerical celibacy, and so on, also included a new focus on a more systematic approach to the education of future clergy and created a need for a literate and educated body of workers who were Church related, but not actually members of the clergy. These disparate needs would eventually result in the codification of Canon law into a single form, namely the Decretum that was authored by Gratian in the mid 12th century. (This too was the result of previous efforts to establish canon law that dated to earlier in the 11th century, as well as drawing from Roman law and Church practices.) And it was this effort, instructing future clergy in proper religious practice combined with the rationalized approach to canon law, which mixed Roman and Church legal traditions, that gave us the first universities. Eventually the disparate organizations that cropped up for study received official recognition, whether from the Church or secular powers, and this is how the first universities were formed, by recognizing and codifying the various organizations of teachers and students that were cropping up across western Europe to engage in the study of canon law or theology.
Members of the university
So the students at these Medieval universities were not studying something so frivolous as biology, or engineering, or Russian literature, they were dedicated to the study of canon law and theology as well as the liberal arts. Over time other courses of study, such as medicine, were added to the "curriculum" of these institutions. Now that focus on the law and Church is important because it is what shaped the members of these institutions for centuries. The students, and teachers, of these organizations were treated as part of the Church. All students were men, teachers were men, and the organizations were decidedly patriarchal.
Today the student bodies of many universities are rather eclectic in make up, and at least in the US it is not unusual to undertake study at a university that is hundred of miles away from where a student went to high school. In the Middle Ages, in a time before air travel or affordable long distance land travel, many of the students were drawn from the surrounding areas and came from a variety of backgrounds, some were coming from the rising middle classes of the growing urban centers of Europe, others were the products of noble families. All were male and the course of study usually started much earlier than universities today. In the Middle Ages students started their coursework in early adolescence, around the age of 14, give or take a few years. Studies could last for quite a long time indeed, and the modern idea of a 4-5 year undergraduate study is a bit shorter than Medieval coursework which could take somewhere around a decade to complete, and if you were going on to the serious study of law or Church teachings, this could take twice as long as the earlier studies in the liberal arts.
Teachers were usually drawn from the ranks of the clergy, though this was not always the case.
Classes
So what did students actually learn in Medieval universities? Early on in their studies, students would focus around two main divisions of the classical liberal arts, the trivium and the quadrivium.
The trivium covered the three topics of grammar, logic and rhetoric.
Grammar was taught to students as one of the earliest fields they had to master. This was really about gaining basic literacy, and literacy in the Medieval world meant Latin. Study of Latin grammar and composition formed the bedrock of all future instruction, as Latin was the main language of instruction for the students, in addition to being the working language of the Church. This was taught through studying classical Latin texts, and is one of the main reasons that Latin works continued to be copied and employed. The texts that were taught could cover poetry, philosophy, literature, or historical works. Logic was taught at this level as well, deriving again from classical works, such as philosophical works from figures like Aristotle, especially following the rise of the scholastic movement in the 12th century.Rhetoric, or the art of persuasion, was taught through the application of logic to grammar to convey knowledge and convince, however studies in this topic also employed classical texts such as poetry and history to give students the ability to convince others of their arguments.
These were the foundation of the later quadrivium which today we would not consider part of the liberal arts. These four topics were, mathematics, geometry, astronomy, and music (though you shouldn't imagine students sitting around to learn how to play instruments, the medieval study of music was more about the interaction of sounds and numbers or musical theory as we would call it today).
Only after completing this course work would students then move onto the fields of Law or Theology, or later Medicine. Where the topics often involved the study of history, philosophy, scripture, and literature.
Now classes were taught by the teachers and masters of the university to the students almost entirely through lecture. Students were to memorize their lessons and be able to recite and analyze the information that they had been given. Many modern styles of learning, project based learning, tactile learning, and so on were not around at the time. Memorization was the name of the game, especially in the trivium and only later would applied knowledge in debate or discussion format be used.
Nor were students given exams like today. The rise of examinations for students is a much later development and not something that medieval students would be expected to do. instead students would engage in debate with their teachers, or if they were younger, be expected to recite their memorized lessons.
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