Very few medieval schoolboys were destined to continue to university, but some did. University was preparation for only a few careers: professor, lawyer, doctor, theologian, or dropout. Dropouts tended to become private tutors and secretaries, stand-up comedians on a jongleur circuit, or magicians and alchemists. These last were rare, but the dropout’s knowledge of university subjects is what gave us the movie trope of reading Latin backwards to summon demons.
It’s worth remembering that university professors, church (Canon Law) lawyers, and theologians were traditionally unmarried. The university path did not lead to the church steps. In the story of Peter Abelard and his student Heloise, it only makes sense if we understand that Abelard’s career at the University of Paris depended on his remaining single. Heloise begged him not to marry her, and when he did marry her, her uncle strongly suspected that it was part of a plan to shuffle her off somewhere and continue his career. We wonder why he didn’t just rent a small house and settle in with a wife, and keep lecturing. But to be a university lecturer, a man had to be at least a Canon, the lowest and most secular office of the Church — but still, within the Church.
The first university was specifically for law, at Bologna. Paris and Oxford began next, as theology schools run by the church. Salerno, Italy had an independent medical school, but at Milan and Pisa, medicine was included in a larger university. By the 1300s, most cities had a university.
The entrance exam for university was a challenging test of ability with Latin. Europe continued to pretend, for a long time, that Latin was its real language and that its native tongues were just unlettered vulgar degradations of Latin. University subjects were “advanced” mainly because they were taught in spoken Latin. One of the boundary markers between “medieval” and “early modern” is the switch away from Latin’s use in all books, lectures, note-taking and exams.
The early university was, at base, a small staff surrounding the Bedellus (dean), who undertook to give a challenging graduation examination in logic, rhetoric, music, astronomy, arithmetic and geometry. Students contracted privately with lecturers who could help prepare them for these exams. Lecturers with high success rates drew more students. Students and scholars organized into associations (universitates) for enforcing contract terms so really, collective bargaining created the “university.”
Students held all of the power in the medieval university. They hired and fired lecturers at will. They forced them to start (and end) lectures on time — or pay fines. Lecturers were fined for being absent or for skipping some of the curriculum. Lecturers used their bargaining power with students only to get standardized fees.
In the next few entries, I’ll cover the development of the university into something that looks like what we know today. It’s important to understand that at the start, it was merely a cluster of students who lived in rented rooms and hired lecturers to prepare them for exit exams. Hiring the lecture hall may have been up to the lecturers or the students. The university collected a nominal fee from its students until graduation. As an institution, its power consisted only of granting the diploma, so that’s when the punishingly high fees kicked in. This is why there were so many dropouts. A poor young man could afford to attend lectures, but he couldn’t afford to graduate.