Copying the guilds, which had developed special “livery” robes for their members to wear on parade, lecturers and masters (graduates) began to wear a uniform robe and hat based on the fashion of the times. Many lecturers were monks, so their robes were variants of their order (Dominican and Franciscan usually). Physicians wore special hats in the medieval period, which influenced these outfits too. By the end of the period, Doctors of Theology wore black robes and hats at the University of Paris—our model for the graduation cap and gown. But Doctors of Law in Italy wore red robes edged with fur–take that!
University students did not believe they were under the laws and charter of the town and tended to break its laws flagrantly. They gambled and drank, partied and rioted. In 1355, students rioted in Oxford; several students and townies died, and some colleges went up in flames.
The standard mode of teaching was the formal debate. The professor would propound a question, such as, “Whether lightning be fire that comes down from the clouds?” and a student would begin the response with “principal arguments” to the affirmative. Next, other students or the teacher would pose contradictory arguments. Without real scientific facts, they based arguments on philosophers such as Aristotle. It was a chance to show off logic, rhetoric and reading depth.
Textbooks were copied by hand, but copying industries grew up around universities. It was a type of home-based work that the few educated women could do, and while expensive parchment was used for much of the Middle Ages, in the later times, the new paper industry made short books affordable. It was probably also a line of work for university dropouts or men who had been novices in a monastery without taking the vows.
Textbooks were typically short sections of a longer work, easy to carry to class. They were unlike the famous illustrated manuscripts and much more like modern books. Wide margins provided space to take notes; texts were carefully paragraphed and some red letters (“rubrics”) helped to organize the text visually. As an innovation to help students read at a glance, words had spaces and more attention was paid to punctuation. If you look at typical medieval Bibles, you’ll see just how little they cared about space and readability there.
If you were a student who needed the works of Aristotle for lectures, you would never buy a “collected works” volume as we do. Each work, or each major section of a work, would be bound by itself. Textbook shops in university towns sold these short, practical folios, but they also rented copies. Students who bought paper could rent a book and copy their own, for a small savings.