What contributed to the growth of universities in the Middle Ages?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Several key factors responsible for the growth of universities include wider exposure to the international realm, greater communication between urban areas, a demand in the secular population for trained and literate personnel who were not members of the clergy, and the reemergence of classical, pre-Christian texts that required a rethinking on the part of the intellectual community. Translations of works such as those by Aristotle brought them into a wider distribution and challenged the previous intellectual goal of monks simply to know a book thoroughly without questioning its content. The reintroduction of works required reconceptualization and led to the emergence of Scholasticism as a way to reconcile faith and philosophy and humans' place in the natural world. The contributions of Muslim, Persian, and Jewish scholars greatly assisted these studies both through translations and commentaries. Urbanization also played a significant role in the growth of universities because centers of learning moved from remote and isolated monasteries to central areas and a secular audience. Universities derived from the church institutions of cathedral schools, or training grounds for clergy, but there was more of a demand for a temporal institution to teach the seven liberal studies, so universities formed throughout Europe with different specialties of study such as law, theology, and medicine.