Describe the birth and growth of universities and the role that scholasticism played in 12th and 13th century Latin Europe

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

ANSWER:
The thirteenth century saw the foundation of two new religious orders, the Dominicans and the Franciscans. Living according to a rule but not confined to monasteries, these friars brought preaching to the common people and carried the Christian message abroad as missionaries. Some of their most talented members taught in the independent colleges that arose after 1200. It was at this stage that Latin Europe innovated the idea of universities as degree-granting corporations imparting both religious and nonreligious learning. Between 1300 and 1500, sixty universities, from St. Andrews in Scotland to Krakow and Prague in eastern Europe, joined the twenty established before that time. Students banded together to start some of them; guilds of professors founded others. Teaching guilds, like crafts guilds, set standards for the profession, trained apprentices and masters, and defended their professional interests. Universities set curricula and instituted final examinations for degrees. Students who passed the exams that ended their apprenticeship received a “license” to teach, while those who completed longer training and defended a masterwork of scholarship became “masters” and “doctors.” The University of Paris gradually absorbed the city’s various colleges, but the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge remained independent, self-governing organizations. Though the new learning sometimes raised inconvenient questions, students aspiring to ecclesiastical careers, and their professors, conferred special prominence on theology, seen as the “queen of the sciences” encompassing all true knowledge. Hence, thirteenth-century theologians sought to synthesize the rediscovered philosophical works of Aristotle and the commentaries of Avicenna with the Bible’s revealed truth. These efforts to synthesize reason and faith were known as scholasticism. Thomas Aquinas, a brilliant Dominican theology professor at the University of Paris, wrote the most notable scholastic work, the Summa Theologica, between 1267 and 1273. Although his exposition of Christian belief organized on Aristotelian principles came to be accepted as a masterly demonstration of the reasonableness of Christianity, scholasticism upset many traditional thinkers. Some church authorities tried to ban Aristotle from the curriculum. However, the considerable freedom of medieval universities from both secular and religious authorities enabled the new ideas to prevail over the fears of church administrators.