Scientia donum Dei est, unde vendi non potest.

For many years I have heard the term "twelfth century renaissance," but have never really understood the rationale for it.  More recently, for personal reasons, I've become interested in the origins of the University of Paris, and the connection of the two.

A "renaissance" is a not just a cultural flourishing, but some kind of re-birth, a recovery of the past, over and above the usual process of re-appropriation and re-consideration that is a normally continuous aspect of cultural life.  What sets the twelfth century apart?  The events I associate with that century--the foundation and fall of the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem, the careers of Peter Abelard and Bernard of Clairvaux, the murder of Becket--are significant, but not outstandingly indicative of any sort of  re-birth.

There was, at this time, a European recovery of Aristotle that had long-range implications for a new conception of science.  But I think what was distinctive was not so much the "what" that was brought forward as a new "how" that would institutionalize appropriating the past.  In other words, what was developing rapidly was a new approach to education--the University.

"Universitas" in the middle ages didn't originally carry a strictly educational meaning.  It referred to any kind of conglomeration of professions or persons that for whatever reason became recognized as a free-standing institution, like our word, "corporation."  Peter Abelard, in the early twelfth century, was a teacher, attracted to a Paris where already one could make a reputation, and a living, among  competing masters in a variety of scholastic settings.  Within a century there was an established institution, the University of Paris, chartered by a papacy far enough away to give it a significant degree of independence from the crown, and the local bishops, and the monastic establishments that hitherto dominated education.

The subjects were not new, but their integration into a single institution was.  One began with the seven liberal arts:  the trivium (grammar, rhetoric and dialectic) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy).  These prepared one for entry into one of the three higher faculties:  law, medicine or theology.

The theology faculty of the University of Paris soon became a powerful, if non-magisterial, voice in Christian theology, hosting epochal thinkers like St. Albert the Great and St. Thomas Aquinas in its first century, in the formative years of what came to be called, for obvious reasons, "scholasticism."

But the "baptism of Aristotle" was not the only landmark "re-birth."  Consider this quotation from the great English legal historian William Maitland: "Of all the centuries the twelfth is the most legal.  In no other age, since the classical days of Roman law, has so large a part of the sum total of intellectual endeavor been devoted to jurisprudence."  The study of the law does not sit comfortably with my ordinary notion of what is fit matter for a "renaissance" (and I remind my readers, I am a lawyer myself).  But as the University of Paris was forming, another university, the only university vying with Paris for the honor of "first," Bologna, was attracting legions of students to the lectures of Irnerius on the newly re-discovered Digest of Justinian.  And as the "second life of Roman law" formed the foundation for modern Continental Law, the foundation of English common law was being established in England under Henry II, and canon law was taking a systematic form in the Decretum of Gratian--all in the twelfth century.

But, to return to Paris, Stephen Ferruolo's book, as you might glean from the subtitle, focuses as much on doubts about the New Education as on its development.  The monastics saw it as fostering spiritual pride.  The humanists took it to task for channelling the best and the brightest into the more lucrative callings, medicine and law.  The moralists looked with a jaundiced eye on the natural result of hoards of ungoverned young men exposed, far from home, to the vices of an incipient metropolis

These are all issues still relevant to contemporary education.  But there is another, suggested by the title of this post:  Scientia donum Dei est, unde vendi non potest.  Knowledge is the gift of God, and therefore cannot be sold.  Already in the twelfth century there was unease with the idea of turning the divine gift of knowledge into a marketable commodity.  The occasional papal prohibition or royal regulation had little effect, and though the workman is undoubtedly worthy of his hire, our contemporary American problem with education is not so much with its content as its cost.  Our educated young people often leave the university saddled with debts that may take half a lifetime to repay, or longer.

I can't suggest a concrete solution, but I can note that tuition at the University of Paris is still less than four hundred dollars per year.  This is, unhappily, about to change for foreign students.  Last fall the Prime Minister announced that, for non-EU students not yet enrolled, tuition would increate about fifteen-fold.  That's still a bargain, compared to what comparable universities charge in English-speaking countries.  But it highlights the challenge of how we collectively value learning, and what other costs we suffer when we fail to educate our people.