CHAP. IV. their entertainment at a banquet, along with the regents for the time being and the inceptor's personal friends, must at all times have involved a formidable outlay, and enables us to understand how it is that we find the wealthier inceptors Incepting for sometimes incepting for others, a phrase which probably implies defraying the expenses of the ceremony and therewith obtaining increased opportunities for the display of their dialectical skill in the public exercises1. others. The Regent. Lectures. Lecturing ordinarie cursorie and extraordinaric. When the year of his inception was completed the master of arts was required, if called upon, to give an ordinary lecture in the arts schools, for one year at least: while thus officiating he was known as a regent master of arts. Such then were the successive stages that marked the progress of the arts student:-that of the sophister, or disputant in the schools,—of the bachelor of arts, eligible in turn to give subsidiary or cursory lectures,-of the incepting master of arts who had received his licence to teach in any university in Europe, and of the regent master of arts who lectured for a definite term as the instructor appointed by the university. It will now be necessary to enter upon a subject of some difficulty, namely, the system of instruction that prevailed. The bachelor, after the completion of his year of determination, was, as we have already stated, qualified for the office of a lecturer; as however he discharged this office while his own course of study was still incomplete, he was himself known as a cursor and was said to lecture cursorie; we must be careful not to confound these lectures with the ordinary lectures given by masters of arts. The staple instruction provided by the university for arts students was given by the regents; and as the funds of the university were not sufficient to provide this instruction gratis, while the majority of the students 1 Anstey, Introd. to Munimenta Academica, p. xci. 2 Statute 134. De juramentis a magistris in inceptionibus et solennibus resumptionibus præstandis. Documents, 1 381. 3 The meaning which, under the guidance of M. Thurot, I have ven tured to assign to the term cursorie, differs from either of those which dean Peacock and Mr Anstey have been inclined to adopt. I have accordingly supplied in Appendix (E) the arguments for the view adopted in the present chapter. could afford to pay but a trifling fee, it was found necessary CHAP. IV. to make it binding on every master of arts to lecture in his turn, if so required, the fees paid by the scholars to the bedells constituting his sole remuneration. The lectures thus given took precedence of all others. They were given at stated hours, from nine to twelve, during which time no cursory or extraordinary lecturer was permitted to assemble an audience. They commenced and terminated on specified days, and were probably entirely traditional in their conception and treatment of the subject. It would frequently happen that overflowing numbers, or the necessity of completing a prescribed course within the term, rendered it necessary to obtain the assistance of a coadjutor, who was called the lecturer's 'extraordinary' and was said to lecture extraordinarie'. If this coadjutor were a bachelor, as was generally the case, he would be described as lecturing cursorie as well as extraordinarie; but in course of time the term cursorie began to be applied to all extra lectures, and hence even masters of arts are occasionally spoken of as lecturing cursorie, that is to say, giving that supplementary assistance which usually devolved on the bachelors. employed by If we now turn to consider the method employed by the Methods lecturers, we shall readily understand that at a time when the lecturer. students rarely possessed a copy of the text of the author under discussion, the Sentences and the Summule being probably the only frequent exceptions, their first acquaintance with the author was generally made in the lecture-room, and the whole method of the lecturer must have differed widely from that of modern times. The method pursued appears to have been of two kinds, of which Aquinas's commentary on Aristotle and the Quæstiones of Buridanus on the Ethics may be taken as fair specimens. In the employment of the former the plan pursued was purely traditional and never varied. The lecturer The commenced by discussing a few general questions having method. reference to the treatise which he was called upon to explain, 1 'Les cours extraordinaires étaient pour les bacheliers une occasion de recruter un auditoire pour leur maitrise, et de s'exercer à l'enseigne ment.' Thurot, p. 78. See also analytical CHAP. IV. and in the customary Aristotelian fashion treated of its material, formal, final, and efficient cause. He pointed out the principal divisions; took the first division and subdivided it; divided again the subdivision and repeated the process until he had subdivided down to the first chapter. He then again divided until he had reached a subdivision which included only a single sentence or complete idea. He finally took this sentence and expressed it in other terms which might serve to make the conception more clear. He never passed from one part of the work to another, from one chapter to another, or even from one sentence to another, without a minute analysis of the reasons for which each division, chapter, or sentence was placed after that by which it was immediately preceded; while, at the conclusion of this painful toil, he would sometimes be found hanging painfully over a single letter or mark of punctuation. This minuteness, especially in lectures on the civil law, was deemed the quintessence of criticism. To call in question the dicta of the author himself, whether Aristotle, Augustine, or Justinian, never entered the thoughts of either lecturer or audience. There were no rash emendations of a corrupt text to be demolished, no theories of philosophy or history to be subjected to a merciless dissection; in the pages over which the lecturer prosed was contained all that he or any one else knew about the subject, perhaps even all that it was deemed possible to know. The dialectical method. The second method, and probably by far the more popular one, was designed to assist the student in the practice of casting the thought of the author into a form that might serve as subject-matter for the all-prevailing logic. Whenever a passage presented itself that admitted of a twofold interpretation, the one or other interpretation was thrown into the form of a quæstio, and then discussed pro and con, the arguments on either side being drawn up in the usual array. It is probable that it was at lectures of this kind that the instruction often assumed a catechetical form,-one of the statutes expressly requiring that students should be ready with their answers to any questions that might be put, "according to the method of questioning used by the masters, if the mode of lecturing used in that faculty required ques- CHAP. IV. tions and answers'. Finally the lecturer brought forward his own interpretation and defended it against every objection to which it might appear liable: each solution being formulated in the ordinary syllogistic fashion, and the student being thus furnished with a stock of quæstiones and arguments requisite for enabling him to undertake his part as a disputant in the schools. Hence the second stage of the trivium not only absorbed an excessive amount of attention but it overwhelmed and moulded the whole course of study. It was the science which, as the student's Summulæ assured him, held the key to all the others, ad omnium methodorum principia viam habens. Even the study of grammar was subjected to the same process. Priscian and Donatus were cast into the form of quæstiones, wherein the grammar student was required to exhibit something of dialectical skill. It was undoubtedly from the prevalence of this method of treatment that disputation became that besetting vice of the age which the opponents of the scholastic culture so severely satirized. 'They dispute,' said Vives, in his celebrated treatise, 'before dinner, at dinner, and after dinner; in public and in private; at all places and at all times".' Regent. When the student in arts had incepted and delivered his The Nonlectures as regent, his duties were at an end. He had received in his degree a diploma which entitled him to give instruction on any of the subjects of the trivium and quadrivium in any university in Europe. He had also discharged his obligations to the university in which he had been educated, and was henceforth known, if he continued to reside, 1 Item statuimus quod, audientes textum in quacunque facultate, pro forma in eadem facultate statuta et requisita rite eundem audire teneantur, una cum quæstionibus juxta modum magistrorum suorum in quæstionando usitatum, si modus legendi in eadem facultate quæstionem requirat.' Statute 138. Documents, I 383. Does not the phraseology of this statute offer very strong proof that the term ordinarie did not imply, as Mr Anstey has conjectured, the employment of the catechetical De Corruptis Artibus, 1 345. A prospect of Master of CHAP. IV. as a non-regent'. If he left its precincts he was certain to be regarded as a marvel of learning, and he might probably rely on obtaining employment as a teacher and earning a modest though somewhat precarious income. He formed one of that class so felicitously delineated in Chaucer's 'poor clerke,' and, dark and enigmatic as were many of the pages of his Latin Aristotle, he valued his capacity to expound the Professional rest and was valued for it. But as in every age with the an ordinary majority of students, learning was seldom valued in those days as an ultimate good, but for its reproductive capacity, and viewed in this light the degree of master of arts had but a moderate value. The ambitious scholar, intent upon worldly and professional success, directed his efforts to theology or to the civil or canon law. As this necessitated a further extension of his academic career to more than double the time necessary for an arts course, it was perforce the exception rather than the rule, and we consequently find, as is shewn by the lists given in a previous page, that the numbers of those who received the degree of D.C.L., D.D., or 1 It will not escape the observa- evidence calculated to substantiate his statement. It was customary both at Oxford and Cambridge to include in the grand total all those attached to the university as servants or tradesmen, and with this fact before us we may perhaps read 3,000 for 30,000 in the celebrated vaunt of Armachanus with respect to the numbers at Oxford in the commencement of the fourteenth century. A similar qualification will be necessary in the statement quoted by M. Victor le Clerc (see p. 130), with respect to the numbers at Paris. But the exaggeration of medieval writers in the matter of statistics is notorious, Mr Froude (Hist. of England, 111o 407), has furnished us with some interesting illustrations of this tendency at a yet later period. Both M. Renan and Mr Lecky have observed that it was not until the introduction of the exact sciences that men began to understand the importance of accuracy in such matters. 2 See pp. 319, 320. |