The transmission of knowledge in the Middle Ages began with ‘a brigade of international translators,’ the development of the university

By Rose McIlveen

A 13th-century ‘professor’ named Bacon described and foresaw, among other things, eyeglasses, flying machines, motorized ships and the process for making gun powder. Scholars who gravitated to the work of early European universities had to take on the ignorance of the age. Bacon was imprisoned for practicing sorcery.

Enter our first “databases”—the universities of Paris, Oxford and Bologna in the 1200s—and Edward Grant, Distinguished Professor emeritus of the history and philosophy of science at IU Bloomington. Grant has a particular interest in the Middle Ages, the development of universities and how knowledge was transmitted from one generation to the next.

“The first universities had professors that were given the title of ‘master,’” he explained. “A major university had four faculties—of arts, theology, law and medicine. The arts faculty was where all students went to get a degree. The other three were higher. You needed a bachelor or a master of arts degree to get into those other three faculties.”

While the development of universities marked a desire to understand the world and its environs, it was not a movement without detractors. For example, Roger Bacon, a cleric and scholar, studied at Oxford between the late 1220s and 1230s, then gravitated to Paris, where he wrote commentaries on several of Aristotle’s books. He also entered the Franciscan order of the Roman Catholic Church and undertook a monumental project—Opus maius—a huge encyclopedia of the arts, sciences and other subjects being offered in the universities of that day. Pope Clement IV ordered Bacon to send the manuscript along without passing it through the Franciscan hierarchy. When the Franciscans discovered his irreverence for the hierarchy, Bacon was accused of practicing sorcery and was put in prison.

Logic and natural philosophy apparently were considered “safe” subjects, however, for undergraduate students at Paris, and while chemistry, according to Grant, was considered alchemy, physics was alive and well. “It fell under the heading of natural philosophy and dealt with problems of motion, for example,” said Grant. “Geometry was not taught, but students picked it up somehow. And universities didn’t teach history, literature or anything like that. That came later on, maybe in the late Renaissance.”

A key to preserving and passing along knowledge through a formal education was accomplished through what Grant called “a sort of international brigade of translators.”

“They began to translate Greek and Arabic into Latin, so by the time you get to 1250, you would find all of the learning that was available from the ancient world and from the Arabs,” said Grant. “At the heart—the core of the medieval curriculum—were the works of Aristotle and Greek philosophy. Aristotle wrote on logic and natural philosophy, and they were of primary importance.”

Bacon’s imprisonment over knowledge was not the first or last time the clergy voiced strong objections to what universities were teaching. “When Aristotle first became a factor in education and everybody could see that it was high-powered stuff, the church got worried,” said Grant. “There were some positions that were clearly in conflict with the traditions of the Catholic Church. So there were problems. For a while in the early 13th century, the church attempted to ban the works of Aristotle in Paris. But at Oxford, Aristotle was taught with no questions asked, so it wasn’t that the Pope objected. It was the Bishop of Paris and the various councils that controlled what went on in the Paris diocese.

“Eventually, the Paris diocese said, ‘OK. Let’s eliminate the offensive part.’ That didn’t work, and they gave it up.”

Did knowledge and learning in the Middle Ages include scientists and laboratories as we know them?

“There were no such things,” Grant said. “The truth of the matter is, in the Middle Ages they didn’t think ‘experiment.’

“Basically, what they did in the Middle Ages was to reason abstractly. They used logic to figure out the way things had to be. But at least they tried to get answers that were satisfying enough to them to give them the feeling that they did understand the world that they lived in.”