The history of universities shaped in many ways the history of culture. The University of Bologna in Italy, which started around 1088 A.D., is commonly cited as the world’s first university. While this claim has been disputed, it generally stands. Within a century or two, universities sprang up around Europe.
The universities of Europe in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance years were structured differently than the universities of North America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
While the daily lives of students at the universities were more regimented than the universities of five to ten centuries later, the classes and professors were less coordinated. To obtain a degree, a student read whichever books, attended the number variety of classes and lectures, which he thought would best prepare him for examinations. There was no set number of semesters or courses needed to graduate.
When a student felt ready, he would request to be examined. He would then undergo days of detailed and intense testing, most of it spoken before a panel of professors, rather than written. When the examinations were over, the professors conferred among themselves, and decided whether or not the student had earned a diploma.
The students lived in buildings controlled by the university. The medievals had a balanced view of alcohol. While drunkenness was forbidden, and students would be punished for it, a glass of beer or wine was served with most meals.
Writing from a twenty-first century perspective, historian Eric Metaxas describes student life at Erfurt, one of Europe’s most significant universities:
By our own standards, life at the university was quite regimented, with students arising at 4:00 a.m. for devotions and going to bed at 8:00 p.m. All students lived in a residential college called a bursa, of which there were six in Erfurt. Students paid for room and board. Two meals per day were served, the first at 10:00 a.m., after four hours of exercises and lectures. After the first meal, there were more exercises and lectures until 5:00 p.m.
The exercises were, of course, mathematical and grammatical exercises, not physical ones. Regarding the bursa, Metaxas notes:
Bursa is the Latin word for sack or purse; this term is still with us in modern universities, where the treasurer or business officer is called the bursar.
Debate was a central activity at a medieval university. A student was given a viewpoint or hypothesis, prepared for several days, and then debated against another student. Often, the students were required to switch sides, and have the debate again a few days later. In this way, the students learned detailed evidence for both sides of the question.
Sometimes the debates were done in teams, with several students on each side.
Erfurt’s university excelled at debate, and its reputation for well-reasoned debates spread across Europe, as historian Lyndal Roper writes:
Founded in 1392, the university was the oldest German institution to have a charter, and in the early sixteenth century it boasted an outstanding collection of humanists, interested in the revival of ancient learning and in returning to the sources.
Particularly in the universities north of the Alps, linguistic skills were highly valued. Students already knew Latin when they arrived at the university. They expanded their Latin skills, learned Hebrew, and learned to distinguish between classical Greek and koine Greek.
The demands of precise scholarship caused professors and students to look at texts in their original languages. Aristotle and Plato were read in Greek, Cicero and Tacitus in Latin, and the Bible in Hebrew. To rely on a translation was to compromise one’s intellectual and rational standards.
