The Municipal Schools

Between the 11th and 12th c., in addition to the traditional teaching venues, new teaching centers were created, some of which were monastic, but the majority of which were connected to episcopal chapters in cities that were rapidly growing both demographically, politically, and economically as market centers. In these centers the introduction of new teaching materials quickly changed the core of philosophic thought: at Montecassino Latin translations of Arabic medical texts began to be produced thanks to the monk Constantine (c. 1020-1080); at St. Gallen Notker (950-1022) encouraged the translation of scriptural and philosophic texts into German (the Psalms, the Categories of Aristotle, the De nuptiis Mercurii et philologiae, and the De consolatione philosophiae of Boethius). In Paris the teaching of logic began to be developed and enriched: no longer were only manuals used, but rather the texts of Aristotle (Logica vetus) and Boethius themselves were studied at first hand. In the school of canons regular at St. Victor, also in Paris, a new interest was given to the development of the mechanical arts and to the relation between intellectual culture and mystical life. At Chartres and in other centers in northern France, the masters of the chapter schools turned their attention to new scientific and philosophic texts being tranlated from Arabic. In the lay schools characteristic of the Italian cities (Ravenna, Salerno, and Bologna), the fields of law and medicine were strengthened. And finally, teaching itself became more complex and systematic, rendering itself an autonomous activity. Thus during the 12th c. a new figure emerged, that of the ‘cleric,’ i.e. —according to the definition of Jacques Le Goff—‘the man who professionally writes or teaches, or better yet, he who does both things together; the man that exercises the activity of professor or scholar, in short, the intellectual.’