The Birth of the Universities

In the 13th c. with the rise of guilds, the ‘profession’ of the intellectual developed into a proper corporation, called the universitas scholarum, or the university. In a brief period of time, the guilds of masters and students assumed a monopoly on teaching, replacing the cathedral schools inside the cities, and making the monastic schools seem old-fashioned. The birth of the university, however, did not take place every where in the same way: in Bologna an association of students was formed; instead in Paris it was students and professors who joined together (‘universitas magistrorum et scholarium Parisiensium’); in Naples Frederick II founded a similar guild in 1224. The guild for intellectuals constituted in every place a vast and homogeneous male social group: women, who in the monastic context had an equal access to culture, were not allowed to join the universities. Teachers and students in fact generally had the status of minor ecclesiastical orders (‘clerics’), although they were not bound by vows or subject to monastic discipline. In this masculine and celibate environment, marginal with respect to the productive life and social relations taking shape in the then nascent urban bourgeoisie, the goliardic tradition was born. The cultural innovations were fermenting in a lively climate which included even aspects of protest and violence, overflowing at times into rowdy manifestations such as the strike of 1229-31, when the Parisian student body transferred to Oxford, where it was not prohibited to study the texts of Aristotle, thus facilitating the development of the most ancient English university.