Browse through Hastings Rashdall's monumental Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages (1895; 2nd ed.: Oxford University Press, 1936) and one finds in volume 3 a section on student life. The topics covered include student discipline (mainly its absence), flogging, speaking in Latin, hazing (“initiation”), academic dress, meals, standard of living, “amusements,” “the wilder side,” and so on. So, yes, historians of the medieval university have long explored how students actually lived. But such discussions have inevitably tended toward the anecdotal and have focused exclusively on students. The old histories say nothing at all about the devotional life of masters and students, which surely was at the heart of the university. How then could they ever hope to communicate what it was actually like to live at a medieval university?
There is no one better equipped to fill this gap in our understanding than William Courtenay, the most prolific and distinguished historian of the medieval university alive today. He begins with two “reconfigurations” to our understanding of medieval universities. The first concerns the importance of the nation to the social fabric of the university. Far more than the university—a legal fiction according to Courtenay—or even the arts faculty, it was the nation that determined the primary associations and even the identity of secular clerics, including those who went on to study in the higher faculties. This is a fundamental shift in how most of us understand the social networks of university masters. The dominant assumption throughout the literature is that the higher faculties shaped the social world of the masters. Instead, it was the nations—associations based on places of origin, and hence on language, local culture, and even liturgical practices—that forged the identity of those attending universities, from beginning students to masters.
The second reconfiguration is a shift in emphasis away from the writings of masters, which of course is traditionally the basis of how we write intellectual history. Courtenay is asking instead “how those in the nations and colleges spent their time” (5). It is a striking fact—always evident in the sources but mostly overlooked—that those who belonged to medieval universities devoted much of their time to religious activities, especially to rituals for the dead. Courtenay concedes that what those rituals meant to masters and students on a personal level is “unknowable” (5). But, as is so often the case, acknowledging our own ignorance moves us in the right direction.
The book has seven chapters, which we may assign to four primary themes. Chapters 1 and 2 take us into the world of rituals for the dead. University statutes say far more about such rituals than we might think: 20 percent of the famous statutes of 1215 concern them. Courtenay first maps out their topography by locating the churches where they took place and briefly sketches the history of contentions that arose between mendicants and parish churches over jurisdiction. Chapter 2 provides context for masses for the dead through a theological investigation from Augustine to the high Middle Ages. The central theological issue was this: Christ sacrificed himself for all, and that sacrifice is reenacted in the mass, yet donors left bequests for masses in order to speed their own souls through Purgatory. Do those masses benefit only the donors or all Christians equally? Was the inequality in this world destined to continue in the next? (Yes was the answer, with a few exceptions.) These discussions were not simply abstract. They form “the conceptual framework that surrounded university practice regarding care for the dead that was embodied in the statutes of 1215” (36). Thus, behind the hoary institutions familiar to us from over a century of scholarship—colleges, nations, and mendicant studia—we find a devotional reality that crystallized in rituals for the dead.
Chapters 3 and 6 explore the book's second theme: devotion to Mary and its growth from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. Again, one of the key sources is well-known: the Proctors’ Book of the English nation, which includes the nation's financial accounts, including frequent references to candles for “nostra domina.” Together these candles were the largest single expense of the English nation, “an obligation that took precedence over all others” (43). In Auctarium Chartularii Universitatis Parisiensis (Delalain frères, 1894), Denifle took “nostra domina” as a reference to the cathedral of Notre Dame. Courtenay takes it instead as a reference to the Virgin. The candles might have been destined for the cathedral of Notre Dame, but it is much more likely that they were intended for Marian devotion at a different church attended by members of the nation. What is at stake here is the basic function and purpose of the nation. In my lectures to undergraduates, I have always struggled to explain what the nation really was. In its devotional capacity, in its corporate celebration of numerous feasts (including five major feasts for Mary), Courtenay sees the nation as a kind of confraternity, which surely gets us closer to the medieval reality.
The third theme, the subject of Chapter 4, explores the distinction between halls and colleges. Halls, which provided lodging for students, were commercial in nature. Colleges were instead charitable institutions, normally established by a wealthy donor as a prayer community for his or her soul. Neither institution had much to do with the academic function of the university. One question arises here for me. Gilbert Ouy argued almost fifty years ago (“Le Collège de Navarre, berceau de l'humanisme français,” in Enseignement et vie intellectuelle, IXe-XVIe Siècle, vol. 1, Section de philologie et d'histoire jusqu’à 1610 [Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1975], 276–299) that the Collège de Navarre served as a “cradle” of French humanism. In this view, the intellectual life of the college shaped a generation of French scholars. How do we reconcile the tension between that view and this one, the nation as an intellectual and a devotional community? Is that older view in some measure mistaken?
The fourth theme treats a “hidden presence” at the University of Paris: women (addressed in chapter 6). In Courtenay's account, women were most visible as founders of colleges and in trades connected to the university, including landlords, tavern keepers, laundresses, and candle makers. They also had a very important presence in the book trade. In some of these activities, they were not directly involved but helped run family businesses. Women were also heavily involved in grammar schools. I find it surprising that, by the late fourteenth century, one in three grammar schools in Paris was for girls (84).
I doubt that we will ever uncover sources telling us what those attending universities thought about their devotions on a personal level. This short book reminds us that the sources we already have, when read with fresh eyes, still have much to offer. Its brevity is one of its many strengths. It should be read by anyone who wishes to go beyond the institution, to know what it might have been like actually to belong to a medieval university.
