Parisian Scholars in the Early Fourteenth Century: A Social Portrait (review)

Parisian Scholars in the Early Fourteenth Century: A Social Portrait. By William J. Courtenay (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1999) 284 pp. $64.95

Symonette, a jongleuse (we might say, "performance artist") from the small town of Bar-sur-Aube in Champagne, was a remarkable woman. Jongleurs and jongleuses were stereotypically of the lower social classes; their vocation stigmatized them in the Middle Ages as being of "easy virtue." All the weight of prejudiced opinion would have been against Symonette when she claimed that Jean le Fourbeur, an arts student at the University of Paris, raped her while he was in his native province during his summer vacation in 1329. If Symonette had been a respectable woman of good family, her accusation would be less remarkable. Not that students were regarded as averse to committing rape. Quite the contrary. They suffered their own stereotypes. But a jongleuse was almost the moral equivalent of a prostitute, and many medieval pundits were hardpressed to accept that a prostitute could be raped.

Symonette prosecuted her suit against Jean in spite of demeaning stereotypes. She pursued him to Paris and enlisted the judicial apparatus of the bishop of Paris in her favor. Jean was arrested, convicted, and compelled to pay an enormous fine for his crime. But Symonette's vindication had a sequel. The bishop of Paris, despite arguments that he and his advisers made to the contrary, was forbidden by papal decree from imposing monetary sentences on members of the University of Paris--Jean included. Even the teacher with whom Jean was studying repudiated him after the rape conviction. But, because the university had to protect itself from trespasses on its privileges, it sued in the papal court, initiating a long and extremely costly litigation, for which the university decided to tax its members to raise the money.

Courtenay has reconstructed, re-edited, and analyzed the amazing record of this tax in Parisian Scholars in the Early Fourteenth Century. The record provides the most comprehensive picture that we have of the social, geographical, and disciplinary character of the several thousand students and teachers at the University of Paris before the great crises of the later Middle Ages--the Hundred Years' War, Black Death, and Great Schism--that changed the institution forever.

Never one to exaggerate his findings, Courtenay nevertheless challenges, or qualifies, a whole array of previous conclusions about the university. He discovers a large component of high-born students at the University of Paris, far higher than has been thought. Even though nobles did not need university education, as earlier scholars suggested, a great many of them wanted it for their sons, even if the latter never proceeded to the higher academic faculties. Courtenay's findings also call into question the university's importance as a means of upward social mobility for poor rural and urban students--noteworthy thirteenth-century examples, like Robert of Sorbon, the country boy who founded the Sorbonne, notwithstanding.

Courtenay also shows that the student body at Paris had a decidedly international flavor during the early fourteenth century, drawing goodly numbers of boys and young men from the British Isles, Scandinavia, Germany, Italy, and Spain. Within France, however, the university failed to attract many students from the south, perhaps because of other opportunities for study at Toulouse and Montpellier or perhaps because of southerners' lingering antagonism about their conquest by northern Frenchmen in the Albigensian Crusade of the early thirteenth century.

The faculty, except particularly in medicine, had less of an international character. Since many scholars believe the international flavor of the faculty to have been strong in the thirteenth century, with Italians like Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure teaching, this finding at first looks as if it confirms another piece of received wisdom, namely, that the spectacular cosmopolitanism of most international institutions, including universities, eroded at the end of the Middle Ages. But Courtenay seems skeptical about the international representation...