Intellectual Culture in Medieval Paris: Theologians and the University, c. 1100–1330 (review)

Although recognized as the roots of the ongoing project we now refer to as higher education, the medieval university is often just a footnote in historical reflections on the cultures we now call home. We all likely know in some rudimentary fashion that the earliest impulses for advanced study began in European locales such as Bologna, Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge. However, our knowledge of those institutions, the people that once populated them, and the cultures they established are not nearly as familiar to us as stories told of locales this side of the Atlantic.

Historical distance likely facilitates much of this relative ignorance as sources concerning the medieval university are not as readily accessible. Perhaps part of the challenge is the latent belief that the medieval university has little to do with the nature of our current institutions of higher learning. Regardless, the medieval university arguably left its imprint upon us in a number of ways and is thus worthy of our attention.

Admittedly, those remarks may prove difficult to justify but please allow me to suggest that perhaps our pervasive guilt—guilt over a fractured curriculum, guilt over a fractured curricular and co-curricular experience—may stem from a culture we inherited from the medieval university. From its earliest days, the university was believed to offer an understanding of all forms of knowledge as parts of a larger whole in a context that also sought to form the whole person.

The possible veracity of these beliefs offers the basis of the exploration offered by Ian P. Wei in Intellectual Culture in Medieval Paris, c. 1100–1330. A medieval historian serving on the faculty at the University of Bristol, Wei contends that these perceptions in relation to the University of Paris are both true and false. He thus constructs a detailed, yet somewhat disorienting, story concerning the masters of theology who populated the university during those early years.

To present this story, Wei mixes methodological commitments defining the practices of both institutional history and intellectual history. Given that his focus is on the culture these scholars facilitated in Paris, he found it necessary to chase down a host of relatively elusive yet critical documents. As a result, what emerges is not only a history of the institution’s early years but also detailed readings of critical texts left behind by scholars such as Hugh of St. Victor, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, and Henry of Ghent.

For example, in one of the early chapters of his book, Wei offers a lengthy discussion of the significant components of the curriculum as found in Hugh’s Didascalion. In particular, Wei focuses on Hugh’s discussion of how those components were designed to form habits for the students—habits concerning what texts to read, the order in which they were to be read, and the manner in which they were to be read. In summary, Wei concludes Hugh “offered his students an introduction to the process of studying which also depicted the ideal scholar” (79).

As Wei continues to unveil this mix of institutional and intellectual history, he organizes the seven chapters that define his text along lines that are both chronological and topical. For example, Wei begins by discussing how the monastic communities such as the one in which Hugh resided during the 12th century contributed to the qualities that defined the emergence of what became known as the University of Paris in the 13th century.

Throughout those roughly chronologically organized chapters, Wei repeatedly stresses that the masters believed “that only by living virtuously was it possible to think properly, and that masters had to accept responsibility for their impact on their students” (p. 122). Virtue and intellect seemingly possessed an inextricable relationship for the masters and to teach one was inherently part of a larger process designed to teach the other—perhaps another source of guilt we often feel...