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1 The Formation of a Reformer at the Franciscan Studium in Paris In his 1957 book Les intellectuels au moyen âge, Jacques Le Goff suggested that the thirteenth-century intellectual was in danger of completely removing himself from the larger medieval society. According to Le Goff, the scholastic’s language—Latin—and his abstract and technical ideas distanced him from the masses of laymen, their problems and their psychology . “Attached to abstract and eternal truths, the scholastic risked losing contact with history, with what was contingent, moving, evolving. . . . One of the great pitfalls of the scholastic intellectuals was that of forming an intellectual technocracy.”1 That Le Goff’s critique of medieval intellectuals is jarring to us today is testimony to how much our knowledge of the medieval university has expanded during the past forty years, in part because of the work of social and cultural historians like Le Goff himself. We know much more now about exchanges between the medieval university and larger society and about how the medieval university functioned as a society and culture in its own right. The experience of studying and teaching at a medieval university involved a great deal more than the production of technical commentaries on the Sentences of Peter Lombard. Nicole Bériou and David d’Avray, for instance, have studied how model sermon collections, produced at the University of Paris, were disseminated around Europe and then preached (albeit in somewhat different form) to laymen and women.2 Michèle Mulchahey has shown that the primary responsibility of Dominican university masters was training teachers for the order’s provincial scholae, where most Dominican preachers and confessors received their education and training.3 We are beginning to learn more, in short, about the university’s impact outside its walls.4 There is still much more work to be done, however, particularly in exploring how the university served as a training ground for talented ecclesi- The Formation of a Reformer 13 astical and secular administrators.5 During the thirteenth century, members of the new, mendicant, evangelical orders—the Franciscans and Dominicans —entered universities in large numbers. The mendicant studia attached to a university such as Paris trained students, most of whom, after graduating, dispersed into the provinces and growing urban centers as preachers and confessors, as well as teachers in provincial studia. A few student friars remained at the university, rising through the ranks to become distinguished university masters. Of these masters, 25 percent left the university for high ecclesiastical position, such as bishop, archbishop, cardinal, and pope.6 This was the trajectory followed by Eudes Rigaud, Franciscan regent master at the University of Paris, who was elected archbishop of Rouen and consecrated by Innocent IV in Lyon in March 1248. During his tenure as archbishop , Eudes became a close friend and councillor to the king of France, Louis IX. He held a seat in the Parlement of Paris, served as a master or judge at the royal court of the Exchequer in Normandy, and was instrumental in negotiating a peace treaty in 1259 between the kings of England and France, ending more than fifty years of war. From the detailed episcopal register he kept over a twenty-one-year period, we know that Eudes was an extraordinarily hardworking and meticulous episcopal administrator and reformer. Before being elected archbishop, however, Eudes had a distinguished career in theology at the Franciscan studium in Paris. The scholarly attention that has been paid to Eudes’s career has focused on either his university career or his administrative career, reflecting the modern divide between intellectual and social historians. Yet one must ask whether teaching theology in a university and working as an ecclesiastical administrator were absolutely distinct careers. How did a career as a university theologian prepare someone for a career as an ecclesiastical administrator? Not much is known about Eudes Rigaud’s university career. There is no edition of his commentary on Lombard’s Sentences, and few of his other theological works have been published.7 Although there have been some recent studies of Eudes’s philosophy and more speculative theology based on his unpublished Sentences commentary,8 there remains a need to illuminate the continuities and discontinuities between Eudes’s university and episcopal careers. Several unpublished manuscripts of sermons Eudes preached at the University of Paris in the mid-1240s, shortly before he was elected archbishop, present a fuller picture of his university career.9 In the sermons, we hear not only Eudes the teacher...

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