The Medieval University and the Impact of Aristotelian ThoughtBY 1200, THE UNIVERSITIES of Paris, Bologna, and probably Oxford, were flourishing centers of learning. Although documents that shed light on their origins and early development are virtually nonexistent until the thirteenth century, by which time they were already well established, the spontaneous emergence of universities was intimately associated with the new learning that had been translated into Latin throughout the course of the twelfth century. Indeed the university was the institutional means by which western Europe would organize, absorb, and expand the great volume of new knowledge; the instrument through which it would mold and disseminate a common intellectual heritage for generations to come. While the universities of Paris and Oxford became renowned as centers of philosophy and science and Bologna for its schools of law and medicine, all three, as well as approximately eighty universities founded subsequently and patterned after Paris (in northern Europe) and Bologna (in southern Europe), shaped the university into a form that has persisted to this day. The medieval university was an association of masters and scholars subdivided into faculties (primarily arts, law, medicine, and theology) in each of which a formal and required curriculum was pursued toward bachelor's and master's, or doctoral, degrees. Although unrecognizable to ancient Greeks, Romans, and Arabs, it would be wholly familiar to students and faculty at any of our modern universities. Residential colleges, especially at Oxford and Cambridge where they became the basic intellectual unit, were already in existence in the late twelfth century and multiplied during the thirteenth (one of these, Merton College at Oxford, was destined to play a major role in the history of medieval science during the fourteenth century). By 15()() approximately sixty-eight colleges had been established in a variety of universities.
The gradual introduction of the new learning rendered obsolete the meager traditional curriculum of the cathedral schools, a curriculum that had preserved a balance between science, literature, and the humanities. As the universities wholeheartedly embraced the new philosophic and scientific knowledge, they forged a new and greatly expanded curriculum which destroyed this balance. By the mid-thirteenth century, the arts courses required for the degree of Master of Arts, a degree that was prerequisite for study in the higher faculties of law, medicine, and theology, were heavily oriented toward logic and natural science. The logical, scientific, and philosophical works of Aristotle now formed the hard core of the curriculum. The required program of study culminating in the Master of Arts degree at the universities of Paris and Oxford was not, as those unfamiliar with the Middle Ages may suppose, top-heavy with courses in theology and metaphysics. Rather, it consisted for the most part of courses in logic (which had absorbed much that was grammatical), physics, which embraced physical change of all kinds, cosmology, and elements of astronomy and mathematics. Since virtually all students in arts studied a common curriculum, it becomes clear that higher education in the Middle Ages was essentially a program in logic and science. Never before, and not since, have logic and science formed the basis of higher education for all arts students