PARIS IN THE MIDDLE AGES Origin of University of Paris.—The early universities rose in response to new wants, and the commencement of the Univer sity of Paris supplies us with a further illustration of the fact. The study of logic, which, prior to the 12th century, was founded exclusively on one or two meagre compends, received, about the year I100, on two occasions, a powerful stimulus—in the first instance from the memorable controversy between Lanfranc and Berengar; in the second, from the no less famous controversy between Anselm and Roscellinus. Dialectic was looked upon as "the science of sciences"; and when, somewhere in the first decade of the 12th century, William of Champeaux opened, in Paris, a school for the more advanced study of dialectic as an art, his teach ing was attended with marked success. Among his pupils was Abelard, in whose hands the study made a yet more notable ad vance; so that, by the middle of the century, we find John of Salisbury relating how all learned Paris had gone well nigh mad in its pursuit and practice of the new dialectic. Abelard taught at first at the cathedral school at Notre Dame, and later at the schools on the Mont Ste. Genevieve, of which he was the founder, and where he imparted to logic its new development.
The schools out of which the university arose were those attached to the cathedral on the Ile de la Cite, and presided over by the chancellor—a dignitary who must be carefully distinguished from the later chancellor of the university. For a long time the teachers lived in separate houses on the island, and it was only by degrees that they combined themselves into a society, and that special buildings were constructed for their class-work. But the flame which Abelard's teaching had kindled was not destined to expire. Among his pupils was Peter Lombard, who was bishop of Paris in 1159, and widely known to posterity as the compiler of the famous volume of the Sentences. The design of this work was to place before the student, in as strictly logical a form as prac ticable, the views (sententiae) of the fathers and all the great doctors of the Church upon the chief and most difficult points in the Christian belief. The logicians seized upon it as a great store house of indisputable major premises, on which they argued with renewed energy and with endless ingenuity of dialectical refine ment ; and upon this new compendium of doctrine, which became the theological text-book of the middle ages, the schoolmen based their successive treatises Super sententias.
The original university, as already stated, took its rise entirely out of the movement carried on by teachers on the island, who taught by virtue of the licence conferred by the chancellor of the cathedral. In the second decade of the 13th century, it is true, we find masters repairing to the left bank of the Seine and placing themselves under the jurisdiction of the abbot of the monastery of Ste. Genevieve; but it was around the bestowal of this licence by the chancellor of Notre Dame, on the Ile de la Cite, that the University of Paris grew up. It is in this licence that the whole significance of the master of arts degree is contained ; for what is technically known as admission to that degree was really nothing more nor less than receiving the chancellor's permission to "in cept," and by "inception" was implied the master's formal entrance upon, and commencement of, the functions of a duly licensed teacher, and his recognition as such by his brethren in the pro fession. The previous stage of his academic career, that of bachelordom, had been one of apprenticeship for the mastership; and his emancipation from this state was symbolized by placing the magisterial cap (biretta) upon his head, a ceremony which, in imitation of the old Roman ceremony of manumission, was per formed by his former instructor. He gave a formal inaugural lecture, and was then welcomed into the society of his professional brethren with set speeches, and took his seat in his master's chair. (See also EXAMINATIONS.) Some time between the years 115o and 117o the University of Paris came formally into being. Its first written statutes were not, however, compiled until about the year 1208, and it was not until long after that date that it possessed a "rector." Its earliest recognition as a legal corporation belongs to about the year 1211, when a brief of Innocent III. empowered it to elect a proctor to be its representative at the papal court. By this permission it obtained the right to sue or to be sued in a court of justice as a corporate body.