Question 1
Evaluate the interpretations in both of the two passages.
Explain which you think is more convincing as an explanation of the relationship between the
Dominicans and the universities.
Passage A
Most men had to combine an academic career with a struggle up the ladder of promotion. The friars opened a way of escape. Some of the earliest recruits were those who had not yet become involved in making a career; others had already gone quite far; in either case the friars saved them for the universities and made it possible for them to turn their backs on the world. It was here that they found their niche. For fifty years before the friars came, theological study had made little advance. There had been few new ideas, and few innovations in method. Now the time had come for a rapid advance. It was difficult to find room for these things in the current curriculum of the universities and in the midst of a secular struggle for existence. The friars offered both an opportunity and a relief from anxiety. The Dominicans were from the earliest days an Order organised for theological study. The rapid organisation of Dominican studies to provide what was virtually a separate university system parallel with the system of secular universities is one of the most astonishing creations of the Middle Ages. Until the friars came the universities had served mainly as a training ground for administrators. This was a necessary, but increasingly unsatisfying, aim. By contrast the friars in their studies aimed at the conversion of the world. They satisfied the intellectual demands of the most intellectual century of the Middle Ages.
R. W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages, published in 1970.
Passage B
From the early thirteenth century, the university of Paris, both teachers and students, was in conflict with the Chancellor of the cathedral of Notre Dame and the city of Paris. Eventually there was a partial truce between the arts students and the theologians at the university brought about by the opposition of both groups to the Mendicant Orders, who had taken advantage of the upheaval to extend their teaching activities. The secular clerks regarded them as the undisguised enemies of the university. In 1253 the university imposed an oath of obedience on all masters, binding them to observe the university statutes. This was something the friars could not and would not tolerate. In 1255 a Papal Bull threatened the university with excommunication if it failed to admit friars as doctors. Thereupon the university formally dissolved itself. In the course of this conflict each side denounced the other as ‘heretics’ and ‘atheists’. A temporary truce was reached in 1261 with the help of the Pope. The university of Paris as a whole agreed to admit the friars but they were to be excluded from the faculty of arts, which was preserved as an area of freedom. This was really a victory for the university; the struggle with the friars had made the university set its own house in order.
Friedrich Heer, The Medieval World, published in 1962.
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Answer
