External and Internal Pressures: From the Emperor to the Universitutes scholarium

The tangled relations within the world of studies were further com­plicated when emperors such as Frederick I Barbarossa (with the Con­stitutio “Habita” of 1155) or kings such as Frederick II (with the “foun­dation” of the Studium in Naples in 1224) projected their own strategic moves onto them.

In some cases the intervention was by happenstance, as in 1155 with the constitution OfFrederick Barbarossa. More commonly, however, it was motivated by a desire to put some order into the world of stud­ies and students. One clear example of the latter case is Reggio Emi­lia, where the commune civitutis, in an attempt to organize the school (prdinure studium), established procedures for assigning individual students and professors to schools that already lined both sides of the city’s main street.^[114] Ordinure studium or reformure studium therefore did not always and in every case mean founding a studium (a univer­sity) ; often, and especially at first, it meant, more simply, establishing rules for avoiding confusion and conflict and for subjecting to “or­der” an already operational and fluid reality.

The students also wanted a hand in shaping the multifaceted world of schools, professors, and would-be professors. Their basic associa­tions, the nutiones and the universitates, moved in just that direction: the nutiones had the principal aim of gathering together all the stu­dents from other regions or from foreign lands and of helping to sat­isfy elementary everyday needs and study requirements; the universi- totes worked both to reinforce and defend the functions of the nationes and to guarantee students from other regions or lands living space and rules for peaceful cohabitation within the city and scholarly discipline within the schools.

The stationarii were entrepreneurs and merchants. Some of them, the stationarii exempla tenentes or stationarii peciarum_y specialized in keeping exemplars—exemplaria—of works containing laws or state­ments of doctrine and in lending out such originals (or copies authen­ticated as originals) to be copied or to serve as models for the correc­tion of other texts. Such works could be borrowed whole or, more commonly, divided into sections known as peciae. Other stationers known as stationarii Hbrorum produced books (codices} and sold new or used copies of books. Certain stationarii became stationarii univer­sitatis by swearing to obey the rectores and to respect the rules given in the statutes of the student universitates.

There were various sets of dispositions, emanating from a variety of institutions, that laid down rules for the schools. There were impe­rial norms such as the “Habita” of 1155, pontifical measures such as the famous decretal of Honorius III of 1219, royal decrees such as those OfFrederick II on the schools of Naples. There were also laws passed by city communal governments, either included in or scattered through the local statutes (as in Bologna in measures of the Comune del podesta promulgated between 1245 and 1267) or incorporated as a “book” of statutes (as in Bologna with the statutes of the people’s commune of 1288). Finally, there were measures decided by the col­leges of jurist doctors and, above all, the statutes of the universitates scholarium such as the Bologna student statutes of 1252, of 1272—74, and the longer and more folly articulated statutes of 1317, which were then revised and updated every ten years. In Padua student statutes were drawn up in 1262 (the so-called Pacta vetera) and in 1321, follow­ing the Bologna text of 1317. The nationes also had statutes—for exam­pie, those of the natio teutonica in Bologna in the mid-fourteenth century.

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