The Organization of the Academic World

Courses of study were not organized in the same manner through­out Europe. Two distinct forms emerged, hence two types or models for a university. The first and the oldest was the Bolognese model.

The first element is the schola. A schola was usually set up in the same house as the master’s living quarters, hence the dominus of the house was both dominus and doctor or magister, the school’s professor. One of his servants, whose tasks became specialized to serve the needs of the school, served as its bidellus. In one variant of this model, a profes­sor did not own the house and the school lodged in it but was simply responsible for instruction. This was the case of Placentinus, a jurist whose very name is unknown and who is always given in the sources by the toponym “of Piacenza.” He and his students were lodged in the houses of the Castelli (or Da Castello) family; Alberico of Porta Ravegnana was lodged in buildings of the commune civitatis.

The second element in the Bolognese model comprised the scholares and their associations. The first of the two ways in which students who frequented a school in the twelfth century were organized was by consortia, fraternitates, or communitates.

Students banded together to form a consortium in order to resolve such specific practical problems as finding lodgings or getting access to a book, or else in order to increase their leverage in negotiations with the professor, the city’s merchants, the book merchants and copyists, and so forth. When these or analogous and larger associa­tions emphasized mutual assistance they were also called fraternitates', when they emphasized pleasure and sociability they were called com­munitates.

The second mode of student association was the comitiva.

A third element in student life in the Bologna model was the natio. Toward the end of the twelfth century, although the comitiva did not disappear, it began to loose its central position in the organization of student life, largely because there were some essential needs that it failed to satisfy, such as providing lodging and meals, ways to borrow money (with attendant guarantees), access to books, and judicial guidance in civil and criminal matters. Instead, students who be­longed to different schools in the same city began to associate with one another and band together to pursue common ends. The selec­tion process that led to the creation of a group (or to co-opting the members of an existent group) operated by common language, shared habits and customs, and a CoUective mind-set arising from a common national origin or from a similarity of views among people born in the same place or the same territory (natio). Thus students from the various schools and the various comitivae began to gather together in these new organizations, all the while continuing to be part of the old comitivae. For some years the new associations were called indifferently nationes or universitates, but as early as the second or third decade of the thirteenth century the term nationes prevailed.

At the same time, the relationship between the students and the pro­fessor of a school changed because the comitiva lost its significance and its functions in daily life. The individual professor still did not have relations with students from other schools.

A fourth part of the Bologna model was the universitas (an English translation would be guild or corporation) of the students and the collegium of the “doctors.” The students’ interests and the professors’ interests began to diverge. On the students’ side, the nationes soon grew and took the form of broader associations that came to be called universitates. In Bologna there were two such universitates, that of the ultramontani, which included the nationes of students from north of the Alps, and that of the citramontani, which included the four Italian nationes of the Lombards, the Tuscans, the Romans, and the Cam­panians. On the other side, teachers’ associations developed toward the mid-thirteenth century, when the domini of the various city schools joined together in a corporation similar to and on the model of the other craft and trade corporations. Their association took the name of collegium, and there were collegia for professors of civil law, canon law, medicine, and the arts.

The student collegia formed a fifth element. These were organiza­tions for students but not founded by the students themselves nor wholly run by them. In general these were institutions founded by popes, cardinals, bishops, or wealthy lords with the aim of providing a hospitium—a place of residence—for a number of young people from one particular city, region, or larger geographical area. This sort of institution was neither common nor particularly important in It­aly, but north of the Alps there were many such collegia.

Sixth and last, there was the role of the bishop or the archdeacon. In Bologna the archdeacon (elsewhere the bishop)—a person exter­nal to the world of studies but not extraneous to it—had tasks that were set and described (somewhat ambiguously) in a famous decretal ofHonorius III in 1219. In this decretal, Superspeculam, the archdea­con of Bologna, a high ecclesiastical dignitary, was charged with granting the insignia of the doctorate to candidates who proved themselves worthy of that honor in their doctoral examination. Since it was unsure whether the certification of that worthiness was a duty of these ecclesiastical dignitaries or a privilege of the professors, a mixed system was set up. Two final examinations were instituted, a private examination (called privata) given in the sacristy, for which the professors (and only those professors who were members of a col­legium) were responsible; and a subsequent public examination (calledpublicu, conventus, or Iuureu), which took place in the cathedral and was in essence a solemn (and extremely costly) ceremony.

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