The Pope and the Professors
Another fine Thomas Woods article at Lew Rockwell about a Catholic institution. This time, the university. Link. Excerpts:
It must be frustrating to be a historian of medieval Europe. No matter how many books you write, lectures you deliver, or students you influence, everyone still thinks the Middle Ages were a period of darkness and stagnation. The substantial output of medieval scholarship that was produced in the twentieth century should have put this inane caricature to rest once and for all, but here we have another case of specialized knowledge that hasn't managed to trickle down to the general public.
The pope (in fact) and the emperor (in theory) possessed authority over all of Christendom, and for this reason it was to them that a university typically had to turn for the right to issue degrees. Equipped with the approval of one or the other of these universal figures, the university's degrees would be respected throughout all of Christendom. Degrees awarded only by the approval of national monarchs, on the other hand, were considered valid only in the kingdom in which they were issued.
Local townsmen were frequently ambivalent in their posture toward university students: on the one hand, the existence of the university was a boon for local merchants and for economic activity in general since the students brought money to spend, but on the other, university students then as now could be irresponsible and unruly. As a modern commentator puts it, inhabitants of medieval university towns loved the money but hated the students.
According to historian of science Edward Grant, the creation of the university, the commitment to reason and rational argument, and the overall spirit of inquiry that characterized medieval intellectual life amounted to "a gift from the Latin Middle Ages to the modern world”¦though it is a gift that may never be acknowledged. Perhaps it will always retain the status it has had for the past four centuries as the best-kept secret of Western civilization."
