A Guide to the History of Physical Education

THE UNIVERSITIES OF THE MIDDLE AGES.

A succession of influences operating in the eleventh and twelfth centuries had widened the scope of human interests and produced a vague longing after knowledge which was not to be satisfied by the traditional teaching of the schools. Along with the demand for a different type and more advanced grade of instruction, there arose here and there famous lecturers, such as Abelard (1079-1142) at Paris, who gathered about themselves great numbers of disciples. Centers were thus created to which other teachers and their followers were attracted, and this in turn led to an informal association of masters and pupils, out of which the medieval university developed. The complete university came at length to include four departments-theology, law, medicine, and philosophy or the arts. Certain texts were thought to contain explicitly or implicitly the sum of ascertainable secular truth, just as the Bible and the writings of Church Fathers held all religious truth; and this was to be extracted by prescribed methods of reasoning, with no fresh resort to the facts of observation and experience. Instead of seeking new harvests, the typical schoolmen of that day were content with the continual threshing over of old straw.