Rituals for the Dead

Religion and Community in the Medieval University of Paris

by William J. Courtenay

Series: Conway Lectures in Medieval Studies

214 pages, 6.00 x 9.00 in, 40 halftones and 3 maps

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Published: December 2018

ISBN 9780268104948

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Published: December 2018

ISBN 9780268104931

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Excerpt

"As engagingly written as it is original, William Courtenay's distinguished contribution to the Conway series documents the roles of nations and colleges at the medieval University of Paris as religious no less than as academic communities. Drawing on visual, material, and textual evidence, he documents how these groups prayed for and remembered their dead and how this devotional concern inflected scholastic debates on suffrages for souls in Purgatory and veneration of the Virgin as patron of learning and intercessor for scholars living and dead. Authored by a world-class luminary in the field, Rituals for the Dead thus vivifies an important and hitherto underappreciated dimension of medieval university life." —Marcia Colish, Yale University

"William Courtenay has long been the finest American scholar of medieval universities. With this book he opens up a whole new vista on the communal and religious lives of students and masters as integrally interwoven with their academic tasks, especially for instance in remembering their dead. Along the way he delves into theology, seals, statutes, processions, and much more, and explores too for the first time the presence of women among these all-male establishments and the growing place of the Virgin Mary in representing their collective identity. It is a grand achievement, providing rich new texture to our standard ways of talking about medieval universities." —John Van Engen, Andrew V. Tackes Professor Emeritus of Medieval History, University of Notre Dame

"Courtenay makes a convincing case that 'the religious side of university life in Paris has received almost no attention.' In doing so, he also makes a strong case for the value and importance of this current study. It is clear from the beginning, however, that this book will be nearly as much about the institutional forms of the university as it is about the spiritual devotion and prayers directed within it. No one is better prepared to treat both of these subjects than William Courtenay."—Joel Kaye, author of A History of Balance, 1250–1375

“In this slim, enticing volume, America’s greatest living scholar of the medieval University of Paris offers new perspectives on neglected ‘religious elements in the daily life of Parisian scholars.’” —Speculum

“Courtenay provides much more than the contribution of a single scholar. His commanding use of source material offers specific, vivid images of daily life at the University of Paris, and thus allows both for a contextualization of prior research and a synthesis of multiple academic areas.” —The Medieval Review

“William J. Courtenay offers a new perspective on the medieval University of Paris, one that highlights the importance of rituals for the dead and the ties that bound university students and masters. “ —The American Historical Review

“This magisterial account teems with insights into the lives of the masters and students in the halls and colleges of the University of Paris in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It demonstrates that studies in the faculties of arts and theology were situated in the Christian tradition and that Christian piety framed masters’ and students’ lives and conduct, with its cycle of prayers for the dead.” —H-France Review

" . . . a fresh perspective on the devotional activities of masters and students at the University of Paris, especially how '[d]eath transform[ed] an academic community into a religious community for the cult of the dead'" —Reading Religion

"In the introduction to this important collection of lectures, William Courtenay makes a convincing case that 'the religious side of university life in Paris has received almost no attention.' In doing so, he also makes a strong case for the value and importance of this current study. It is clear from the beginning, however, that this book will be nearly as much about the institutional forms of the university as it is about the spiritual devotion and prayers directed within it. No one is better prepared to treat both of these subjects than William Courtenay." —Joel Kaye, author of A History of Balance, 1250–1375

"In his latest book, Rituals for the Dead, William J. Courtenay offers enticing new perspectives on the religious functions of the early university." —Comitatus

In his Pour un autre Moyen ge Jacques Le Goff brought together a number of his articles that approached medieval society from a different, less common perspective, as the title suggested. Similarly, in the following chapters, none previously published, features of the medieval University of Paris rarely encountered in the secondary literature are being explored, indeed reconfigured. Much of the literature on medieval universities, from Heinrich Denifle through the contributions of Hastings Rashdall, Lynn Thorndike, Gaines Post, and Pearl Kibre concentrated on questions of origins and early development, constitutional structure, curriculum and studies, and the role of colleges. Universities were places of intellectual endeavor as well as professional training for careers in the church, in medicine, or in law. Other historians emphasized student daily life, the frequenting of taverns, gambling, acts of violence, student pleas for money and the suspicious responses of parents and patrons. And more recently there has been an emphasis on the regional and social background of students and careers of graduates. But although it has long been acknowledged that students and masters were clerics and that most of them had careers in the church, the religious side of university life in Paris has received almost no attention. Thus, in what follows, those standard themes and descriptions, while true in their own way, have been set aside or at least balanced with a different perspective on the university that explores the religious elements in the daily life of Parisian scholars.

Before addressing that, a different way of looking at or reconfiguring the University of Paris needs to be considered. We tend to think of a university community as one entity. One is studying at, teaching at, or is part of a specific university, which in this book was the medieval University of Paris. From one perspective it is legitimate to speak about a university or a university community as a whole. The enjoyment of scholarly privileges and protections was only available for those who were recognized as members of the university. Put another way, those privileges were institutional privileges and applied to the individual only because he belonged to the university as a corporation of masters and students (magistri et scolares Parisienses). To be a student at the university, to have what was called scolaritas, meant that one was acknowledged as a student by the master under whom one studied, who in turn belonged to the guild of masters.

From another and more accurate perspective, however, the university was a fictional entity, having standing in law as a corporate personality with rights and privileges, but was in fact a consortium, a collection of different groupings that were actually the basis of self-identity and social interaction. One thought of oneself as belonging to a faculty (that is, one of the four scholarly disciplines of philosophy or the liberal arts, theology, decrees, that is canon law, and medicine), and, within the faculty of arts, as belonging to a nation. Of those two, the faculty and the nation, the nation was the principal unit of affiliation for secular clerics within the university. All secular masters of theology or medicine, and many in law, had earlier studied and reigned, that is taught, in the faculty of arts and belonged to one of its nations. The oaths taken by those being licensed in arts required obedience to the rector and the proctor of the nation regardless of their future state, that is, promotion in a higher faculty. And students in theology and medicine often continued to teach in the faculty of arts to support themselves while studying in a higher faculty. When they incepted in the higher faculty as masters of theology, canon law, or medicine, their social network often remained the one formed at the level of the nation, both those who, like them, had gone on to higher studies, but also their former colleagues who remained active in the nation. There is very little evidence that masters in a higher faculty regularly associated with each other apart from meetings to conduct the business of the faculty, although they may well have done so, but there is considerable evidence that masters in a nation met almost weekly for eating and drinking in different taverns at the expense of the nation, which included students in a higher faculty who were still teaching in arts. Nations also on occasion celebrated the achievement of a former master in the nation when he incepted as a doctor in a higher faculty and presumably had maintained his association with his former colleagues.

It is usually said that the faculty of arts at Paris was divided into four nations. A more accurate description would be to say that the faculty of arts was itself a corporate persona made up of four largely autonomous units, the nations. A master was a member of the faculty of arts only because he was, first and foremost, a member of a nation. The nation was the unit of self-identification and association, just as, in a weaker sense, departments are in American colleges and universities. Modern academic departments, however, are based on a recognized scholarly discipline, while the basis for self-identification in the nations at a medieval university was regional, based on place of origin. Although a student in arts did not have a choice of which nation he wished to join or be affiliated with when he came to Paris to study, we can assume most were comfortable in the company of fellow Landsmänner, to use the German term, ones whose vernacular language or Latin accent, topographical attachments and associations, and even liturgical practices were familiar. This attachment to a local region or terroir, subdivided nations into subgroups. This is easy to comprehend in the case of the English nation, which contained masters and students from Scotland, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Germany, and Eastern Europe, but it was even the case for the other nations. The French nation divided itself into five provinces: the diocese of Paris and the ecclesiastical provinces of Sens, Reims, Tours, and Bourges. Within the Picard nation the closest associations were often diocesan, dominated by Beauvais and Amiens in the south and Arras, Tournai and Cambrai in the north. The same was true for the Norman nation and the important topographical difference between upper and lower Normandy. From the standpoint of religious practices, those from these local regions usually had an attachment to a particular saint, St. Martin for those from the province of Tours and St. Remy for those from the region of Reims, St. Firmin for those from the diocese Amiens, St. Piat for those from the diocese of Tournai, and St. Romain from those from Rouen.

(excerpted from introduction)