The Status of the University of Paris as Parens Scientiarum: An Episode in the Development of Its Autonomy

Abstract

AMONG the historical developments which characterize the thirteenth century none is more distinctive than the interactions of the revived papacy, attempting to assert a plenitudo potestatis both ecclesiastical and temporal, and the particularism of episcopal and, increasingly, of royal authority. The work of Brian Tierney has shown the importance of canonist limitations upon papal authority in determining the actions of Robert Grosseteste, and has emphasized the significance of the twelfthand thirteenth-century canonists in providing theoretical justification of the conciliar movement.' Nowhere does this fact seem more readily illustrated than in the study of the University of Paris, where papal encouragement had resulted in giving a new scope to education, and thus aimed at destroying the local limitations, and hence controls, which had characterized the schools of earlier periods. The University of Paris had by the mid-thirteenth century become a center for the great contention between universal control and local self-determination, and had indeed emerged as a defender of episcopal authority in opposition to the papacy. This role evolved directly from the disputes concerning the place of the mendicant orders in the university, an argument which grew to involve the pope himself.2 The aim of this paper is to present some revisions in the chronology of these events, and to place the developments in the broader historical context which their significance warrants. No hint of its future role appeared in the origins of the university, which on the contrary was associated with the effort to extend the papal potestas. The heretical tendencies, popular and ideological, which had grown in the latter part of the twelfth century, had shown the need for a broad reaffirmation of orthodoxy, while the science which had recently become available through translations from Arabic stood in an unresolved position with respect to the established dogma of the