The Origins and Diffusion of the European Universities Clyde P. Patton0 Tt is surprising that more scholars have not used the university as -*- the object of their studies. Some historians have been concerned with the narrower aspects of the historical evolution of particular universities and with the broader contexts of intellectual development ;1 and certain novelists have shed their own brand of light on the groves of academe,2 but geographers and other social scientists have not drawn much of their inspiration from the cultural institution which they ought to know best. And yet, the university is a spendid cultural artifact which lends itself particularly well to a study of diffusion. The object in question is relatively easy to define, to date, and to locate. Furthermore, one can deal with the whole population of artifacts rather than the incomplete and often biased samples of other studies. Finally, it is a phenomenon complex enough to reflect and to generate any number of associated cultural trends and movements, so that its study can be extremely revealing of other features of the cultural landscape. * Presidential address at the annual banquet of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers, Bellingham Yacht Club, Bellingham, Washington, June 14, 1968. Dr. Patton is Professor of Geography and Head, Department of Geography, University of Oregon, Eugene 97403. lLowrie J. Daly, The Medieval University 1200-1400 (New York, 1961); H. Denifle, Die Entstehung der Universitäten des Mittehlters bis 1400 (Berlin, 1885); Stephen d'Irsay, Histoire des universités françaises et étrangères des origines à nos jours, 2 vol., (Paris, 1933-35); Charles H. Haskins, The Rise of Universities, (New York, 1923); H. Rashdall, F. M. Powicke, and A. B. Emden, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, (Oxford, 1936), 3 vols; Nathan Schachner, The Medieval Universities, (New York, 1938). 2 Mary McCarthy, Bernard Malamud, and Stringfellow Barr among many others. O ASSOCIATION OF PACIFIC COAST GEOGRAPHERS The definition of a medieval European university turns out to be remarkably easy. Of the three great medieval institutions, the Church, the Empire, and the University, only the last is a distinctive creation of the Middle Ages. No other society evolved the typical institutional amalgam which we call a university. To be sure all cultures have been concerned with learning and teaching. The Greeks and the Romans perhaps went further than other peoples of antiquity in formalizing their systems of education, but they never created institutions that dealt with higher learning; nor did the Arabs at a later date.3 There were Greek, Roman, or Arab teachers and scholars of note, and students gathered to hear these masters; but the gathering was local not ecumenical; the curriculum was ad hoc not organized; credentials were not given to successful scholars nor was the right to teach controlled by a body of masters (or by students , or bureaucrats for that matter). In short, the university did not come into being until the first European Renaissance, not the major rebirth of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but the more modest yet significant renaissance of the twelfth century. There were, of course, antecedents in the form of monastic, episcopal, or municipal schools from which the university drew its inspiration, but the distinction between a mere school of local significance , the Studium respectu regni whose writ, so to speak, ran only the length of the realm and the Studium generale whose influence extended over all of Christendom was made at an early date and seems to have been a matter of common knowledge among the educated.4 Furthermore, this distinction required the presence of one of the higher faculties, Medicine, Law, or Theology, as well as the more basic Arts faculty.5 And the distinction was almost universally legalized by the granting of a Papal charter, or lacking that, an Imperial charter. These charters normally formalized yet another unique feature of the university. They granted the fus ubique do3 d'Irsay, Histoire des Universités, I, pp. 30 fif. ; Rashdall, The Universities of Europe, I, p. 3. 4 Rashdall, I, pp. 6 ff and p. 13; Schachner, The Medieval Universities, p. 45. 5 Rashdall, loc. cit.; Schachner, loe. cit. VOLUME 31 1 YEARBOOK / 19699 cendi, the...