Description: Every society has devised means to educate its young and prepare a next generation of leaders. Not every society has had universities. These guilds of scholars and students were the invention of twelfth-century Europe, when the mastery of set texts in Latin in the context of an organized guild assumed paradigmatic status as preparation for leadership in the church, and eventually in the whole of society. Studium, or institutionalized learning, achieved recognition as the third pillar, alongside regnum (monarchy) and sacerdotium (priesthood) necessary to sustain European Christendom.

The essays in Learning Institutionalized: Teaching in the Medieval University give medieval scholars the tools to explore the deeper history of disciplines and the origins and nature of university learning by posing a number of questions. How was learning conceived? Was it a forming of the mind to grasp and work with abstractions? a body of true knowledge? a spiritual discipline? or as the inner wisdom acquired from a personal master? How did the structure of university teaching reshape learning by forcing it into the framework of text, gloss, and disputation? Was it beneficial for certain areas of human thought, such as law or religion, to become construed as disciplines to be mastered by a faculty? Since the church and the courts had succeeded for a thousand years without university-trained schoolmen, what form of leadership was this learning intended to serve.

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