Chapter VI: Part 6

When Bruno at last appreciated the dangers by which he was surrounded he announced his intent to go again to Frankfort to have some of his books printed, and so took his leave of Mocenigo. On the following day, in May, 1592, Bruno was seized by six men, using force, who locked him in an upper story of Mocenigo's house. The next day he was transferred to an underground cellar, and the following night to the prison of the Inquisition. May 23rd his former host denounced him, with a cunning and lying statement concerning some of his views and teachings. Thus he was reported as stating that Christ's miracles were only apparent, that He and the apostles were magicians, that the Catholic faith was full of blasphemies against God, that the Friars befouled the world and should not be allowed to preach, that they were asses, and the doctrines of the Church were asses' beliefs, etc. (McIntyre). This was followed two days later by a second denunciation in which Mocenigo went to a diabolical extreme of deceit and hypocrisy; stating that all the time he was entertaining Bruno he was promising himself to bring him before the Holy Office. Within forty-eight hours the Holy Tribunal met to consider the matter; before them appeared the book-sellers who had known Bruno in Zürich and Frankfort, and before them came Bruno in his own behalf, professing his entire willingness to tell the whole truth. Within a few days Mocenigo made yet another deposition, denouncing Bruno's statements about the infallible Church. On the following day Bruno was again heard in his own defense, and appealed to the famous and fallacious doctrine of two-fold truth, acknowledging that he had taught too much as a philosopher rather than as an honest man and Christian, and that he had based his teachings too much on sense and reason and not enough on faith;--so specious had become his argument with the terrors of the Inquisition before him. He further claimed that his intent had been not to impugn the faith but to exalt philosophy. He then beautifully epitomized his own views, claiming that he believed in an infinite universe, in an infinite divine potency, holding it unworthy of an infinite power to create a finite world, when he could produce so vast an infinity; with Pythagoras he regarded this world as one of many stars,--innumerable worlds. This universe he held to be governed by a universal providence, existent in two forms;--one nature, the shadow or footprint of deity, the other the ineffable essence of God, always inexplicable. Concerning the triune Godhead he confessed certain philosophic doubts as well as concerning the use of the term "_persons_" in these distinctions, while he quoted St. Augustine to the same effect. The miracles he had always believed to be divine and genuine; concerning the Holy Mass and the Transubstantiation he agreed with the Church. As the days went by he became the more insistent upon his orthodoxy. He condemned the heretic writings of Melancthon, Luther and Calvin, expressed respect for the writings of Lulli because of their philosophical bearings, while for St. Thomas Aquinas he had the most profound regard.

Other counts in the indictment which he had to face were his doubts concerning the miracles, the sacraments and the incarnation, his praise of heretics and heretic princes and his familiarity with the magic arts. He finally made a formal solemn abjuration of all the errors he had ever committed, and the heresies he had ever uttered, or doubts expressed or believed, praying only that the Holy Office would receive him back into the Church where he might rest in peace. Further examinations were held and the earlier processes against him in Naples and Rome recalled. After this there was a period of apparent quiet save that he remained in prison. It is not known to what tortures he may have been subjected, but it is recorded that he knelt before his judges asking their pardon, and God's, for all his faults, and professed himself ready for any penance, apparently not yet realizing the fate in store for him.

A little later it transpired that the Sacred Congregation of the Supreme Tribunal of the Holy Office, in Rome, desired to assume all further responsibility for the process against so distinguished a heretic. Accordingly the machinery of the Church was put in motion to this end. Negotiations with the Venetian Republic, somewhat tedious and complicated, which need not detain us now, were at last concluded. January 7, 1603, the Venetian procurator reported of Bruno that "his faults were exceedingly grave in respect of heresies, though in other respects he was one of the most excellent and rarest natures, and of exquisite learning and knowledge," (McIntyre) but that the case was of unusual gravity, Bruno not a Venetian subject, the Pope most anxious, etc. It was then decided to remit him to the Tribunal of the Inquisition at Rome; whereat it is duly reported, the Pope was deeply gratified.

To Rome then he went and here he was lost, so far as documentary records go, for a period of six years. How to explain this fact and this apparent clemency has bothered the biographers not a little. Whether this time was spent in an examination of his voluminous writings, which would seem incredible, or whether the Dominicans labored so long to procure his more absolute recantation in order to prevent scandal in and reflection on their order, or whether Pope Clement himself regarded kindly--in some degree-- the great scholar who was so anxious to dedicate to him a _magnum opus_;--to these queries history answereth not. The Dominicans pretended--years later--to doubt if he ever had been put to death, or whether he had ever really belonged to their order. These statements are too characteristic to provoke more than a sad smile.

Finally matters were hastened to an end by the efforts of Fathers Commisario and Bellarmino; the latter being the zealous bigot who decided that Copernicanism was a heresy, who later laid the indictment against Galileo. Through their machinations Bruno was, in February, 1599, decreed on eight counts as a dangerous heretic, who might still admit his heresies, and he was to be granted forty days in which to recant and repent. But this period was stretched out some ten months, until December, when it was reported that Bruno refused to recant, having nothing to take back. Among the Tribunal at this time was San Severino, fanatical, bitter because of his failure to secure the papacy, who had declared that St. Bartholomew's was "a glorious day, a day of joy for Catholics." It was decided that the high officers of the Dominicans should make one last effort to compel or coax Bruno to abjure. This he declined to do, Whereupon, January 20th, 1600, it was decreed that "further measures be proceeded to, _servatis servandis_, that sentence be passed, and that the said Friar Giordano be handed over to the secular authority." A few days later Bruno was degraded, excommunicated and handed over to the Governor of Rome, with the usual hypocritical recommendation to "mercy," and that he be punished "without effusion of blood," which meant of course burning at the stake.

Bruno's reply to his judges deserves to be printed in letters of gold whenever it can be recorded;--"_Greater perhaps is your fear in pronouncing my sentence than mine in hearing it._"

Let us spare ourselves a too minute account of his execution. Some reports are to the effect that his tongue was tied, because he refused to listen to the exhortations of those members of the Company of St. John the Beheaded, better known as the Brothers of the Misericordia, who accompanied the condemned to the scaffold or the stake, resorting to the most cruel methods in order to provoke at least some appearance of recantation or repentance during the last moments of life.

Right here let it be said of Bruno that whatever may have been his weaknesses before the Inquisition at Venice, he stood firmly by his creed when put to the final test, and died an ideal martyr's death because his creed did not agree with that of his persecutors.

And so terminated the life of one of Italy's greatest ornaments and scholars. The occasion had not then the importance we assign it now. The burning of a heretic was a frequent spectacle, and the year 1600 was the year of Jubilee, in which the death of one unbeliever more was but the incident of a day. He had himself foreseen it, saying, "Torches, fifty or a hundred, will not fail me, even though the march past be at mid-day, should it be my fate to die in Roman Catholic Country."

There remains yet to comment on his character and to analyze his views.

The greatest blot upon the former is his attitude before the Venetian Tribunal. Here he was at first defiant, even polemical, strong in his asserted right to use the natural light of sense and reason. Under greater stress he modified this to one of absolute and indignant denial, and finally became submissive to the last degree, cringing and finally begging for pardon on bended knees. That this attitude changed with his better realization of his predicament is undeniable. Moreover what keen and sensitive natures may do under the influence of torture is never to be predicated. How many of us could resist the persuasiveness of the rack when it came to modifying our beliefs? But whatever may have been his weakness at that time, he completely rehabilitated himself before his end, for were not his ashes scattered to the winds as a token that he completely failed to recant? Surely no martyr to science or dogma ever died a more dignified death, for the edification or example of others.

What shall be said of his persecutors and prosecutors? Let us here be charitable; let us be just. Have we yet that absolute knowledge of right and wrong which can enable us to pass final judgment on men of the past, their motives and actions? Moral perceptions are the product of the race, the age and the environment; they vary greatly with the times. There is no crime in or out of the Decalogue which has at all times and by all peoples been regarded as such. The Church during several centuries enjoyed a monopoly of wisdom or learning as well as of opportunities for acquiring them. Zealotry, bigotry, intolerance, fanaticism, were the natural products of such conditions. So were cruelty and disregard of human life. Join the mind of a bigot to the body of one who knows not fear, and the result will be a Loyola, or a St. Louis of France, who held that the only argument a layman should engage in with a heretic should be a sword thrust through the body. If then heresy was a crime, punishable by a cruel death in all the capitals of Europe, let us blame less the men who were trained and grew up with these notions, but rather more the Church which preached them, whether Catholic or Protestant. Only if one of these really were, as it still claims to be, _infallible_, then what has become of its infallibility? Or if heresy be held still a crime then what shall we say of the Church's ethics? If one were God-given the other is un-Christ-like. But no free thinker can engage in theological polemics, or with jesuitical sophistries, without letting his reason excite his emotions; and when the emotions enter the door logic flies out of the window.

Let us say then that Bruno was in some respects so far ahead of his day and generation that they understood him not. And yet he was a _torch bearer_, save at his own last funeral pyre, shedding forth a light which illumed the centuries to come, and helping to make the period of the Italian Renaissance one of the most important and glorious in the world's history. If better known and more widely studied, he would be by English and American students placed on that pinnacle which he deserves in the Hall of Fame.

What shall be said of Bruno as a philosopher? He, first of all men in the middle ages, taught that Nature was lovable and worthy of study. Loving her, trusting, confiding in her, he found himself at outs with all the mental processes of his fellow scholars. In this way the natural method was brought into direct opposition with the ponderously artificial and strained methods of his day. He held that our eyes were given us that we might open and look upward. "Seeing, I do not pretend not to see, nor fear to profess it openly," he says. His philosophy was rather a product of intuition than of ratiocination, which became his real religion, for which Catholicism was a cloak, because in those days one was compelled to wear a cloak or live but a short life, and that within prison walls. What the medieval church, Catholic and even Protestant, has to answer for, as to the suppression of truth and provocation of hypocrisy, is beyond the mensuration of man. For the argument from authority he had the greatest contempt, and herein he set the world of thinkers a valuable lesson. "To believe with the many because they were many, was the mark of a slave," (McIntyre). Before Bacon, before Descrates, he saw the necessity of "first clearing the mind of all prejudice, all traditional beliefs that rest on authority." He thus begins one of his sonnets:--

"Oh, holy assinity! Oh, holy ignorance, holy folly and pious devotion; which alone makest souls so good that human wit and zeal can go no further," etc.

By the independence of his mental processes he was thrown quite upon his own resources, and his nature, already dignified and reserved, was made more introspective and self-conscious. In this way he developed strains of vanity and egotism which led him at times to the bombastic self-laudation of a Paracelsus. He had nothing but disgust for the common people and the sort of scholars (pedants) whom they admired. The vulgar mind was more influenced by sophisms, by appearance, by failure to distinguish between the shadow and the substance. Take but two or three of Bruno's conceptions:--

He perhaps first during the middle ages taught the transformation of lower into higher organisms, following the Greeks who first enunciated the doctrine of evolution, which it remained for Darwin and Wallace to edit and illustrate as that law of the organic continuity of life, which we call _evolution_. He further wrote of the human hand as a factor in the evolution of the human race, in a way which should have commended him to the author of the Bridgewater treatise. He wrote of the changes on the earth's surface brought about by natural processes, which have changed not only the external configuration of the same but the fate and destiny of nations; of the identity of matter throughout the universe; of the universal movement of matter. Long before Lessing he showed how myths may contain the germs of great truths, and should be regarded as indications thereof. In this way, he told us, the Bible was to be regarded, holding its more or less historical statements to be quite subordinate to its moral teachings.

When we realize how to such highly developed reasoning powers as Bruno possessed, were added a phenomenal memory, a tremendous power of assimilation, a developed imagination, a poetic nature, the gift of easy and accurate speech and a temperament easily excited to fervor in attack or defense, we may the better appreciate his dominating greatness as well as his trifling weakness; the former being entirely to his own credit while the latter are ascribed largely to the faults of his time, and the fact that he was really living far ahead of his day and generation. He was not only the forerunner of modern science, he was the prototype of the modern biblical critic, foreshadowing the modern higher criticism, albeit in veiled terms, and as a matter of esoteric teaching; because the biblical critic of those days was burned at the stake, while to-day he is barely ostracized by the shallow and narrow minded, with whom he has at best nothing mentally in common. So much have four centuries of labor and vicarious suffering accomplished for the emancipation of the human mind.

Bruno _had_ a creed, but it was too simple for his times. He rejected certain orthodox dogmas, (e. g. the Trinity, the Immaculate Conception) which commend themselves still less to the emancipated and cultivated minds of to-day. He absolutely rejected authority, which was a step toward reason comparable to the freeing of the slaves or serfs. He evolved a theory of evolution from _a priori_ concepts, which it remained for Darwin to complete and demonstrate. He believed in the natural history of religions. His motives were of the loftiest, though his methods were not always those of to-day. He believed that the essence of truth inhered in those differences which kept men apart, and still sever them. He believed the _law of love_ and that it sprang from God, which is the Father of All, that it was in harmony with nature, and that by love we may be transformed into something of His likeness. As Bruno himself says:--"This is the religion, above controversy or dispute, which I observe from the belief of my own mind, and from the custom of my fatherland and my race." (McIntyre, p. 110).

And yet this sublime man was burned as a heretic! Let us stop when we hereafter pass through the Campo dei Fiori, as I have done many a time, and take off our hats to the memory of this great man, who, while small in some human traits, yet was the greatest thinker in Italy during the sixteenth century, whose memory may help us to forget some of the hypocrisies and cant so generally prevalent during the age which and among the men who condemned him. Let us also thank God that there is no Tribunal of the Inquisition to-day, to pass misguided judgment upon us for having gone further than Bruno ever dreamed, though along the same lines, and to condemn us therefore to the Flames.

This paper has already been prolonged, perhaps tiresomely, nevertheless I cannot refrain from quoting a few paragraphs from that most versatile student of this period, Symonds, whose estimate of Bruno is as follows:--(Renaissance in Italy; Catholic Reaction, II Chap. ix).

"Bruno appears before us as the man who most vitally and comprehensively grasped the leading tendencies of his age in their intellectual essence. He left behind him the mediaeval conception of an extra-mundane God, creating a finite world, of which this globe is the center, and the principal episode in the history of which is the series of events from the Fall, through the Incarnation and Crucifixion, to the Last Judgment. He substituted the conception of an ever-living, ever-acting, ever-self-effectuating God, immanent in an infinite universe, to the contemplation of whose attributes the mind of man ascends by the study of Nature and interrogation of his conscience.

"Bolder even than Copernicus, and nearer in his intuition to the truth, he denied that the universe had "flaming walls" or any walls at all. That "immaginata circonferenza," "quella margine immaginata del cielo," on which antique science and Christian theology alike reposed, was the object of his ceaseless satire, his oft-repeated polemic. What, then, rendered Bruno the precursor of modern thought in its various manifestations, was that he grasped the fundamental truth upon which modern science rests, and foresaw the conclusions which must be drawn from it. He speculated boldly, incoherently, vehemently; but he speculated with a clear conception of the universe, as we still apprehend it. Through the course of three centuries we have been engaged in verifying the guesses, deepening, broadening and solidifying the hypotheses, which Bruno's extension of the Copernican theory, and his application of it to pure thought suggested to his penetrating and audacious intellect."

Bruno was convinced that religion in its higher essence would not sufferer from the new philosophy. Larger horizons extended before the human intellect. The soul expanded in more exhilarating regions than the old theologies had offered.

"Lift up thy light on us and on thine own,
O soul whose spirit on earth was as a rod
To scourge off priests, a sword to pierce their God,
A staff for man's free thought to walk alone,
A lamp to lead him far from shrine and throne
On ways untrodden where his fathers trod
Ere earth's heart withered at a high priest's nod,
And all men's mouths that made not prayer made moan.
From bonds and torments, and the ravening flame,
Surely thy spirit of sense rose up to greet
Lucretius, where such only spirits meet,
And walk with him apart till Shelley came
To make the heaven of heavens more heavenly sweet,
And mix with yours a third incorporate name."

VIII

STUDENT LIFE IN THE MIDDLE AGES[5]

[5] An Address given before the Chas. K. Mills Society of Students of the University of Pennsylvania, February 19, 1902.

[Reprinted from the _Univ. of Penna. Medical Bulletin_, March, 1902.]

I assume that every university student of today realizes that his possibilities and his opportunities are better in every way than were those enjoyed by students of bygone times. I take it, also, that you would not be averse to listening to an account of the habits, the surroundings, the privileges, and the disadvantages which surrounded students at a time when universities were young and when customs in general, as well as manners, were very different from those of to-day. With all this in view, I shall ask your attention to a brief account of Student Life in the Middle Ages, with especial reference to that of the medical student. Measured by its results, the most priceless legacy of mediæval times to mankind was the university system, which began in crude form and with an almost mythical origin, but which gradually took form and shape in consequence of many external forces. It represented an effort to "realize in concrete form an ideal of life in one of its aspects." Such ideals "pass into great historic forces by embodying themselves in institutions," as witness, for instance, the case of the Church of Rome.

The use of words in our language has undergone many curious perversions. Take our word "bombast," for instance. Originally it was a name applied to the cotton plant. Then it was applied to any padding for garments which was made of cotton. Later it was used as describing literary padding, as it were, as when one filled out an empty speech with unnecessary and long words, and, at last, it came to have the meaning which we now give it. So with the word "university." "Universitas" in the original Latin meant simply a collection, a plurality, or an aggregation. It was almost synonymous with "collegium." By the beginning of the thirteenth century it was applied to corporations of masters or students and to other associated bodies, and implied an association of individuals, not a place of meeting, nor even a collection of schools. If we were to be literal and consistent in our use of terms, for the place where such collections of men exercise scholastic functions the term should be "_studium generale_," meaning thereby a place, not where all things are studied, but where students come together from all directions. Very few of the mediæval studia possessed all the faculties of a modern university. Even Paris, in its palmiest days, had no faculty of law. The name _universitas_ implies a general invitation to students from all over the world to seek there a place for higher education from numerous masters or teachers. The three great _studia_ of the thirteenth century were Paris, transcendent in theology and the arts; Bologna, where legal lore prevailed; and Salernum, where existed the greatest medical school of the world's history. In spite of the fact that these, like all the other _studia_ of the Middle Ages, were under the influence of the Church, from them sprang most of the inspiration that constituted the mainspring of mediæval intellectual activity, although how baneful such influence could be may be illustrated by the Spanish--that is, the ultra-Catholic University of Salamanca, where not until one hundred years ago were they allowed to teach the Copernican system of astronomy.

Under the conditions existing during the Middle Ages, with relatively few institutions of advanced learning, and in the presence of that spirit which led men to travel long distances, and very widely out of the provinces, to the cities of the great scholia, or, as we call them now, universities, the most imperative common want was that of a common language; and so it happened that not only were the lectures all given in Latin, but that it was very commonly used for conversational purposes, and appears to have been almost a necessity of university life. Early in the history of the University of Paris a statute made the ability of the petitioner to state his case before the rector in Latin a test of his bona-fide studentship. This may perhaps, in some measure account for the barbarity of mediæval Latin. Still, as the listener said about Wagner's music, "it may not have been as bad as it sounded," since the period of greatest ignorance of construction and rhetoric had passed away before the university era began. John Stuart Mill even praised the schoolmen of the Middle Ages for their inventive capacity in the matter of technical terms. The Latin language, which was originally stiff and poor in vocabulary, became, in its employment by these mediæval thinkers, much more flexible and expressive. It was the Ciceronian pedantry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which killed off Latin as a living language. Felicity in Latin counted, then as now, as a mark of scholarship, and six hundred years ago a schoolmaster could come up to the university and, after performing some exercises and passing such an examination as the doctors of music do to-day, could write one hundred verses in Latin in praise of the university, and take his degree. The boys who went to the universities learned their Latin at inferior grammar schools, often in university towns. These schools were mainly connected with cathedrals or churches, although, in the later Middle Ages, even the smallest towns had schools where a boy might learn to read and write at least the rudiments of ecclesiastical Latin. In those days not only were the clergy Latin scholars, but the bailiff of every manor kept his accounts in Latin, and a tutor even formed part of the establishment of a great noble or prelate who had either a family or pages in his care.

In those good old days boys were accustomed to seek the university at the ages of thirteen to fifteen. A Paris statute required them to be at least fourteen, and naturally many were older. Many of these students were beneficed, and boys were canons or even rectors of parish churches. In this capacity they obtained leave of absence to study in the universities, and so it was quite common at one time for rectors and ecclesiastics of all ages to appear in the rôle of university students. At the close of the fourteenth century, in the University of Prague, in the law school alone there appeared on the list of students one bishop, one abbot, nine archdeacons, 290 canons, 187 rectors, and still other minor ecclesiastics. At one time in the University of Bologna, in the registry of German corps, more than half the students were church dignitaries. Sad to relate, many of these clerical students were among the most disorderly and troublesome of the academic population, the statutes vainly prescribing that they should sit "as quiet as girls;" while, as Rashdall says, "even spiritual thunders had at times to be invoked to prevent them from shouting, playing, and interrupting."

Considering the youthfulness of what we may call the freshmen, as many of them went up to the universities at the early age already mentioned, it is not strange that we hear of "fetchers" or "carriers" or "bryngers," who were detailed to escort them home; but we must remember that the roads were dangerous in those days, and that protection of some kind was necessary even for men. Proclamations against bearing arms usually made exceptions in favor of students travelling to or from the university. Students, many of them, lived in halls, or, as we would say now, dormitories, and one of them assumed the rôle of principal, or was delegated to exercise certain authority. Quite often this was the man who made himself responsible for the rent, whose authority came only from the voluntary consent of his fellow-students, or who was elected by them.

When it came to the matter of discipline, the good old-fashioned birchen rod was not an unknown factor in university government. There seems to have been always a certain relationship between classic studies and corporal punishment. In mediæval university records allusions to this relationship began about the fifteenth century. In Paris, about this time, when there were so many disgraceful factional fights, the rectors and proctors had occasionally to go to the colleges and halls and personally superintend the chastisement of the young rioters. We find also in the history of the University of Louvain that flogging was at one time ordered by the Faculty of Arts for homicide or other grave outrages. It is worth while to recall for a moment how grave offences were dealt with in those days. At the University of Ingolstadt one student killed another in a drunken quarrel, and was punished by the university by the confiscation of his scholastic effects and garments, but he was not even expelled. At Prague a certain Master of Arts assisted in cutting the throat of a friar bishop, and was actually expelled for the deed. In those days drunkenness was rarely treated as a university offence. The penalties which were inflicted for the gravest outrages and immoralities were for the greater part puerile in the extreme. In most serious cases excommunication or imprisonment were the penalties, while lesser offences were punished by postponement of degree, expulsion from the college, temporary banishment from a university town, or by fines.

In Leipzig, in 1439, the fine of ten new groschen was provided for the offense of lifting a stone or missile with a view of throwing it at a master, but not actually throwing it; whereas the act of throwing and missing increased the penalty to eight florins, while successful marksmanship was still more expensive. Later statutes made distinction between hitting without wounding and wounding without mutilation, expulsion being the penalty for actual mutilation. With the beginning of the sixteenth century the practice of flogging the very poorest students appears to have been introduced. During these Middle Ages they had a peculiar fashion of expiating even grave offences. For example, at the Sorbonne, if a fellow should assault or cruelly beat a servant he was fined a measure of good wine--not for the benefit of the servant, but for all the culprit's fellow-students. Those were the days, too, when trifling lapses incurred each its own penalty. A doctor of divinity was fined a quart of wine for picking a pear off a tree in the college garden or forgetting to shut the chapel door. Clerks were fined for being very drunk and committing insolences when in that condition. The head cook was fined for not putting salt in the soup. Most of these fines being in the shape of liquors or wines, I imagine that the practice was more general because the penalty was shared in by all who were near.

With lapse of time the statutes of the German universities gradually grew stricter until they became very minute and restrictive in the matter of unacademical pleasures. A visit to the tavern, or even to the kitchen of the college or hall, became a university offence. There were statutes against swearing, against games of chance, walking abroad without a companion, being out after eight in the winter or nine in the summer, making odious comparisons of country to country, etc. This was particularly true of the English universities, where a definite penalty was imposed for every offence, ranging from a quarter of a penny for not speaking Latin to six shillings eight pence for assault with effusion of blood.

The matter of constantly speaking Latin led to a system of espionage, by which a secret system of spies, called "_lupi_" or wolves, was arranged; these were to inform against the "_vulgarisantes_," or those offenders who persisted in speaking in their mother tongue.

It was the students of those days who set the example and the fashion of initiating, or, as we would say now, of hazing the newcomers. This custom of initiation, in one form or another, seems to have an almost hoary antiquity. As Rashdall puts it, three deeply rooted instincts of human nature combine to put the custom almost beyond suppression. It satisfies alike the bullying instinct, the social instinct, and the desire to find at once the excuse and the means for a carouse. In the days of which we are speaking the _Bejaunus_, which is a corruption of the old French _Bec-jaune_ (or yellow bill), as the academic fledgling was called, had to be bullied and coaxed and teased in order to be welcomed as a comrade, and finally his "jocund advent" had to be celebrated by a feast furnished at his own expense. A history of the process of initiating would furnish one of the most singular chapters in university records. At first there were several prohibitions against all _bejaunia_, for the unfortunate youth's limited purse ill afforded even the first year's expenses. As the years went by certain restrictions were imposed, and by the sixteenth century the _depositio cornuum_ had become in the German universities a ceremony almost equal in importance to matriculation. The callow country youth was supposed to be a wild beast who must be deprived of his horns before he could be received into refined society in his new home. This constituted the _depositio_ for which he was supposed to arrange with his new masters, at the same time begging them to keep expenses as low as possible. Soon after he matriculated he was visited in his room by two of the students, who would pretend to be investigating the source of an abominable odor.

This would be subsequently discovered to be due to the newcomer himself, whom they would take at first to be a wild boar, but later discovery to be that rare creature known as a _bejaunus_, a creature of whom they had heard, but which they had never seen. After chaffing comments about his general ferocious aspect it would be suggested, with marked sympathy, that his horns might be removed by operation, the so-called _depositio_. The victim's face would then be smeared with some preparation, and certain formalities would be gone through with--clipping his ears, removal of his tusks, etc. Finally, in fear lest the mock operation should be fatal, the patient would be shriven; one of the students, feigning himself a priest, would put his ear to the dying man's mouth and then repeat his confession. The boy was made to accuse himself of all sorts of enormities, and finally it was exacted as penance that he should provide a sumptuous banquet for his new masters and comrades.

This latter ceremony consisted of a procession headed by a master in academic dress, followed by students in masquerading costume. Certain further operative procedures were then gone through with, the beast was finally dehorned and his nose held to the grindstone, while a little later his chin was adorned with a beard made of burnt cork, and his wounded sensibilities assuaged by a dose of salt and wine. All this constituted a peculiar German custom, although some means of extorting money or bothering those who were initiated was practically universal. In Germany this ceremony of _depositio_ seems to have led later to the bullying and fagging of juniors by seniors, that gave rise to indignities while at the same time it more than exceeded in brutality anything of which we have read in the English grammar schools. These excesses reached their highest in the seventeenth century, and for a long time defied all efforts of both government and university authorities to suppress them.

In southern France this initiation assumed somewhat different form. Here the freshman was treated as a criminal, and had to be tried for and released by purgation from the consequences of his original sin. At Avignon this purgation of freshmen was made the primary purpose of a religious fraternity formed under ecclesiastical sanction, and with a chapel in the Dominican church. (Rashdall). The preamble of its constitution piously boasted that its object was to put a stop to enormities, drunkenness and immorality, but its practices were at extreme variance with its avowed purposes.

The matter of academical dress may interest for a moment. During the Middle Ages there was for the undergraduate nothing which could be properly called academic dress. In the Italian universities the students wore a long black garment known as a "cappa." In the Parisian universities every student was required by custom or statute to wear a tonsure and a clerical habit, such "indecent, dissolute, or secular" apparel as puffed sleeves, pointed shoes, colored boots, etc., being positively forbidden; and so the clothes of uniform color and material, like those worn in some of the English charitable schools, have been the result of the uniform dress of a particular color which mediæval students were supposed to wear, and which indicated that at the time they were supposed to be clerks. At one time the so-called Queen's Men in Oxford University were required to wear bright red garments, and differences of color and ornament still survive in the undergraduate gowns of Cambridge. While the students usually wore dark-hued material, the higher officials of the universities wore more and more elaborate garments, until the rector appeared in violet or purple, perhaps with fur trimmings. The hoods, which are still worn to-day, were at one time made of lamb's wool or rabbit's fur, silk, such as those which we wear, coming in as a summer alternative at the end of the fourteenth century. The birretta, or square cap, with a tuft on the top, in lieu of the modern tassel on top of the square cap, was a distinctive badge of membership, while doctors and superior officers were distinguished by the red or violet color of their birrettas.

This so-called "philosophy of clothes" throws much light upon the relation of the Church to the universities, as well as on the use and misuse of the term "clericus." That a man was a _clericus_ in the Middle Ages did not necessarily imply that he had taken even the lowest grade of clerical orders. It simply implied that he was a clerk, i. e., a student. Even the wearing of a so-called clerical dress was rather in order that the wearer might enjoy exemption from secular courts and the privileges of the clerical order. The lowest of the people even took the clerical tonsure simply in order to get the benefit of clergy; and to become a clerk was at one time almost equivalent to taking out a license for the commission of murder or outrage with comparative immunity. Nevertheless, the relation between clerkship and minor orders is still quite obscure.

It is quite evident that students of those days were not worked as hard as those of the present day. Three lectures a day constituted a maximum of work of this kind, beside which there were disputations and "resumpciones," which seem to have corresponded very much to the quizzes of to-day, scholars being examined or catechised, sometimes even by the lecturer himself. Gradually supplementary lectures were introduced, but there was a period during which the university seemed to decline and decay rather than the reverse, when intellectual life was not nearly as active and studies not nearly as closely pursued. In the days of Thomas Aquinas intellectual vigor was at its highest, but in the fifteenth century there was a distinct falling off.

During these centuries, too, it was not unusual that students attended mass or religious services before going to lectures. This practice grew during the latter portion of the Middle Ages. Attendance was not, however, compulsory. Even at Oxford the statutes of the New College were the first which required daily attendance at mass. In those days lectures began at six in the morning in summer, and sometimes as late as seven in the winter mornings. There is every reason to think that often lectures were given in the darkness preceding dawn, and even without artificial light. It should be said that these lectures were sometimes three hours in duration, and hence it might appear that three such lectures a day were about all that could be expected of a student.

The standard of living for the mediæval student was not always so bad as has been sometimes represented. University students then, as now, were recruited from the highest as well as the poorest social classes, and the young sons of princely families often had about them quite an establishment. At the lower end of the university social ladder was the poor scholar who was reduced to begging for his living or becoming a servant in one of the colleges. In Vienna and elsewhere there were halls whose inmates were regularly sent out to beg, the proceeds of their mendicancy being placed in a common chest. Very poor scholars were often granted licenses to beg by the chancellor. This was not regarded as a particular degradation, however, because the example of the friars had made begging comparatively respectable. Those who would have been ashamed to work hard were not ashamed to beg.

This custom, for that matter, is by no means yet abandoned. When I was first studying in Vienna, in 1882, I remember a young German nobleman who was reduced to such an extent that he lived absolutely on the charity of others. He kept a little book in which he had it set down that on such a day such a person had promised to give him so much toward his support, and he called regularly on his list of supporters, and almost daily, in order that the gulden which they had promised him might be forthcoming.

There is the good old story you know, also, of the three students who were so poor that they had but one cappa or gown between them, in which they took turns to go to lectures. In the small university towns, where thousands of students gathered together during a part of the year--where means of carrying food were scanty, and food itself not abundant--it is not strange that student fare was often of the most meagre sort.

The matter of food was not the only hardship of student life in those days about which we are talking. At that time such a thing as a fire in a lecture-room was unknown, there being no source of warmth or comfort, save, perhaps, straw or rushes upon the floor. The winter in the northern university towns must have been severe, but it is not likely that either in the lecture-room or in his own apartments did the student have any comfort from heat. This was true to such an extent that they often sought the kitchens for comfort. In Germany it was even one of the duties of the head of the college to inspect the college-rooms lest the occupants should have supplied themselves with some source of heat. In some places, however, there was a common hall or combination room in which a fire was built in cold weather. You must remember, also, that glass windows were an exceptional luxury until toward the close of the period under discussion. In Padua the windows of the schools were made of linen. In 1643 a glass window was for the first time introduced into the Theological School at Prague. In 1600 the rooms inhabited by some of the junior fellows at Cambridge were still unprovided with glass windows. Add to these hardships the relative expense of lights, when the average price of candles was nearly two pence per pound, and you will see that the poorest student could not afford to study by artificial light. Some of the senior students may have had bedsteads, but the younger students slept mostly upon the floor. In some places there were cisterns or troughs of lead, or occasionally pitchers and bowls were provided, but usually the student had to resort to the public lavatory in the hall.

Along with these hardships consider the amusements of this period, which were for the greater part conspicuous by their absence. Statutes concerning amusements were often more stringent than those concerning crime or vice. These were essentially military times, and tournaments, hunting, and hawking, which were enjoyed by the upper social classes, were considered too expensive and distracting for university students, and were consequently forbidden. "Mortification of the flesh" was the cry of those days, as even now among some religious fanatics. Even playing with a ball or bat was at times forbidden, along with other "insolent games." A statute of the sixteenth century speaks of tennis and fives as among "indecent games" whose introduction would create scandal in and against the college. Games of chance and playing for money were also forbidden; nevertheless, they were more or less practised. Even chess enjoyed a bad reputation among the mediæval moralists, and was characterized by a certain bishop of Winchester as a "noxious, inordinate, and unhonest game." Dancing was rather a favorite amusement, but was repressed as far as possible, since the celebrated William of Wykeham found it necessary to prohibit dancing and jumping in the chapel. Apparently, then, in those days a good student amused himself little, if at all, and had to find his relaxation in the frequent interruptions caused by church holidays. At St. Andrew's, in Scotland, however, two days' holiday was allowed at carnival time expressly for cock-fighting. On the evenings of festival days entertainments were occasionally provided by strolling players, jesters, or mountebanks, who were largely patronized by students.

Altogether, it is not strange that students in those days fell into dissolute habits, many having to be expelled or punished. We can even understand how some of them actually turned highwaymen and waylaid their more peaceful brothers as they approached the universities with money for the ensuing season. In the archives of the University of Leipzig there are standard forms of proclamation against even such boyish follies as pea-shooting, destruction of trees and crops, throwing water out of the window upon passers-by, shouting at night, wearing of disguises, interfering with a hangman in the execution of his duty, or attending exhibitions of wrestling, boxing, and the like.

Evidently, then, university life had its exceedingly wild side. One needs only to recall the history of the famous Latin Quarter in Paris to be convinced of this. This was the students' quarter in the old city of Paris as extended by Philip Augustus across the river. Paris then was surrounded by a cordon of monasteries, whose abbots exercised jurisdiction over their surrounding districts. Just to the west of the student quarter stood the great Abbey of St. Germain. Between the monks of this monastery and the students there were frequent conflicts, and it is recorded that in 1278, for instance, a pitched battle occurred between the monks, under their provost, on one side, and the unarmed and defenceless boys and masters, on the other, during which many were badly wounded, and some mortally. The matter was finally carried to court, and the monks were required to perform certain penances and to pay certain fines. Their brutality, however, was not effectually suppressed. In 1304 the Provost of Paris hanged and gibbetted a student, and was punished therefor by the king; while the subsequent history of Paris is one of constant conflict between students and the clerical orders. On the other hand, the clerical tonsure in which the Parisian scholar clothed himself enabled him to indulge in all kinds of crime, without fear of that summary execution which would have been his fate had he been merely an ordinary beggar.

Bibulousness was another striking characteristic of mediæval university life. In those days they knew not tea nor coffee nor tobacco, but spirituous liquors in some form were far from unknown to them. No important event of life could be transacted without its drinking accompaniment. At all exercises, public or private, wine was freely provided, and many of the feasts and festivals which began with mass were concluded with a drunken orgie.

You have observed that so far I have made frequent mention of clerical matters. In truth, in northern Europe the Church included practically all the learned professions, including the civil servants of the government, the physicians, architects, secular lawyers, diplomatists, and secretaries, who were all ecclesiastics. It is true that in order to be a "clerk" it was not really necessary to take even minor orders, but it was so easy for a king or bishop to reward his physician, his lawyer, or his secretary by a monastic office rather than by a large salary, that the average student, at least in the larger places, looked to holy orders as his eventual destination. How much of insincerity and hypocrisy there were among those reverend gentlemen thus constituted you may imagine better than I can picture. The Reformation, as well as the increasing corruption of the monastic orders, brought about changes which were not rapid, but which became almost complete, and led finally to the partial restoration of the ancient dignity of the early Church.

Without pursuing this part of the subject further, it may be imagined what a general alteration and reformation in all branches of study, as well as in the general intellectual life of the people, the founding of the universities accomplished. For the greater part designed for the confirmation of the faith, they often brought about a reaction against it. Like the other integral portions of the university, the medical departments of nearly all the mediæval institutions came into existence through voluntary associations of physicians and would-be teachers. For a long time medicine was included under the general head of philosophy, whose standard-bearers were Aristotle and the Arabians. At Tübingen, in 1481, the medical student's days were divided about as follows: In the morning he studied Galen's _Ars Medici_, and in the afternoon Avicenna on _Fever_. During the second year, in the forenoon he studied Avicenna's _Anatomy and Physiology_, and in the afternoon the ninth book of Rhazes on _Local Pathology_. The forenoons of his third year were spent with the _Aphorisms_ of Hippocrates, and in the afternoon he studied Galen. If any text-book on surgery at all were used it was usually that of Avicenna. Some time was also given to the writings of some of the other Arabian physicians. At that time any man who had studied medicine for three years and attained the age of twenty-one might assume the rôle of teacher if he saw fit, being compelled only, at first, to lecture upon the preparatory branches. He was at that time called a _baccalaureus_. After three years' further study he became a _magister_ or _doctor_, although for the latter title a still further course of study was usually prescribed. The courses of medical instruction were quite stereotyped in form, and were carefully watched over by the Church. Nevertheless, it came about that the study of medicine once more was taken up by thinkers, although, unfortunately, not logical thinkers, whereas previously it had been almost entirely confined within the ranks of the clerics or clergy. The most celebrated of all these mediæval philosophers in science and medicine was Albert von Bollstaedt, usually known as Albertus Magnus, who died in 1280. His works which remain to us fill twenty-one quarto volumes, in which he discussed both anatomical and physiological questions. It is exceedingly illustrative of the foolishly speculative vein in which many of these discussions were carried on, that they seriously discussed such questions as whether the removal of the rib from Adam's side, out of which Eve was formed, really caused Adam severe pain, and whether at the judgment day that loss of rib would be compensated by the insertion of another. Those were the days, also, when it was seriously discussed whether Adam or Eve ever had a navel. In spite of such follies, however, Albertus Magnus left an impression upon scholarship in science, in a general way, which long outlasted him.