There were universities at
Oxford, Paris, Cologne, Montpelier, Orleans, Angers. Spain had four
universities; Italy, ten. The number of students in attendance must
amaze us if we think that higher education did not then prevail.
Professor Thomas Davidson in his History of Education, says: "The number
of students reported as having attended some of the universities in
those early days almost passes belief, e.g. Oxford is said to have had
about 30,000 about the year 1300 and half that number as early as 1224.
The numbers attending the University of Paris were still greater. The
numbers become less surprising when we remember with what poor
accommodations--a bare room and an armful of straw--the students of
those days were content and what numbers of them even a single teacher
like Abelard could, long before, draw into lonely retreats."
That in the twelfth and following centuries there was no lack of
enthusiasm for study, notwithstanding the troubled conditions of the
times, is very clear. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,
education rose in many European states to a height which it had not
attained since the days of Seneca and Quintilian.
The curriculum followed by a student in Dante's time embraced the seven
liberal arts of the Trivium and the Quadrivium, namely Grammar,
Dialectic, Rhetoric, Arithmetic, Music, Geometry and Astrology.
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