The Universities and the Printing with Movable
Types
The period between the end of Western Roman Empire and the
emergence of medieval Europe from500 to 1000 has been called
dark ages. A period of Barbarism..buts this period was also the
flowering of Byzantine Empire.. Constantine the Great was the
emperor of Western and Eastern Roman empire in 324. He chose
a new Capital, Byzantiun which he called Constantinople…
Imperial Library..composing collection of Greek and Latin works
and in later years Christian and Pagan works
University of Constantinople, Which was founded by Theodosius
II, a serious scholar and an ardent book collector. Ecclesiastical
Library and monastic collection were also established widely.
Prophet Mohammed(570-632) and his followers, towards the end
of 6th century bent upon world conquest and begun raiding
Byzantine empire, Syria, babylonia, Mesopotamia, Persia and
Egypt.Spread like wildfire both by sword and persuasion. Good
thing in this period though Arab invaders fail to conquer
Constantinople later on instead they compete Constantinople
in terms of study and production of secular literature.
 Bagdad
had became the center for the study of
Greek works who has introduce the works of
Aristotle’s logic ..Physicians and scholars
gathered in the city to study and translate Greek
medical, scientific and philosophical works into
Arabic, Syria or Aramaic.
 Abbasid Al-Mamum, who established in 830 the
“House of Wisdom”.
 Byzantine Empire and Arab trade, travel between
though in hostility were not interrupted instead
had tremendously progressed, and teaching of
medicine, mathematics and natural science as
well as works of Aristotle, Hippocrates and Galen
flourished.
 Beverley
Grammar School, The oldest secular, state
run school, was founded in 700 and survived many
years of Viking occupation.
 Benedict Biscop, 8th century foundation of
Wearmouth and Jarrow in Northhumbria, became
the center of a “Briliant Christian Culture”
 Boniface, 8th century, founded Fulda the center of
Learning and literature in Germany
 Irish with Anglo-Saxon, 8th century were chief
transmitter and preservers of learning in the west
and “decisive cultural factor throughout the
territory of the future Carolingian Empire”
 Carolingian Renaissance, the revival of learning w/c
was sponsored by Charlemagne and inspired and
directed by Alcuin
Alcuin (735-804) -- Charlemagne’s head scholar –
master of school at York in Northumbria and head of the
Palace School in Aachen, is one of the few names that
come down to us from this period
 Charlemagne (768-814) provided a political unity in the
form of the Frankish Empire, and the Pope a religious
unity, and a new era slowly began. Eventually, the
Church took over Europe, and the Pope replaced the
emperor as the most important figure. By 1200, the
Church would own a third of the land area of Europe!
 Scriptoria, copying of manuscript have a great
contribution of the circulation of copied manuscript which
survived the scholarship, literature and monastic work
from the fire disaster.
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The Crusades, 1078 started at the time when Jerusalem
had been captured from the ruling Seljuk Turk and ,
brought goods and money circulation and created new
activityand enterprises, as result towns grew up around
castles and monasteries that led to rise of Universities.
THE UNIVERSITIES
The earliest universities to develop were in Italy.
These were at Salerno (1) in the course of the ninth
century, and Bologna (2) in the eleventh century.
University of Bologna, The first European university
appeared in Bologna, Italy The first university to receive
a papal charter, in 1088, obtained complete immunity
from civil jurisdiction in 1317
 University of Paris, In northern Europe, became the first
recognized university.The University of Paris received its
charter in 1150.
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Oxford was recognized in 1167, though teaching began in
1096.The University of Oxford, in England,8. University of Oxford
apparently came into existence around 1096, with 60 to 100
students assembled round the Augustinian canons of the Priory of
St Frideswide. The first reference to Oxford as a studium
generale did not however occur until 1163 The degree of doctor
of music was introduced in Oxford in 1515 , A migration of
scholars from Oxford in 1209 led to the establishment of
Cambridge University.
University of Cambridge was created c.1209, at first
its growth was relatively slow and it was only
recognised as a studium generale by Bull of Pope John
XXII in 1318. The degree of doctor of music was in
Cambridge in 1463.
 Universities of New Zealand Despite the great influence
of Oxford and Cambridge on intellectual life, the
traditions of universities in New Zealand owes at least
as much to the Scottish and provincial civic university
model. Indeed the oldest university in this country was
that of Otago, created by the Province of Otago, rather
than the central Government. However, in 1870
Parliament passed legislation to create the University of
New Zealand in the fifteenth century
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There were over seventy universities founded in
Europe during the Middle Ages.
In the Late Middle Ages, kings, popes, and princes
vied to found new universities. By the end of the Middle Ages, there
were eighty universities in Europe, most of them located in
England, France, Italy, and Germany”
Universities developed out of monastery and cathedral schools -really what we would call elementary schools, but attended by
adolescents and taught by monks and priests..
The first documented universities (University of Bologna (1088),
University of Paris (teach. mid-11th century, recogn. 1150),
University of Oxford (teach. 1096, recogn. 1167), University of
Modena (1175), University of Palencia (1208), University of
Cambridge (1209), University of Salamanca (1218), University of
Montpellier (1220), University of Padua (1222), University of
Toulouse (1229), University of Orleans (1235), University of Siena
(1240) and University of Coimbra (1288)) began as private
corporations of teachers and their pupils. 1347
The University of Prague is founded in 1380,1386 University of
Heidelberg
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University of Paris
A predecessor of the modern university was in Paris,
especially under the guidance of Peter Abelard,.
Dissatisfied
with tensions between burghers and
students and the Censorship of leading intellectuals
by the Church, Abelard
and others formed the Universitas,
modelled on the
mediaeval guild, self-regulating, permanent
institution of
higher education.
Abelard Peter Abelard (1079-1142) The
primary development
of scholastic philosophy began with the teachings of Peter Abelard;
he first attempted to synthesize reason and theology. He was the
single most important personality in establishing 12th-century Paris
as the university center of Europe. He is best known, however, for
conceptualism, his attempt to synthesize nominalism and realism.
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Averroes of Cordova (Ibn Rushd, 11261
1198) is the greatest of the Islamic
philosophers. He began as a lawyer,
and was chief justice of Seville and later
of Cordova. He was also a physician, and served
as the court physician in Marrakesh. He was the
first to recognize that if a person survived smallpox, they
would be immune thereafter. But Islam’s openness to
philosophy was not to last. The Emir of Baghdad ordered
Averroes’ books burned, and his example was followed by
other leaders all the way back to Averroes’ homeland of
Spain.
In the late Middle Ages (the
1200s
St Thomas
Aristotle excited a lot of thought
in the
monks and scholars of the
universities. These neo-Aristotelians were
called schoolmen, or scholastics. By studying
Aristotle and his Arab and Jewish
commentators, they learned to think more
logically, but their goals were still essentialy
theological. He was the most famous and
influential of the Parisian masters of the 13th
century (although he was born of Italian noble
parentage). “He began his studies at the
University of Naples
 Roger Bacon (1214-1294),one of Thomas critics, a
Franciscan monk and scientist, pointed out that reason
does actually need experience in order to have
something to reason
about -- a hint of modern
empiricism in the Middle Ages!
.
* John Duns Scotus (1265-1308 St. Thomas’ severest critic), a
Franciscan monk and professor at Oxford, Paris, and Cologne.
He believed that the authority of the church was everything.
The will is supreme and intellect is subordinate to it. Although a
conceptualist (like Thomas), of the thing, the idea, and the
name, he felt that it was the individual thing that was the most
real. His student William would take that and run with it.
 in England (1280-1347) was another Franciscan monk. Like Roger
Bacon, he believed that, without sensory contact with things,
the universal is inconceivable. In fact, he said universals are
only names we give groups of things -- a return to the no
theologians do not prove by rigid demonstration what they
accept, but show they are reasonable. Theology, then, is Fides
quaerens intellectum (Anselm)
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Science in the Middle Ages
Aristotle and His Work, Medieval thinkers failed to free science
from its subservient position as a handmaiden to theology. "In the
area of science as in many others, medieval intellectuals
considered Aristotle the master of all knowledge. Aristotle had
taught that natural science should be based on observations that
could then lead to generalizations.
Robert Grosseteste (1168-1253), The Englishman ,the
chancellor of Oxford University, stressed the need for students to
observe the world of nature and was especially interested in the
study of light or the science of optics. He was persuaded that a
deeper knowledge of physical light would serve to penetrate the
nature of the universe.,
Roger Bacon (1220-1292), Grosseteste's pupil carried on his
master's work. Although Bacon achieved no scientific breakthroughs
of his own, he is still remembered for his imaginative visions of
flying machines, submarines, and powered ships and for
emphasizing the importance of mathematics for the study of both
"natural" and "divine" philosophy.
St. Anselm of Canterbury(1033-1109)
was a neoPlatonist, and he is best
known for his efforts at coming up
with
a logical proof of God’s existence -- the
famous
ontological proof: Since we can think of
a perfect
being, he must exist, since perfection
implies existence. he was a proponent of realism.
Anselm’s motto was Augustine’s “I believe in order that I
may understand”
Nominalism
 Roscellinus of Amorica in Brittany (1050-1121) was the
founder of nominalism, another approach to universals.
A universal, he said, is just a “flatus vocis” (a vocal
sound -- i.e. a word). Only individuals actually exist.
Words, and the ideas they represent, refer to nothing.
This is quite compatable with materialism and
empiricism, but not, really, to Christianity.
From the end of the Thirteenth Century and into
the next, greater numbers of colleges and
universities were founded. Recovered texts from
the Roman period, such as Justinian’s Corpus
Juris Civilis, expanded the field of learning,
particularly legal studies. Increased contact with
the ever diminished Byzantines resulted in
scholars fleeing Muslim incursions and bringing
their books with them.
 By the Renaissance, university studies underwent
more significant changes. Ultimately, the birth of
the university system in the Twelfth Century
began a process that substantially impacted
Western Civilization, effecting law, medicine,
and a pathway toward an openness that would
eventually break with the old order of thinking,
leading Europe into the early modern period
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Diamond Sutra The earliest dated printed book known, printed in China in 868 CE. However, it is suspected that book
printing may have occurred long before this date.
618 to 906: T’ang Dynasty - the first printing is
done in China using ink on carved wooden
blocks begins to make multiple transfers of an
image to paper.
Movable type is the system of printing and typography that
uses movable components to reproduce the elements of a
document (usually individual letters or punctuation).
 The world's first known movable-type system for printing was
created in China around 1040 AD by Bi Sheng (990–1051)
during the Song Dynasty as described by the Chinese scholar
Shen Kuo (1031–1095), but was abandoned in favour of clay
movable types due to the presence of wood grains and the
unevenness of the wooden type after being soaked in ink
Prior to the development of metal movable type, most printing
was done using blocks carved from wood.
 Woodblock printing was used extensively in East Asia, and
created the world's first print culture.
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KIND OF MOVABLES TYPES
 Wooden movable type
 Pottery movable type,the first known
movable-type system for printing was
created in China around 1040 AD. This type
was made of baked clay.
 Yuan dynasty woodblock edition of a Chinese
play In 1193, Zhou Bida, an officer of Southern
Song Dynasty, made a set of clay movable-type
method according to the method described by
Shen Kuo in his Dream Pool Essays, and printed
his book Notes of The Jade Hall
 Ceramic movable type
 Porcelain movable type occurred in 1719
 Metal movable type
 Copperplate of 1215-1216 5000 cash paper
money with bronze movable type conterfeit
markers
Movable Type traces its origins to the punches used to make
coins: the reverse face of a Tetradrachm Greek coin from
Athens, 5th century BC, featuring letters and the owl
symbol of Athena.
 The technique of imprinting multiple copies of symbols or
glyphs with a master type punch made of hard metal first
developed around 3000 BC in ancient Sumer
A replica of the Phaistos Disc
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The enigmatic Minoan Phaistos Disc of 1800–1600 BC has
been considered by one scholar as an early example of a
body of text being reproduced with reusable characters: it
may have been produced by pressing pre-formed
hieroglyphic "seals" into the soft clay. A few authors even
view the disc as technically meeting all definitional
criteria to represent an early, if not the earliest incidence
of movable-type printing
Metal movable type in Europe
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A case of cast metal type pieces and typeset matter in a composing
stick
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1452: In Europe, metal plates are first used in printing. Gutenberg
begins printing the Bible which he finishes in 1456
Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz is acknowledged as the first to invent a
metal movable-type printing system in Europe. Gutenberg was a
goldsmith familiar with techniques of cutting punches for making
coins from moulds. Between 1436 and 1450 he developed hardware
and techniques for casting letters from matrices using a device called
the hand mould.
Gutenberg's movable-type printing system spread rapidly across
Europe, from the single Mainz press in 1457 to 110 presses by 1480,
of which 50 were in Italy. Venice quickly became the center of
typographic and printing activity. Significant were the contributions
of Nicolas Jenson, Francesco Griffo, Aldus Manutius, and other
printers of late 15th-century Europe. Despite some conjectures
(see[21]), there is no evidence that movable type from the East ever
reached Europe.
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Source : Jean Key Gates, Intro to Librarianship,
DR. George Boercee, The Middle Ages
http://www.suite101.com/content/universitie
s-and-students-in-the-high-middle-agesa298007#ixzz1RUiXPUyb
 Reporter:
Alma Gomes