william t. costello, sj - The School of Literature, Communication, and ...

THE FRAMEWORK
OF SCHOLASTICISM
The seventeenth century opened with Cambridge, inhabited by
some two thousand students, 1 a fixed little star in a tight little
scholastic cosmos. It was too soon, in 1600, for the discoveries of
Kepler and Galileo, with their profoundly revolutionary philosophical
implications, to have influenced the course of study established
by the prudentia majorum nostrorum. If anything, the tra-
ditional scholastic framework was more firmly constituted by
rigid 2 statute than ever, because, perhaps, as other traditions had
been let go, academic traditions were a safe and uncontroversial
link with the
past.
How traditional was this scholastic learning, with its
peculiar,
all-pervading methodology, it is difficult now to appreciate. No
system of thought had held its patent of monopoly for so long.
Having taken birth and name from the Carlovingian schools (ca.
800), whose first masters were Alcuin, Rhabanus Maurus, and
Fredegis of Tours, scholasticism had come to maturity in the thirteenth
century, had enjoyed four hundred years of affluent domi-
nance, and was now settled to a respectable old age as the seventeenth
century opened. For eight centuries it had been the learn-
ing of Europe, the mens franca joining Cambridge
and Oxford
to Salamanca, Alcala, Padua, and Paris in a republic of thought.
Nothing would ever replace it, so it seemed, nor should anything
be allowed to change the status quo.
That the scholastic status quo at Cambridge was undisturbed
by the activities of the nonscholastic world, and that scholastic
traditions were jealously to be is guarded, evidenced by the reform
statutes of Elizabeth and James and by the directives of the Uni-
versity itself. In a petition for the reformation of St. John's Col-