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34 THE SCHOLASTIC CURRICULUM AT CAMBRIDGE "academic acts and exercises." In the context, "sermons" refer to those preached on feast days, anniversaries, on the death of royalty (oratio funebris), and so on, by one of the twelve University preachers annually chosen by grace (special decree): "Placeat vobis ut ii omnes, quorum nomina sunt infra scripta, sint 12 Praedicatores hoc anno per Academiam emittendi . . ." 88 Although there is nothing peculiarly scholastic about the sermons, and although, like the Clerum, they can hardly be numbered among the students' "acts/' still they were considered an important part of Cambridge education in that theological age, and it is thanks to obligatory attendance and the practice on the part of the students of taking down the preacher's discourse word-forword that early seventeenth-century sermons are still coming to light. OTHER EXERCISES In addition to the chief exercises: lectures, disputations, and declamations (to which we have annexed Clerums and sermons), reference is often made to two other statutable acts, the priorums and posteriorums. By our time these had degenerated into mere forms, though originally they had been serious oral examinations on Aristotle's Prior and Posterior Analytics. Cambridge seems to have borrowed these examinations in logic from the University of Paris, for in Bedell Stokey's Book the rubrical summons to these exercises began: "Alons, Alons, goe Mrs. goe, goe According to Bedell Buck's Book, the Father, usually one of the senior proctors, herded his questionists into the schools on a day appointed between admission and the following Ash Wednesday. The Father made a speech, at the end of which he asked of each . . ." 89 questionist three or four perfunctory questions in logic. Having thus "entered his priorums or posteriorums" the student was able in good conscience to take the required oath that he had performed all and every exercise and act which the ancient statutes demanded. Strangely enough, the perfunctoriness of the priorums and posteriorums resulted from an excess rather than a defect of learning, for the seventeenth-century student had been drilled so thoroughly in logic that there was no need, except to satisfy the statutes, for a formal examination. The rest of the scholastic acts sometimes met with in seventeenth-century studies are no more than matters of terminology. "Sophomes" refer to the disputations of sophisters, that is, undergraduates who had not yet commenced as bachelors. "Inceptions"
THE FRAMEWORK OF SCHOLASTICISM 35 were specifically bachelors' disputations, just as "determinations" refer specifically to the disputations of the masters. "Quadragesimals," as we have said before, were simply the disputations held during Lent in the schools. If the understanding of scholasticism were merely a matter of understanding a strange set of technical terms and a peculiar series of technical exercises, there would be no need, beyond mere antiquarianism, thus to have stressed mechanical forms. In addi- these forms as a vital tion, however, it is necessary to appreciate influence on the scholastic mind itself, sharing importance with the doctrinal content, which we shall study in the following chapter. Lectures, declamations, and, particularly, disputations had been serious occupations of the university student, and it is impossible to understand such a phenomenon as, for example, the mid-seventeenth-century pamphlet war without understanding the mechanical workings of the mind which had been trained to insist on an answer to an answer of an answer. For, the pam- phleteer of later life, who was so seriously disputatious in keep- his brother, had been told as a student: "Slubber not over ing your exercises in a slight and careless perfunctory manner, as if you performed them per formam only, et dieis [sic!] causa, but take paines about them, and doe them exactly both for your owne credit 8c good example of others/' 90
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