44 - University preaching

Summary

In the medieval university, giving sermons represented one of the basic academic actitivies, together with lectures and disputations. As Peter the Chanter put it famously near the end of the twelfth century, the graduate in theology had to be proficient in the acts of legere, disputare, praedicare. This highlights the fact that in the medieval university, preaching was the end to which all higher study of theology led. But not all university students worked to become full-blown theologians by incepting as masters. We have seen that, from the early fourteenth century on, monks were sent to the university primarily to learn how to preach; and recent studies of the educational organization of the mendicant orders point out that many friars similarly spent some time at the university, not to gain a higher degree but to receive the necessary theological training for their use as future lectors in convents and study houses. To the secular clergy, too, the possibility of some university study had opened up with the constitution Cum ex eo of Pope Boniface VIII in 1298, which made it possible for beneficed clergy to take a leave of absence in order to study at the university for a shorter or longer period; and episcopal records of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are full of such dispensations. But whether a degree candidate or a priest who simply meant to deepen his theological knowledge, all students were exposed to a good deal of preaching.