Igure: by Guest On 29 July 2018

FIGURE 1: A disputation between Saint Augustine and Faustus the Manichean.
School of Mont
St. Michel (Normandy). Early thirteenth century. Bibliothèque municipale, Avranches, MS 90, fol.
1. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, N.Y.
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/117/2/331/30024

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Toward a Cultural History of Scholastic Disputation
ALEX J. NOVIKOFF
THE SCHOLASTIC DEBATES OF MEDIEVAL AUTHORS have not fared well among historians.
As a subject, they are treated seriously by philosophers and theologians interested
in particular points of logic or doctrine, selectively by specialists of medieval learning
who focus on particular authors or key ideas, and hardly at all by historians con-
cerned with the wider cultural fabric of medieval society. Popular images of scho-
lastic argumentation have only isolated the field further. From Renaissance human-
ists and luminaries in the age of reason to general assumptions today, these debates
have routinely been condemned as medieval vestiges of an anti-intellectual world:
pedantic at best, pointless at worst.1 Faced on the one hand with the pejorative
connotations of “scholastic” and “quodlibet,” we are on the other hand endlessly
entreated these days to enter into “dialogue” with others, a discourse that both re-
flects and presupposes a post-Enlightenment (perhaps even postmodern) engage-
ment with the world.2 Marginalized and misunderstood, the history of medieval di-
alogue and debate is in need of a fresh assessment.
A preliminary version of this article was delivered as a paper in February 2008 at the Mellon-Sawyer
Seminar on Disputation at UCLA’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. I am grateful to the
organizers, Brian Copenhaver and Calvin Normore, for the invitation to speak and to the participants
for their feedback. I especially thank Daniel Hobbins, James J. Murphy, Benjamin Nathans, Albert B.
Novikoff, Thomas B. Payne, Edward Roesner, Jennifer Saltzstein, and my wonderful colleagues in the
Rhodes History Department’s “Historians at Work” seminar. For advice and encouragement in my
earliest research on this topic, I thank Edward Peters, Rita Copeland, E. Ann Matter, Anna Sapir
Abulafia, Roger Chartier, and Anthony Grafton. My deepest gratitude is offered to the six anonymous
reviewers for the AHR for their critical and constructive insights, and to the editors of the journal, who
handled this article with such care and judiciousness: Konstantin Dierks, Sarah Knott, Jane Lyle, and
especially Robert Schneider. I wish to recognize the generous support of the Rhodes College History
Department in helping to cover the cost of the images.
1 Many authors of the Middle Ages criticized or satirized the logic of the schools and universities,
but it was the humanists of the Italian Renaissance who were among the first to associate scholasticism
with a distinctly medieval and backward-looking outlook, a view that has persisted ever since. The image
passed down in the English-speaking world is well summed up by John Locke, Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1690), bk. III, chap. 10, para. 9: “For, notwithstanding these learned disputants, these
all-knowing doctors, it was to the unscholastic statesman that the governments of the world owed their
peace, defence, and liberties . . . Nevertheless, this artificial ignorance, and learned gibberish, prevailed
mightily in these last ages, by the interest and artifice of those who found no easier way to that pitch
of authority and dominion they have attained, than by amusing the men of business, and ignorant, with
hard words, or employing the ingenious and idle in intricate disputes about unintelligible terms, and
holding them perpetually entangled in that endless labyrinth.” The parody of scholastic debate finds its
most familiar caricature in the proverbial question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin,
a satire on medieval angelology (and scholasticism in general) that likewise seems to be early modern
in origin.
2 “Dialogue” and “dialogic” are buzzwords in many corners of modern political and intellectual
discourse. In his influential, and difficult to characterize, collection of essays The Dialogic Imagination,
331

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332 Alex J. Novikoff
Serious challenges remain to understanding the place of scholasticism in the

broader culture of the High Middle Ages. A particular challenge is posed by the
origins and development of disputation, the formalized debate techniques of the
medieval university, whose existence is always assumed but whose impact beyond the
academic environment has not been adequately explored. As a leading scholar of
medieval rhetoric has put it, “the scholastic emphasis upon thesis, counterthesis, and
listing of arguments must have had its effects on all kinds of discourse. It would be
difficult to name a more pervasive influence with so little study given to its effect.”3
An especially vexed question is the relationship between the dialogue genre, a pop-
ular literary form in the twelfth century, and the dialectical methods of scholastic
disputation. Giles Constable has stated the problem thus: “Dialogue and dialectic—
the science of doubt as it has been called—played a fundamental part in the thought
processes of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. It underlay the discipline of dis-
putation that developed in the schools and was applied to almost every branch of
intellectual inquiry.”4 Curiously, no scholar has yet pursued the history of dialogue
and disputation along these other branches—what we might call their cultural his-
tory. The centrality of scholastic disputation to medieval learning has never been
doubted; the problem in charting its history is where to begin and in what direction
to proceed. To date, the topic has more commonly been treated as a subsidiary and
finite category of medieval logic in connection with individual authors or schools.
Identifying disputation as a historical problem raises a fundamental question:
Can the scholastic argumentation embodied in these dialogues and disputations (real
or literary) shed light on deeper cultural mutations within medieval civilization? The
answer, it seems, is yes. Scholastic disputation arose in the late eleventh century in
connection with new developments in monastic learning, and over the course of the
next two centuries, it developed systematically and centrifugally from France and
Italy to become a formative practice in the scholastic culture of medieval Europe,
eventually transcending the frontier between private and public spheres and extend-
ing to multiple levels of society. Not only was the triumph of disputation one of the
signal achievements of the medieval university curriculum, but its evolution and ap-
plication beyond the confines of strictly academic circles (in debate poems and poly-
phonic music, and more particularly in the Christian confrontation with Jews and
Judaism) suggests that the rise of medieval disputation can offer historians an in-
structive model of cultural history: specifically, it illustrates how dialogue escaped its
literary origin and passed from an idea among few to a cultural practice among many.
The term “cultural history” is as elusive as it is seductive. Frequently invoked but
rarely defined, cultural history in the early modern period is often identified with a
combination of anthropological and historical approaches to understanding popular
trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, Tex., 1981), literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin saw
an important linguistic and semiotic shift in the rise of the “dialogical” novel of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, which he contrasted with the ancient epic. For recent reflections on the opposition
between medieval and modern, see Carol Symes, “When We Talk about Modernity,” American Historical
Review 116, no. 3 (June 2011): 715–726.
3 James J. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: A History of Rhetorical Theory from St. Augustine
to the Renaissance (Berkeley, Calif., 1974), 102 n. 47. I am grateful to the author for bringing this passage
to my attention.
4 Giles Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, 1996), 130.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW APRIL 2012

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Toward a Cultural History of Scholastic Disputation 333
cultural traditions using a variety of narrative texts or nonverbal forms of commu-

nication (public rituals, material texts, the body, and the like).5 Among French his-
torians, the study of medieval “mentalities” that flourished in the last third of the
twentieth century was an attempt to access the shared ideas and worldviews of the
medieval mind by investigating its cultural matrix, described by one cultural historian
as a “historical anthropology of ideas.”6 Previous attempts at medieval cultural his-
tory have therefore often consisted of dissecting a single author or concept in order
to get at the larger surrounding culture. What has not been pursued in any great
detail is the evolution and diffusion of that most scholastic method itself—dispu-
tation—especially its extension into other, related spheres of cultural activity that
did not immediately depend on the schools in which it first developed. An important
exception is Erwin Panofsky’s short but provocative Gothic Architecture and Scho-
lasticism (1951), which attempted to correlate the ordered and harmonious spaces
of thirteenth-century cathedrals to the organizational structure of scholastic
thought.7 A comparative model of a different sort led another scholar to suggest that
elements of the scholastic method of the twelfth century were influenced by earlier
Islamic colleges, which also gave prominence to a pro and contra form of argumen-
tation.8 Evoking loose parallels between thought and architecture or between two
different cultural traditions is one thing; tracing the organic evolution of an essential
mode of analysis in a single culture is quite another. A new approach to scholastic
learning is needed.
Studies of the medieval mind or the medieval “imagination” have been under-
taken before, and in their most successful forms they have greatly enriched our un-
derstanding of medieval society by expanding intellectual and theological concepts
into more culturally relevant categories.9 In the case of disputation, however, one
5 As just one example of the plurality of definitions offered, see Peter Burke, Varieties of Cultural
History (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997). For an attempt at a cultural history of medieval France, see Michel Sot,
Jean-Patrice Boudet, and Anita Guerreau-Jalabert, Le Moyen âge (Paris, 1997), where disputation is
mentioned in passing (e.g., 127, 145, 176) but not discussed at any length.
6 See Peter Burke, “Strengths and Weaknesses of the History of Mentalities,” in Burke, Varieties
of Cultural History, 162–182, here 163. The textbook of sorts for the history-of-mentalities approach is
Hervé Martin, Mentalités médiévales, XI e–XV e siècle (Paris, 1996). For critique and analysis of the French
approach, see Roger Chartier, “Intellectual History or Sociocultural History? The French Trajectories,”
trans. Jane P. Kaplan, in Dominick LaCapra and Steven L. Kaplan, eds., Modern European Intellectual
History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives (Ithaca, N.Y., 1982), 13– 46. More recently, see Philippe Poir-
rier, Les enjeux de l’histoire culturelle (Paris, 2004).
7 Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (Latrobe, Pa., 1951). Panofsky’s now-fa-
mous insight was slightly anticipated in a review article by Lucien Febvre, “Histoire des idées, histoire
des sociétés: Une question de climat,” Annales ESC , no. 2 (1946): 158–161, here 161: “We must not
underestimate the role of ideas in history . . . We must show that a Gothic cathedral, the marketplace
of Ypres and one of those great cathedrals of ideas such as those Etienne Gilson describes to us in his
book are daughters of a single epoch, sisters reared in the same household.”
8 George Makdisi, “The Scholastic Method in Medieval Education: An Inquiry into Its Origins in
Law and Theology,” Speculum 49, no. 4 (1974): 640–661. Most scholars have not been convinced by the
argument for an Islamic root to the Western legal tradition, but see more recently John A. Makdisi, “The
Islamic Origins of the Common Law,” North Carolina Law Review 77, no. i5 (June 1999): 1635–1739.
9 Above all, one thinks of the influential studies by Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans.
Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago, 1986); The Medieval Imagination, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago,
1992); and Intellectuals in the Middle Ages, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (London, 1993). For a dis-
cussion of Le Goff’s methodology, see Aaron Gurevich, “Popular and Scholarly Medieval Cultural Tra-
ditions: Notes in the Margins of Jacques Le Goff’s Book,” Journal of Medieval History 9 (1983): 71–90.
The extraordinary scholarship of Caroline Walker Bynum might also be said to move in the cultural-
historical direction, and she has on several occasions emphasized the need to go beyond what she calls

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of the stumbling blocks to appreciating its cultural dimension is the tendency to

freeze it in a moment in time rather than observe its evolution. Individual practi-
tioners and instances of disputation have been studied, but rarely has there been a
sustained consideration of the practice itself.10 In order to uncover the formation of
this essential habit of medieval culture, a more profitable approach will be to trace
the development of disputation on the frontiers between private and public spheres
and between learned and popular audiences. The crossing of these frontiers can best
be observed when disciplinary boundaries are blurred and disputation is examined
longitudinally across both time and place—the longue durée, to borrow a term from
the economic historians of the Annales school. Our goal, therefore, is to illustrate
how an idea and a literary form originally limited to small intellectual circles in the
late eleventh century evolved though multiple stages to become a cultural practice
within the larger public sphere in the thirteenth.11 It is in this sense that the study
of scholastic disputation, long confined to technical discussions among specialists,
offers historians a useful paradigm of cultural history.
“old-style intellectual history.” See Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336
(New York, 1995), xvi, and Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany
and Beyond (Philadelphia, 2007), xv–xviii. More recently, see the exemplary study by Daniel Hobbins,
Authorship and Publicity before Print: Jean Gerson and the Transformation of Late Medieval Learning
(Philadelphia, 2009). A sociological approach to medieval thought is D. L. D’Avray, Medieval Religious
Rationalities: A Weberian Analysis (Cambridge, 2010).
10 When disputation is singled out for study, it is almost always in the context of the university
curriculum, and with scant regard for pre-university or extra-university manifestations. Cf. Olga Weijers,
La “Disputatio” à la Faculté des arts de Paris (1200–1350 environ): Esquisse d’une typologie (Turnhout,
1995); and Bernardo C. Bazàn, John W. Wippel, Gérard Fransen, and Danielle Jacquart, eds., Les
questions disputées et les questions quodlibétiques dans les facultés de théologie, de droit, et de médecine
(Turnhout, 1985). For the use of disputation among individual scholastic authors, see the learned studies
by Marcia L. Colish, Peter Lombard, 2 vols. (Leiden, 1994); and John W. Baldwin, Masters, Princes, and
Merchants: The Social Views of Peter the Chanter and His Circle, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J., 1970). For case
studies of individual poets and philosophers of the later Middle Ages, see Georgiana Donavin, Carol
Poster, and Richard Utz, eds., Medieval Forms of Argument: Disputation and Debate (Eugene, Ore.,
2002). A detailed analysis of a famous thirteenth-century Jewish-Christian disputation is Robert Chazan,
Barcelona and Beyond: The Disputation of 1263 and Its Aftermath (Berkeley, Calif., 1992).
11 The term “public sphere” is admittedly something of a hornet’s nest in modern historiography.
Jürgen Habermas noted that his concept of a “bourgeois public sphere” in the eighteenth century did
not apply to medieval Europe; Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry
into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass., 1989; original German
ed. 1962), 5–12. Medievalists, however, have rightly challenged the presumption that no public sphere
at all existed in the Middle Ages. In fact, Habermas’s public sphere was largely based on a caricature
of the Middle Ages, not unlike the caricatures of scholastic debates cited above. Recent discussions of
premodern publicity range widely, from the symbolic rituals of early medieval assembly politics to late
medieval marketplaces, public intellectuals, and legal culture. I employ the term “public sphere” to point
to a division between the more cloistered and literary world of monastic learning in the eleventh century
and the more public, and indeed performative, sphere of university and extra-university debates in the
thirteenth century, as will become clear below. On the semantic difficulties involved in discussing the
concepts of “private” and “public” in the Middle Ages, see Peter von Moos, “Öffentlich” und “privat”
im Mittelalter: Zu einem Problem historischer Begriffsbildung (Heidelberg, 2004); and Shannon McShef-
frey, “Place, Space, and Situation: Public and Private in the Making of Marriage in Late-Medieval Lon-
don,” Speculum 79, no. 4 (2004): 960–990. For another attempt at locating a public sphere in the thir-
teenth century, see the remarkable study by Carol Symes, A Common Stage: Theater and Public Life in
Medieval Arras (Ithaca, N.Y., 2007). A more radical application of Habermas’s concept is Leidulf Melve,
Inventing the Public Sphere: The Public Debate during the Investiture Conflict (c. 1030–1122), 2 vols. (Lei-
den, 2007), who advances the curious argument that a public sphere existed in the predominantly textual
context of the eleventh-century controversy over Investiture but that it then did not reappear until after
the Middle Ages.

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DEBATE AND ARGUMENTATION ARE as ancient as civilization itself, and perhaps innate
to the human mind.12 Plato knew well that a skillfully crafted dialogue could express
what mere lecture notes could not.13 Aristotle devoted his Topics and Sophistical
Refutations to the art of forming questions and responses, pioneered the discipline
of logic, and was himself the author of several dialogues that are no longer extant.
In the legal courts of late Republican Rome, Cicero perfected an art of discourse
in utramque partem (on both sides of the issue) that became a basic element in clas-
sical rhetoric. In his dialogues, Cicero introduced Romans to the chief schools of
Greek philosophy and created a Latin philosophical vocabulary that allowed him to
follow the Socratic method by raising doubts about the plausibility of some of the
most important ideas of the day.14 Both before and immediately after the rise of
Christianity as a state religion, the social competition of public disputation formed
an integral part of Roman culture.15 Early Christians adopted the rhetoric of debate
for their own purposes. The New Testament describes Jesus disputing with the elders
(Luke 2: 46– 47) and Paul disputing with the Jews (Acts 17–18), motifs that would
become especially popular in later medieval and Renaissance iconography. In late
antiquity, the merging of classical learning and Christianity produced another cul-
tural turn in dialogue and disputation: Augustine introduced in his Soliloquia and
other writings a meditative inner dialogue with himself, while continuing to dispute
publicly with heretics, and Boethius provided in his celebrated dialogue Consolation
of Philosophy and other theological works a point of departure for the medieval
harmony between faith and philosophy.16 In the centuries after the fall of Rome,
12 The roles of reason and debate are currently being rethought from the perspective of the cognitive
sciences. A recent, and controversial, theory holds that human reason evolved for the purpose of winning
arguments in the debating arena. See the positions for and against this theory in Behavioral and Brain
Sciences 34, no. 2 (April 2011): 57–111. For a précis of this theory, see Patricia Cohen, “Reason Seen
More as Weapon Than Path to Truth,” New York Times, June 14, 2011. For ancient models of literary
debate, see G. J. Reinink and H. L. J. Vanstiphout, eds., Dispute Poems and Dialogue in the Ancient and
Mediaeval Near East: Forms and Types of Literary Debates in Semitic and Related Literatures (Leuven,
1991).
13 On Plato’s use of dialogue, see Charles H. Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical
Use of a Literary Form (Cambridge, 1996); and Kenneth M. Sayre, Plato’s Literary Garden: How to Read
a Platonic Dialogue (Notre Dame, Ind., 1995). For a convergence of philosophical ideas and music similar
to what is attempted in this article, see J. B. Kennedy, The Musical Structure of Plato’s Dialogues (Dur-
ham, N.C., 2011).
14 See Robert Gorman, The Socratic Method in the Dialogues of Cicero (Wiesbaden, 2005). Cicero’s
dialogues, in particular, circulated widely because the early Church declared him a “virtuous pagan,”
and consequently many of his works were deemed worthy of preservation. Indeed, more works survived
in the Middle Ages by Cicero than by any other Latin author. See John C. Rolfe, Cicero and His Influence
(London, 1923); and Ettore Paratore, “Cicerone attraverso i secoli,” in Luigi Alfonsi et al., Marco Tullio
Cicerone (Florence, 1961), 237–244, for indications of their medieval manuscript tradition. Cicero’s
moral philosophy proved especially influential in the twelfth century. See, for instance, the following
studies by Philippe Delhaye: “La place de l’éthique parmi les disciplines scientifiques au XIIe siècle,”
in Miscellanea moralia in honorem eximii domini Arthur Janssen, universitatis catholicae in oppido lovani-
ensi professoris, 2 vols. (Louvain, 1948), 1: 29– 44; “L’enseignement de la philosophie morale au XIIe
siècle,” Medieval Studies 11 (1949): 77–99; and “Une adaptation du ‘De officiis’ au XIIe siècle: Le ‘Mora-
lium dogma philosophorum,’ ” Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 16 (1949): 227–258, 17
(1950): 5–28.
15 Richard Lim, Public Disputation, Power, and Social Order in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, Calif., 1995).
16 See the learned remarks about Augustine’s dialogues in Brian Stock, Augustine the Reader: Med-
itation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), 130–137. Dialectic was
of paramount importance to Augustine throughout his works, and in De doctrina Christiana 2.31.48–

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where scholars have begun to highlight the role of Christianity in this so-called “end
of dialogue,” Augustine and Boethius served as models for the medieval continuity
of dialogue in a monastic and contemplative setting.17 This master narrative of the
decline of literary dialogue and public disputation has been especially attractive to
scholars of the Renaissance, who have repeatedly minimized the role of both during
the Middle Ages, all while accentuating the “culture of dialogue” or “culture of
debate” that humanism allegedly rediscovered.18 Like the abusive stereotypes of
scholastic thought, this assumption correspondingly calls for revision.
2.35.48 he explicitly acknowledges the usefulness of dialectic (disputandi disciplina) for all the kinds of
problems that must be investigated and resolved in sacred scripture. In Soliloquia 2.7.14 he never uses
the word “dialectic,” but he does refer to the discipline in one of its meanings when he writes that there
is no better way of searching for truth than by questioning and answering. He then raises the question
whether the art of disputation (ars disputandi ) is true or false, and he answers that it is true. On Boethius,
see especially Seth Lerer, Boethius and Dialogue: Literary Method in the “Consolation of Philosophy”
(Princeton, N.J., 1985). For the medieval reception of this classic work, see Maarten J. F. M. Hoenen
and Lodi Nauta, eds., Boethius in the Middle Ages: Latin and Vernacular Traditions of the “Consolatio
Philosophiae” (Leiden, 1997); and, most recently, Noel Harold Kaylor, Jr., and Philip Edward Phillips,
eds., A Companion to Boethius in the Middle Ages (Leiden, 2010). The importance of Boethius’s logic
and the complexity of the Consolation of Philosophy are expertly treated in John Marenbon, Boethius
(Oxford, 2003).
17 Simon Goldhill, ed., The End of Dialogue in Antiquity (Cambridge, 2008). On the medieval con-
tinuity of ancient models, see K. J. Wilson, “The Continuity of the Post-Classical Dialogue,” Cithara 21,
no. 1 (1981): 23– 44; Jacques Fontaine, “Le genre littéraire du dialogue monastique dans l’Occident latin
des Ve et VIe siècles,” in Marek Starowieyski, ed., The Spirituality of Ancient Monasticism: Acts of the
International Colloquium Held in Cracow-Tyniec, 16–19th November 1994 (Cracow, 1994), 228–250; and
M. L. W. Laistner, Thought and Letters in Western Europe, A.D. 500 to 900 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1957), chap.
8, for the use of dialogue among the Carolingians. Important insights into the dialogue form during the
twelfth century and after, and on which I seek to build the connection to scholastic disputation, are
provided by Peter von Moos, “Le dialogue latin au Moyen âge: L’exemple d’Evrard d’Ypres,” Annales
ESC , no. 4 (1989): 993–1028; von Moos, “Literatur- und bildungsgeschichtliche Aspekte der Dialogform
im lateinischen Mittelalter: Der Dialogus Ratii des Eberhard von Ypern zwischen theologischer dis-
putatio und Scholaren-Komödie,” in Günter Bernt, Fidel Rädle, and Gabriel Silagi, eds., Tradition und
Wertung: Festschrift für Franz Brunhölzl zum 65. Geburstag (Sigmaringen, 1989), 165–209; von Moos,
“Gespräch, Dialogform und Dialog nach älterer Theorie,” in Barbara Frank, Thomas Haye, and Doris
Tophinke, eds., Gattungen mittelalterlicher Schriftlichkeit (Tübingen, 1997), 235–260; E. C. Ronquist,
“Learning and Teaching in Twelfth-Century Dialogues,” Res publica litterarum 13 (1990): 239–256; and
Roger Friedlein, Der Dialog bei Ramon Llull: Literarische Gestaltung als apologetische Strategie (Tü-
bingen, 2004).
18 For a modest sampling of English-language works on this topic, see David Marsh, The Quattro-
cento Dialogue: Classical Tradition and Humanist Innovation (Cambridge, Mass., 1980); Jon R. Snyder,
Writing the Scene of Speaking: Theories of Dialogue in the Late Italian Renaissance (Stanford, Calif., 1989);
Virginia Cox, The Renaissance Dialogue: Literary Dialogue in Its Social and Political Contexts, Castiglione
to Galileo (Cambridge, 1992); Colette H. Winn, ed., The Dialogue in Early Modern France, 1547–1630:
Art and Argument (Washington, D.C., 1993); and Dorothea Heitsch and Jean-François Vallée, eds.,
Printed Voices: The Renaissance Culture of Dialogue (Toronto, 2004). More pointedly, see David Marsh,
“Dialogue and Discussion in the Renaissance,” in Glyn P. Norton, ed., The Cambridge History of Literary
Criticism, vol. 3: The Renaissance (Cambridge, 1999), 265–270, here 265, who says that “the Humanist
dialogue arose in Italy around 1400 . . . [and] reflects the new philosophical freedom and eclecticism
which were fostered by the rise of mercantile communes and by the weakening of papal authority through
schism”; Stephen A. Tyler, “Ode to Dialog on the Occasion of the Un-for-seen,” in Tullio Maranhão,
ed., The Interpretation of Dialogue (Chicago, 1990), 292–300, here 293, who describes the dialogue as
“a literary genre emerging out of the Renaissance reinvention of the mood of the classical discourses
of Plato”; and Christopher S. Celenza, The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin’s
Legacy (Baltimore, 2004), 87, 100, who says that “many humanists participated in this culture of the
disputatio” and that “the verbally centered culture of the disputation was intimately allied to the progress
of Humanism.” No mention is made in any of these works of the medieval tradition of dialogue or of
scholastic disputation.

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THE TURN OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY has long been identified with new beginnings in
the intellectual and cultural landscape of Europe.19 The growth of cities and centers
of learning, the migration of students into France, a renewed interest in dialectic,
and the recovery of ancient law texts are all familiar components of what is commonly
referred to as the “twelfth-century renaissance.”20 The Italian-born monk Anselm
of Bec (1033–1109) occupies a central place on this new horizon of learning. Best
known for his ontological proof of the existence of God, Anselm experimented early
in his career with a more pedagogically engaging method of instruction at his mon-
astery in Normandy (Bec). It was his pioneering use of dialogue and disputation in
the company of his students that initiated the emergence of a culture of disputation.21
Anselm’s first substantial work, the Monologion (ca. 1077), reflects a close reading
of Augustine’s De trinitate.22 Anselm described his work as a meditatio on the divine
being, but by “meditation” he specifically meant the inner dialogue and deliberation
that was characteristic of Augustine’s spirituality. Some of Anselm’s brothers per-
sisted in asking him to give them an example of meditation, “by writing down some
thoughts on the divine essence and other related matters, which I have communi-
cated to them in my regular discussions [colloquia].” The discussions must have been
fairly open engagements, for it was the leading questions that drew out of Anselm
a new approach to teaching and learning. “They asked that whatever conclusion was
reached in the course of each investigation should be expressed in plain language
with intelligible arguments and simple disputation [simplicique disputatione], so that
the necessary conclusions and clear truth of the matter would be clearly expressed.”23
These opening words in the prologue to the Monologion point to what would quickly
become a recurring feature of Anselm’s method of inquiry: dialogue and disputation.
19 For recent assessments, see Thomas F. X. Noble and John Van Engen, eds., European Trans-
formations: The Long Twelfth Century (Notre Dame, Ind., 2012).

20 The phrase “renaissance of the twelfth century” owes its popular success, but not its initial con-
ception, to Charles Homer Haskins’s 1927 book of the same title. For the pre-Haskins origins of the
term and the development of the concept, see Alex J. Novikoff, “The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century
before Haskins,” Haskins Society Journal 16 (2005): 104 –116. On developments since Haskins’s influ-
ential book, see Marcia L. Colish, “Haskins’ Renaissance Seventy Years Later: Beyond Anti-Burck-
hardtianism,” Haskins Society Journal 11 (2003): 1–15. The applicability of the term has long been ques-
tioned. For a recent critique, see C. Stephen Jaeger, “Pessimism in the Twelfth-Century ‘Renaissance,’ ”
Speculum 78, no. 4 (October 2003): 1151–1183.
21 I explore this element of the culture of disputation in detail in Alex J. Novikoff, “Anselm, Di-
alogue, and the Rise of Scholastic Disputation,” Speculum 86, no. 2 (2011): 387– 418. The paragraphs
that follow recapitulate those arguments in order to set up the later cultural history of disputation that
constitutes the focus of this article. For insights into other elements of monastic learning in the age of
Anselm, see Sally N. Vaughn and Jay Rubenstein, eds., Teaching and Learning in Northern Europe,
1000–1200 (Turnhout, 2006); and most recently, Steven Vanderputten, ed., Understanding Monastic
Practices of Oral Communication: Western Europe, Tenth–Thirteenth Centuries (Turnhout, 2011). The
locus classicus for a sweeping historical assessment of Anselm remains R. W. Southern, Saint Anselm:
A Portrait in a Landscape (Cambridge, 1990). A diverse appraisal of Anselm’s significance for the modern
world is offered in Coloman Viola and Frederick Van Fleteren, eds., Saint Anselm, a Thinker for Yesterday
and Today: Anselm’s Thought Viewed by Our Contemporaries (Lewiston, N.Y., 2002). Still very useful
because of the range of historical themes touched upon are the proceedings from the 1982 Anselm
conference held at Bec: Raymonde Foreville, ed., Les mutations socio-culturelles au tournant des XIe–XIIe
siècles (Paris, 1984).
22 The various stages that Anselm went through to “publish” his works have been addressed in a
meticulous study by Richard Sharpe, “Anselm as Author: Publishing in the Late Eleventh Century,”
Journal of Medieval Latin 19 (2009): 1–87.
23 Anselm of Canterbury, Monologion, in S. Anselmi opera omnia, ed. Franciscus Salesius Schmitt,
6 vols. (Rome, 1938–1961), 1: 7. All translations are my own unless otherwise stated.

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This path to knowledge, along with an unprecedented commitment to demonstrating

Christian truth by reason alone (sola ratione), was the critical element in his ped-
agogical innovations at his school at Bec.24 He later explained his simultaneous re-
liance upon, and departure from, Augustine along similar lines in a letter to his
mentor Lanfranc: “it was my intention throughout the whole of this disputation [dis-
putationem] to assert nothing that could not be immediately defended either from
canonical writers or from the words of St. Augustine.”25 Even a work cast in the form
of a meditation was, for Anselm as it was for Augustine, a dialogue with oneself. All
reflections on the matter of the divine being, even if originally stimulated by a reading
of Augustine, were the result of an inner dialogue. In much the same way that he
was committed to proving Christian doctrine sola ratione, without recourse to scrip-
ture, Anselm was venturing to demonstrate most of his propositions by means of
inner disputation alone.
Anselm’s method of teaching, as far as it can be reconstructed from his writings
and those who knew him, was to hold a Socratic form of debate with the monks, in
which the participants argued out the issues. Clues to his pedagogy come from his
theological and philosophical works that are cast in the form of a dialogue between
master and pupil.26 To be sure, the dialogue genre extends back to antiquity, and it
was effectively used by Lanfranc and others, but over his career, Anselm went on
to write more dialogues than any other Latin Christian author since Augustine.27 No
fewer than seven of his works take the literary form of a dialogue, and there are
several others that are attributed to him but are of dubious authenticity. De gram-
matico is likely the earliest of these dialogues and concerns not grammar in the sense
that the title implies, but paronymy (the semantics involved when the same noun
signifies more than one thing) and the section in Aristotle’s Categories that deals with
substance.28 Like his later works, De grammatico is not overtly confrontational. The
discussion about Aristotle’s syllogisms comes to a close when the teacher in the
dialogue applauds the student’s progress but warns him against the power wielded
24 The novelty of Anselm’s reliance on reason as an aid to faith has been much commented upon by
historians, theologians, and philosophers alike. For a fresh assessment, see Marilyn McCord Adams, “Anselm
on Faith and Reason,” in Brian Davies and Brian Leftow, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Anselm (Cam-
bridge, 2004), 32–60. See also Eileen C. Sweeney, “Rewriting the Narrative of Scripture: 12th-Century De-
bates over Reason and Theological Form,” Medieval Philosophy and Theology 3 (1993): 1–34.
25 Anselm, Epistola 77, in Opera omnia, 3: 199–200.
26 This point has been observed before, but never truly explored. See the remarks by Richard Campbell,
“The Systematic Character of Anselm’s Thought,” in Foreville, Les mutations socio-culturelles au tournant
des XI e–XII e siècles, 549–560, here 553–554: “What I find striking about Anselm’s arguments, whether in
the more philosophical works or in the more theological, is the way they always proceed within the context
of what someone says . . . In the dialogue form adopted in many of the later works all of the statements are,
of course, owned by one or [an]other of the participants . . . Anselm is not indulging in idle speculation or
intellectual games; he will only consider propositions which are ‘owned’ by one speaker.”
27 The foundational study of the dialogue genre is Rudolf Hirzel, Der Dialog: Ein literarhistorischer Ver-
such, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1895). A recent compendium of medieval Latin dialogues has highlighted the genre’s
popularity for later centuries, but curiously ignores its resurgence in the twelfth century: Carmen Cardelle
de Hartmann, Lateinische Dialoge, 1200–1400: Literaturhistorische Studie und Repertorium (Leiden, 2007).
See also the studies of individual authors in Klaus Jacobi, ed., Gespräche lesen: Philosophische Dialoge im
Mittelalter (Tübingen, 1999), with an essay devoted to Anselm by Eileen Sweeney, 101–124.
28 The authoritative commentary on this early work is Desmond Paul Henry, Commentary on “De
grammatico”: The Historical-Logical Dimensions of a Dialogue of St. Anselm’s (Dordrecht, 1974). The
dating of this dialogue is a matter of some conjecture. The dates proposed are as early as 1060–1063
(after R. W. Southern, which I prefer) and as late as 1080–1085. See the discussion by Sharpe, “Anselm
as Author,” 22, who favors a dating of around 1080 “or a little later.”

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FIGURE 2: Anselm in conversation with fellow monks, giving them books. Upper half: Anselm, as archbishop
of Canterbury 1093–1109, presenting books to Countess Matilda of Tuscany. Twelfth century. Oxford, Bodleian
Library, MS Auct. D.2.6, fol. 185v. Used by permission.
by other dialecticians. Even if the aspiring student should be outdone by weightier

arguments, “you would not deny that at least our disputing [disputandi nobis] has
benefited us in the practice of argumentation.”29 The very framing of the work in-
dicates that Anselm’s dialogues, in their form as well as their content, served as a
window onto the current issues that engaged him in discussions with his students.
The effects of this learning on the intellectual atmosphere at Bec so impressed the
ecclesiastical historian Orderic Vitalis that he described with amazement Anselm’s
ability to produce a climate of learning in which the monks were “so eager to solve
theological problems and compose edifying treatises, that almost all of them seem
to be philosophers.”30 Both Orderic and Anselm’s biographer Eadmer stressed the
diversity of the students, clerics, and laymen who came to sit at the feet of the re-
nowned teacher.31 Thus the dialogical procedure that characterizes Anselm’s school
not only reflects the pedagogical activities that took shape at Bec, it is what attracted
them there in the first place.
In the corpus of his writings, Anselm uses the verb disputare and its accompanying
noun forms on more than forty separate occasions.32 While the meaning of this term
29 Anselm, De grammatico, in Opera omnia, 1: 168.
30 Orderic Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, 6 vols., ed. and trans. Marjorie Chib-
nall (Oxford, 1969–1980), 2: 297.
31 Ibid., 2: 294 –295; Eadmer, The Life of St. Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury (Vita Anselmi ), ed.
R. W. Southern (Oxford, 1962), xxii, 39– 40.

32 For these figures I rely on A Concordance to the Works of Anselm, 4 vols., ed. G. R. Evans (Mill-
wood, N.Y., 1984), s.v. “disputabo” to “disputet.”

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might vary from a simple “discussion” or “conversation” to a more intense “dispute”

or “debate,” there is a clear parallel between the form of his writings and the vo-
cabulary he employs. From his earliest meditation to his last letters, with several real
debates in between, he consistently refers to his rational investigations and dialec-
tical argumentation in terms of a disputatio, and his dialogues bear the imprint of
this approach.
From the circle of Anselm and his students, the dialogue rapidly emerged as a
literary, pedagogical, and indeed polemical genre of choice for authors of the twelfth
century. Fewer than ten dialogues can be counted in the century prior to Anselm’s
writings at Bec (the 1060s), but more than eighty exist from his time to the close of
the twelfth century. The authors of these dialogues and disputations are among the
most important writers and thinkers of the twelfth century: Odo of Tournai, Rupert
of Deutz, Hugh of St. Victor, Anselm of Havelberg, Aelred of Rievaulx, Adelard of
Bath, Peter Alfonsi, Peter Abelard, Walter of Châtillon, Andreas Capellanus, and
many others, including several anonymous authors and known students of Anselm.
The sheer quantity of dialogues written in the generations following Anselm and his
circle reflects the success of new methods of writing and argumentation—the scho-
lastic method, so called because of its association with the schools of the late eleventh
and the twelfth century.33 In one sense these figures are hardly surprising, since
alongside the resurgence in dialogues there can, and should, be placed a concomitant
growth in a number of other literary enterprises, such as the writing of letters, poetry,
commentaries and glosses, sentences, and even history.34 Yet in contrast to these
other genres, whose purposes and audience are often more explicit or apparent,
there is no immediate explanation for the sudden popularity of the dialogue form
in the last quarter of the eleventh century and throughout the twelfth.35 No ars dialogi
as such existed in the Middle Ages comparable to the ars dictaminis or the ars po-
etica.36 Most of Plato’s dialogues remained untranslated until the fifteenth century.
33 The foundational study of the scholastic method is Martin Grabmann, Die Geschichte der Scho-
lastischen Methode: Nach den gedruckten und ungedruckten Quellen dargestellt, 2 vols. (Freiburg im
Breisgau, 1909–1911), who adopts the broadest possible scope and examines authors from late antiquity
until the beginning of the thirteenth century. Important themes related to scholastic thought are dis-
cussed in the various essays in Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg, eds., The Cam-
bridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Disintegration of
Scholasticism, 1100–1600 (Cambridge, 1982). Many philosophical and theological elements of early
scholasticism are explored in an excellent recent collection of essays by leading scholars in the field: Irène
Rosier-Catach, ed., Arts du langage et théologie aux confins des XI e–XII e siècles: Textes, maı̂tres, débats
(Turnhout, 2011).
34 Brian Stock, in discussing the cosmological interests of twelfth-century authors, writes that “a
great many literary forms from the classical and, in particular, the late Latin world were revived for the
purpose: the dialogue, the satura (or prosimetrum), the encyclopedia, the commentary, and, more rarely,
the epic and the myth itself. The forms were utilized in ways that often emphasized their distance from
antiquity and their relation to literary fashions in their own day.” Stock, Myth and Science in the Twelfth
Century: A Study of Bernard Silvester (Princeton, N.J., 1972), 30.
35 Cf. Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century, 128: “one of the most striking examples
of the influence of rhetoric on the forms of religious literature in the eleventh and twelfth centuries was
the popularity of debates, dialogues, and disputes, or, as they were sometimes called, the altercatio or
conflictus.”
36 But see von Moos, “Literatur- und bildungsgeschichtliche Aspekte der Dialogform im lateinis-
chen Mittelalter,” who says that “a new culture of problematizing dialogue” tended to replace the com-
mentary in the late twelfth century (199). In his investigation of Everard of Ypres (“Le dialogue latin
au Moyen âge”), von Moos takes up the question of the ars dialogica, but it still stands that there was
no formalized manner for writing dialogues. Ronquist, “Learning and Teaching in Twelfth-Century

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What did develop and was eventually formalized in the schools of the twelfth century
was the practice, and later theory, of disputation.37 In the generation following An-
selm, the medieval disputatio would be taken up in Italy and northern France and
become central to the new scholastic milieu.
IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE twelfth century, theologians, scientists, and lawyers all
turned to the dialogue for effective instruction. While certain patterns in the form
and function of the dialogue genre remained, new developments in the practice of
debate also emerged.
The theological nature of the dialogues of Anselm and his followers can readily
be seen in the spiritual dialogues of Aelred of Rievaulx or the instructional dialogue
of Conrad of Hirsau (ca. 1070–ca. 1150). In Conrad’s Dialogus super auctores, a
teacher instructs an inquisitive pupil on how to approach and understand the works
of twenty-one classical authors, among them Prudentius, Horace, Ovid, Homer, and
Virgil.38 This student-teacher dialogue (an early contribution to the scholastic ac-
cessus ad auctores genre) echoes in its opening paragraph the didactic program en-
countered in Anselm’s dialogues, only here it is the student who opens the con-
versation, saying that the discourse must be carefully controlled; in this way, “the
teacher is better able to exercise his goodwill, while . . . the slower partner, that is
the learner, who is in dire need, is helped.”39
The inquisitive student in search of answers can also be found in the dialogues
of Adelard of Bath, whose De eodem et diverso and Questiones naturales offer detailed
descriptions of the science and philosophy that he acquired on his travels to eastern
lands.40 In both of these works, Adelard presents himself in conversation with his
nephew-pupil, whose criticism of and curiosity about his uncle’s travels form the
Dialogues,” 242, 245, stresses the equality of interlocutors and their “spirit of tolerance and open in-
quiry.” The medieval dialogue is the subject of increasing attention, notably by scholars in France and
Germany. A conference in Paris in June 2010, inspired by the work of Peter von Moos, was devoted to
the topic of the dialogue form in the exempla literature of the Middle Ages. I am grateful to Jean-Claude
Schmitt for sharing with me his contribution to the conference proceedings ahead of publication.
37 For general remarks about the history of disputation, see Brian Lawn, The Rise and Decline of
the Scholastic “Quaestio Disputata”: With Special Emphasis on Its Use in the Teaching of Medicine and
Science (Leiden, 1993), chaps. 1–3. See also P. Delhaye, “L’organisation scolaire au XIIe siècle,” Traditio
5 (1947): 211–268; and the concise overview of the origins of disputation by Anthony Kenny in Kretz-
mann, Kenny, and Pinborg, The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, 24 –29. See also R. N.
Swanson, The Twelfth-Century Renaissance (Manchester, 1999), 35: “The quaestio was a format mainly
for the masters; students had their own oral academic exercises. In the twelfth century (but perhaps
emerging from older roots) the disputation became their characteristic academic exercise.”
38 For an extended discussion of this work, see Leslie G. Whitbread, “Conrad of Hirsau as Literary
Critic,” Speculum 47, no. 2 (1972): 234 –245.

39 The Latin text is published in R. B. C. Huygens, ed., Accessus ad auctores: Bernard d’Utrecht;
Conrad d’Hirsau—Dialogus super auctores (Leiden, 1970). Extracts are translated in “Dialogue on the
Authors,” in A. J. Minnis and A. B. Scott, eds., Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, c. 1100–c. 1375:
The Commentary-Tradition, rev. ed. (Oxford, 1988), 39–64, here 39.
40 An edition and translation of both these works and a third, De avibus tractatus (also in dialogue
form), has been made available in Charles Burnett, ed., Adelard of Bath, Conversations with His Nephew:
“On the Same and the Different,” “Questions on Natural Science,” and “On Birds” (Cambridge, 1998).
Winthrop Wetherbee describes Adelard as anticipating in important ways the Platonism of the school
of Chartres; Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century: The Literary Influence of the School
of Chartres (Princeton, N.J., 1972), 20–22.

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pretext for the discussions. Adelard refers to the discussion in Questiones naturales
as a “disputatio” and ends De eodem et diverso by asking his nephew to “judge for
yourself whether I have disputed rightly (utrum recte disputaverim).”41 The tone of
these works does not rise beyond that of a friendly and affectionate conversation,
but Adelard’s dialogical approach is consistent with a new generation of dialecti-
cians. He begins Questiones naturales by reminding his nephew that seven years ear-
lier, he sent him and other students to study in French schools (in Gallicis studiis)
at Laon, a major center of learning in the early twelfth century.42 The dialogue form
that Adelard cultivated very likely reflected the dialectical procedures of such
“French schools,” just as his emphasis on reason (ratio) surely reflected the new
currents in early-twelfth-century thought.43
A transitional figure in the emergence of disputation out of dialogue is the Bene-
dictine abbot Rupert of Deutz (ca. 1075–1129), the twelfth century’s most prolific
author and a staunch defender of traditional monasticism.44 In his effort to con-
trovert what he saw as the intrusion of dialectic into the sphere of theological study,
Rupert engaged in public disputes at Liège, Laon, and Châlons-sur-Marnes.45 The
topics of debate differed from one disputation to the next, but Rupert did not shrink
from opportunities to face off with his adversaries, who dismissed him on account
of his ignorance of dialectics. He proudly recounted his combative position several
years later in his apologetically written commentary on the Benedictine rule (ca.
1125). He went to France, he says, in order to engage in a mighty battle of disputation
(praelium disputationis) with those famous masters whose authority was always held
over and against him.46 Portraying himself as seated on a paltry ass, with only a
servant boy to accompany him, Rupert combines the imagery of a lone protector of
the faith with the vocabulary of feudal combat as he describes his expedition to join
battle (ad conflictum) in distant cities in France, where a large band of masters and
students met him in order to hear his arguments and defeat them. Rupert’s use of
such colorful imagery is more than just rhetorical flourish. Peter Abelard employed
much the same language in his own autobiographical apology: “I preferred the weap-
ons of dialectic to all the other teachings of philosophy, and armed with these I chose
the conflicts of disputation [conflictus pretuli disputationem] instead of the trophies
41Burnett, Adelard of Bath, 91, 73.
42The existence and importance of the school of Laon has been a topic of considerable debate
among scholars. Most recently, see the study by Cédric Giraud, Per verba magistri: Anselme de Laon et
son école au XII e siècle (Turnhout, 2010); and supplemented by Giraud, “L’école de Laon entre arts du
langage et théologie,” in Rosier-Catach, Arts du langage et théologie aux confins des XI e–XII e siècles,
351–371. On the study of dialectic and its connection to twelfth-century theology, see Joseph de Ghel-
linck, Le mouvement theologique du XII e siècle (Brussels, 1948); Marie-Dominique Chenu, La théologie
au douzième siècle (Paris, 1957); and more recently Toivo J. Holopainen, Dialectic and Theology in the
Eleventh Century (Leiden, 1996).
43 Cf. Andreas Speer, “Ratione duce: Die naturphilosophischen Dialoge des Adelard von Bath und
des Wilhelm von Conches,” in Jacobi, Gespräche Lesen, 199–230.

44 See Maria Lodovica Arduini, Rupert von Deutz (1076–1129) und der “status Christianitatis” seiner
Zeit: Symbolisch-prophetische Deutung der Geschichte (Stuttgart, 1985).

45 Cf. John Van Engen, Rupert of Deutz (Berkeley, Calif., 1983), 200–215.
46 Rupert of Deutz, Super quaedam capitula regulae divi benedicti abbatis, in J.-P. Migne, ed., Pa-
trologiae cursus completus: Series latina, 221 vols. (Paris, 1844 –1864) [hereafter PL], 170: cols. 482– 483.
See the eloquent reconstruction of this episode in Van Engen, Rupert of Deutz, 211–212. This passage
has recently been examined in a slightly different twelfth-century context: Ian P. Wei, “From Twelfth-
Century Schools to Thirteenth-Century Universities: The Disappearance of Biographical and Autobi-
ographical Representations of Scholars,” Speculum 86, no. 1 (2011): 42–78, here 51–53.

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of war.”47 Abelard, of course, actually did come from a knightly background, and in
Paris he strove to use the tools of logic and the methods of dialectic in precisely the
manner to which Rupert objected, throughout his works defending the virtues of
questioning and the value of disputation.48 A comparable description of disputation
is given, but with a different purpose, by Herman of Cologne (d. 1181), the Rhineland
Jew turned Premonstratensian canon whose Opusculum de conversione sua is a rare
(and still controversial) specimen of a medieval autobiographical conversion nar-
rative.49 In the second chapter of the Opusculum, Herman states that it was the
intense conversations that he heard among clerics that compelled him to inquire into
the sacraments of the Church. Listening in on these conversations led him to chal-
lenge the leading cleric of the day, Rupert of Deutz, to a public disputation (ad
disputationis invito conflictum).50 It would ultimately take the prayers of two pious
women to bring about Herman’s conversion, but disputation remained a theme of
his progression toward Christianity until finally he took on the role of disputing his
former coreligionists, but as a representative of Christianity. Thus, within a fifteen-
year period (1120–1135), three separate accounts describe the conflicts of dispu-
tation (two of them involving Rupert) and the centrality that public dispute had come
to assume in intellectual life. It is not that these texts are necessarily interrelated or
that one author was echoing another; rather, these years represent a transitional
moment in the rise of disputation as a cultural practice. From an art historical per-
spective, increasingly frequent images of debate, and especially of Paul disputing
with Jews, are notable features in the development of twelfth-century iconography.51
A crucial parallel to the use of debate in theological circles is the renewed study
of Roman law, first in northern Italy and eventually in France as well. The systematic
study of canon law often centered upon the use of a question-and-answer format for
47 Peter Abelard, Historia calamitatum: Texte critique, avec une introduction, ed. J. Monfrin (Paris,
1959), 63–64. For a discussion of this passage, see Jacques Le Goff, “Quelle conscience l’université
médiévale a-t-elle eu d’elle-même?” in Paul Wilpert, ed., Beiträge zum Berufsbewusstsein des mittel-
alterlichen Menschen (Berlin, 1964), 16–19.
48 Abelard’s disputatious career is the stuff of legend, although this has somewhat clouded what his
contribution to the scholastic method actually was. I have here deliberately focused on other, equally
instructive examples from his generation, as my point about the rise of disputation is more about the
culture as a whole than about any single individual. For analysis of Abelard’s own anti-Jewish dialogue
in the context of the Jewish-Christian debate, see Alex J. Novikoff, “Reason and Natural Law in the
Disputational Writings of Peter Alfonsi, Peter Abelard, and Yehuda Halevi,” in Michael Frassetto, ed.,
Christian Attitudes toward the Jews in the Middle Ages: A Casebook (London, 2007), 109–136.
49 The historiographical debate over the “authenticity” of this account is fully reviewed in Jean-
Claude Schmitt, The Conversion of Herman the Jew: Autobiography, History, and Fiction in the Twelfth
Century, trans. Alex J. Novikoff (Philadelphia, 2010), esp. chap. 1, “Fiction and Truth.” Schmitt himself
adopts a somewhat nuanced position, suggesting that a real Jew named Herman may indeed lie behind
the account, but that the Opusculum as the text exists is the product of a community of Premonstratensian
canons whose main ambition was to augment the new order’s prestige by embellishing a foundation
legend.
50 Hermannus quondam Judaeus: Opusculum de conversione sua, ed. Gerlinde Niemeyer (Weimar,
1963), 76. A slightly different translation from mine is given in Karl F. Morrison, Conversion and Text:
The Cases of Augustine of Hippo, Herman-Judah, and Constantine Tsatsos (Charlottesville, Va., 1992),
81.
51 The iconography of debate in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries merits greater attention, par-
ticularly within the larger culture of disputation that this article seeks to describe. I am grateful to Colum
Hourihane, director of the Index of Christian Art at Princeton University, for sharing his expertise with
me on images of Paul disputing with Jews. See also my discussion of Jewish-Christian disputations below.

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FIGURE 3: Paul disputing with Jews (bearded in the foreground) and Gentiles. One of the figures in front holds
an inscription, revincebat Iudaeos, in reference to the passage from the Latin Vulgate (Acts 18:28): “For he
vigorously refuted the Jews in public debate.” An inscription with the words disputabat cum Graecis is issuing
from Paul’s left hand. Enamel plate, ca. 1170. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Erich Lessing / Art
Resource, N.Y.
legal disputes and the harmonizing of conflicting interpretations.52 In time, the

quaestiones disputatae of the glossators (or commentators) of the law would become
an established genre within the legal literature.53 There is much that remains hazy
in this early history of medieval law, but it is also clear that the recovery of the juristic
learning embodied in Justinian’s Digest came as an especially powerful, “almost
intoxicating” revelation to Western scholars in the late eleventh century.54 Much as
the recovery of Aristotle’s New Logic would ultimately transform medieval logic, the
intricacy and ingenuity of the legal reasoning in Justinian’s Digest attracted and
transformed the minds of those familiar with legal problems. From the significant
portions of the Digest that were made available, medieval jurists learned how to
frame sophisticated legal arguments, how to manipulate legal categories, how to
analyze problems, and how to find solutions to apparently contradictory opinions.55
52 Stephan Kuttner employed the very phraseology of the twelfth-century theologians, with a nod
to the development of Parisian polyphony as well, in the title of his now-famous essay on the topic,
Harmony from Dissonance: An Interpretation of Medieval Canon Law (Latrobe, Pa., 1960). Twenty-six
years later, Charles Donahue, Jr., lamented the meager advances that had been made in interpreting
the legal texts that survive: Why the History of Canon Law Is Not Written (London, 1986).
53 Like scholastic university disputations, scholarship on the legal uses of disputation has focused
heavily on the later periods. See, for example, Manlio Bellomo, ed., Die Kunst der Disputation: Probleme
der Rechtsauslegung und Rechtsanwendung im 13. und 14. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1997).
54 James A. Brundage, The Medieval Origins of the Legal Profession: Canonists, Civilians, and Courts
(Chicago, 2008), 77.

55 Ibid., 77–78. For a reconstruction of the gradual recovery of Justinian’s Digest, see Wolfgang P.

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A significant figure in promoting the new methods for reconciling conflicting texts
was Bishop Ivo of Chartres (d. 1115), whose treatise on legal interpretation and
whose collection of church law, the Panormia, were once hailed for having antici-
pated the methods of scholasticism, in part because he explicitly acknowledged the
problem of contradictory texts.56 Modern scholarship on Ivo has modified this por-
trait: his authorship of the Panormia is no longer certain, and his method of handling
contradictory texts is now being examined in a more theological and more local—less
judicial and less papal—context.57 Ivo is reported to have been a former student of
Lanfranc at the Norman abbey of Bec, and if the twelfth-century source for this
tradition is to be trusted, his application of dialectics to the legal tradition would owe
something to the same pioneering circle that included Anselm. Ivo’s continuators,
and especially the “Four Doctors” associated with Bologna, further developed the
method of probing contrasting opinions and “initiated a culture of juristic debate
that was to become an integral part of medieval learning.”58 From simple antinomies
in the sources to hypothetical cases, from real difficulties in interpreting a legal term
to the didactic device of formulating statements as questions, the quaestiones of the
glossators offer a broad example of the application of dialectic in the field of law.59
They were sometimes clad in the dress of a Socratic dialogue, like the dialogues of
Rogerius; sometimes presented as a more elementary question-and-answer cate-
chism; and sometimes made into the structural elements of a summa, like the fre-
quently copied Summa decretalium quaestionum by Honorius of Richmond (late 1100s).
The most famous canonical collection of the twelfth century, by an elusive master
known to us simply as Gratian (ca. 1140), displays the centrality of this approach in
the very title he gave his work: Concordia discordantium canonum (Harmony of Dis-
cordant Canons).60 The structural resemblance to Peter Abelard’s Sic et non, in which
seemingly conflicting statements of the church fathers are placed side by side, has
long intrigued scholars, even if the precise relationship between the two authors
remains uncertain.61 The presumption had initially been that theological argumen-
tation preceded legal argumentation, and that Gratian derived his knowledge of the
scholastic method from Abelard. In the early twentieth century, legal historians were
hard-pressed to place the influence in the direction from law to theology.62 The latest
Müller, “The Recovery of Justinian’s Digest in the Middle Ages,” Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law 20
(1990): 1–29.
56 Paul Fournier and Gabriel le Bras, Histoire des collections canoniques en Occident depuis les
Fausses décrétales jusqu’au Décret de Gratian, 2 vols. (Paris, 1931–1932), 2: 55–114, summarizing work
originally published between 1896 and 1898.
57 Building on the manuscript collations of Martin Brett, see Christof Rolker, Canon Law and the
Letters of Ivo of Chartres (Cambridge, 2010), with a discussion of Fournier’s thesis at 41– 49, and Ivo’s
education at 89–91.
58 Peter Landau, “The Development of Law,” in David Luscombe and Jonathan Riley-Smith, eds.,
The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 4: c.1025–c.1198, Part I (Cambridge, 2004), 113–147, here 125.
59 Stephan Kuttner, “The Revival of Jurisprudence,” in Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable, eds.,
Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 299–323, here 314.
60 A powerfully argued and technically convincing revisionist interpretation of this work that dem-
onstrates multiple stages of authorship is Anders Winroth, The Making of Gratian’s “Decretum” (Cam-
bridge, 2000).
61 As but one example, see D. E. Luscombe, The School of Peter Abelard: The Influence of Abelard’s
Thought in the Early Scholastic Period (Cambridge, 1969), chap. 9, “Abelard and the Decretum of Gra-
tian,” 214 –223.
62 See Hermann Kantorowicz’s pioneering article “The Quaestiones disputatae of the Glossators,”

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manuscript analysis once again argues the reverse, and theological texts other than
Abelard have been suggested as sources of Gratian’s method of argumentation.63
The causal influence may never be solved, nor need it be, for what is at issue is the
very spread of a culture of disputation that was not restricted to a single area of
inquiry but rather pervaded the ideas, texts, and culture of the entire period. As
Stephan Kuttner rightly cautioned, “It was a mistaken question, based on a search
for ‘influences’ where the reality was that of an intellectual climate which became
apparent at the same time but in different ways north, west, and south, wherever the
need for organizing knowledge in a comprehensive, rational manner was felt.”64 This
intellectual climate, an emerging culture of disputation, blossomed when a wave of
translations broke on the shore of twelfth-century Europe in the form of Aristotle’s
New Logic.
THE RISE OF SCHOLASTIC DISPUTATION out of dialogue within legal and theological
circles might have remained a minor byproduct of the new schools and scholars of
the twelfth century had it not been for the recovery of Aristotle’s Topics and So-
phistical Refutations, works that dealt directly with the dialectical process of forming
and refuting arguments.65 The translation and transmission of this “New Logic” in
the middle of the twelfth century had a profound impact on the direction that scho-
lastic disputation would take, lending authority and guidance to the practice most
characteristic of the medieval schoolmen.
An early witness to the importance of Aristotle for medieval disputation was
Adam of Balsham. His logical treatise Ars disserendi of about 1132 (perhaps best
translated as the Art of Discourse) survives incomplete and exists in two recensions,
the second one appearing with important changes under the title Dialectica Alex-
andri, probably out of association with Adam’s most illustrious follower in the second
half of the twelfth century, Alexander Neckham.66 Little is known about Adam’s life,
but over his career he circulated among the most prominent teachers and clerics in
Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis 16 (1939): 1–67, here 52: “Even in French theology which was, of
course, much more closely connected with Aristotle than with Italian jurisprudence, disputations did not
become a feature of the curriculum until well after the middle of the twelfth century, and it must there-
fore have been jurisprudence which influenced theology, Bologna which influences Paris, not vice versa.”
Cf. John W. Baldwin, The Scholastic Culture of the Middle Ages, 1000–1300 (Prospect Heights, Ill., 1971),
75: “Originating from the contentious nature of legal science, the disputation passed from the Roman
lawyers of Bologna to the canonists and the theologians.”
63 See the relevant conclusions reached by John Wei, “Gratian and the School of Laon,” Traditio
64 (2009): 279–322, here 320: “Gratian must have learned the scholastic method for reconciling con-
tradictory authorities from a contemporary theologian or contemporary theological work.” Cf. Landau,
“The Development of Law,” 122, discussing Ivo of Chartres: “As regards procedural law, his attitudes
towards the ordeal (judicium Dei ) betray an incipient rationalisation, doubtless under the influence of
early scholasticism.”
64 Kuttner, “The Revival of Jurisprudence,” 310.
65 Cf. Sten Ebbesen, “Ancient Scholastic Logic as a Source of Medieval Scholastic Logic,” in Kretz-
mann, Kenny, and Pinborg, The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, 101–127; and Ebbesen,
“The Way Fallacies Were Treated in Scholastic Logic,” Cahiers de l’Institut du Moyen-âge Grec et Latin
55 (1987): 107–134.
66 Ars disserendi has also been rendered as Art of Reasoning (for example, by Daniel D. McGarry
in The Metalogicon of John of Salisbury: A Twelfth-Century Defense of the Verbal and Logical Arts of the
Trivium, trans. McGarry [1955; repr., Berkeley, Calif., 1962]).

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Paris. A younger contemporary, John of Salisbury, met Adam probably between 1136
and 1138 in Paris and recorded his gratitude at having learned “a great deal from
his explanations,” although he also said of Adam’s writing that he got so involved
in verbal intricacies that his exposition was of very little use.67 Indeed, it is probably
the highly technical nature of the treatise that has caused it to be so often ignored
in modern scholarship, even though it represents, as its modern editor states, the first
time that “Aristotle’s Topics and Sophistici Elenchi were put into contribution [sic]
in an original treatise by a Latin writing author.”68
Adam thought that the language of the textbooks was antiquated and that the
present revival of dialectic would change the understanding and practice of debate.
With fresh translations of Aristotle in hand, and a considerable reliance on Boethian
logic as well, he undertook to produce a handbook containing all that was essential
for mastering logic. He mentioned the currency of disputes and the lack of any formal
rules governing their procedure as one of his reasons for writing the treatise: “There
was not yet the custom of disputing, for then there was only the beginning, not as
yet an art of disputing, for one ought to dispute before an art can be made of it.”69
Accordingly, his focus was on discourse in the form of questions and answers, for
he believed that it was from enuntio and interrogatio that the principles of discourse
were to be found. In underscoring the principles of debate, Adam illustrates the
nexus between contemporary scholastic discourse and Aristotelian argumentation.
John of Salisbury, writing a generation later, offers an even more conspicuous
example of Aristotle’s impact on the emerging practice of scholastic disputation. His
celebrated Metalogicon (1159), dedicated to Thomas Becket, is a defense of the ver-
bal and logical arts of the trivium against the charges of the pseudonymous Corni-
ficius and his fellow opponents of a liberal arts education. In particular, the Meta-
logicon reveals the growing divide among scholars over the nature of education, and
especially what role should be played by the newly translated texts of Aristotle.70
John wished that classroom disputation would rid itself of unnecessary verbiage and
return to the systematic logic it aimed to uphold.71 Logic, as he defined it, was the
science of argumentative reasoning.72 It was precisely on the subject of logic that he
saw scholastic disputation and Aristotle merging, the latter benefiting the former.73
John ranges widely in the Metalogicon. He addresses the question of genera and
species and the philosophical issue of universals, and he offers precious and insight-
ful commentary on the education and personalities of other masters of his day. Yet
67 Ioannis Saresberiensis Metalogicon, ed. J. B. Hall (Turnhout, 1991), II.10, IV.3.

68 Lorenzo Minio-Paluello, “The Ars Disserendi of Adam of Balsham,” Mediaeval and Renaissance
Studies 3 (1954): 116–169, here 116–117.
69 Lorenzo Minio-Paluello, ed., Twelfth Century Logic: Texts and Studies, 2 vols. (Rome, 1956, 1958),
1: 4: “Nondum igitur disserendi usus, nam adhuc tunc initium, nondum disserendi ars, prius enim desseri
opportuit quam de hoc ars fieret, prius enim de quo ars quam ipsa.”
70 Cf. K. S. B. Keats-Rohan, “John of Salisbury and Education in Twelfth-Century Paris from the
Account of His Metalogicon,” History of Universities 6 (1986–1987): 1– 46.

71 A similar plea was invoked later in the twelfth century by the satirist Walter of Châtillon, who
complained in one of his poems that “scholars have become idle and unfruitful; they learn only in order
to say ‘I have disputed.’ ” See Walter of Châtillon, Felix Erat Studium, in Moralisch-satirische Gedichte
Walters von Châtillon, ed. Karl Strecker (Heidelberg, 1929), no. 11, 113–115.
72 Ioannis Saresberiensis Metalogicon, ed. Hall, 56: “logica est ratio disserendi.” Note that disserendi
is the same word employed by Adam of Balsham.

73 Ioannis Saresberiensis Metalogicon, ed. Hall, II.18, 84; Metalogicon, trans. McGarry, 117.

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time and again he returns to Aristotle’s work, citing its relevance to contemporary
dialectic and especially the practical matter of disputation. Chapter 10 in Book III
of the Metalogicon is expressly devoted to the “usefulness” (utilitate) of Book VIII
of Aristotle’s Topics, which addresses the methods of verbal reasoning. Seizing on
the now-familiar metaphor of disputation as a form of verbal combat, John explains
how Aristotle can best prepare the young scholastic:
[Aristotle], the drill-master of those who profess to be logicians, has in the foregoing books,
as it were, provided the means of disputation [instrumenta disputandi], and stacked in the
arena arms for the use of his students. This he has done by explaining the meanings of un-
combined words and clarifying the nature of propositions and topics. His next step is to show
his disciples how they may use these instruments, and somehow to teach them the art of
engaging in [argumentative] combat.74
John’s explication of Aristotle was clearly meant to guide students (and perhaps
masters, too) in the art of disputation as well as in its proper application. Others of
his generation who were opposed to dialectic might well have found cause to disagree
with his assessment, but there is no mistaking its relevance for contemporary mas-
ters; the return of Aristotle was catalyzing the practice most characteristic of the
schools of his day, and the one most problematic for upholders of the monastic
attitude toward learning: disputation.
The recovery of Aristotle’s Topics in the mid-twelfth century marks a significant
moment in the formative development of scholastic disputation. While knowledge
of the later, and better-documented, university disputatio is necessary for a full ap-
preciation of this contribution, John of Salisbury himself makes note in the Meta-
logicon of the dramatic changes brought about by the Aristotelian impact. “If what
[Book VIII] teaches is both borne in mind and correctly observed,” he remarks, “it
contributes more to the science of argumentative reasoning than practically all the
works on dialectic that our modern predecessors were accustomed to teach in the
schools.”75 He then proceeds to examine point by point the ways in which Book VIII
of the Topics can, and should, serve as a textbook for scholars involved in dialectic
and the practice of disputation.76 This aspect of logic constitutes the centerpiece of
John’s defense of the trivium as a whole, and it is well worth noting that his focus
on the practical rules of disputation as outlined in Book VIII of Aristotle’s Topics
constitutes the second-lengthiest chapter in the entire Metalogicon.
What John of Salisbury needed to explain, defend, and correct, Peter the Chanter
of Notre Dame (d. 1197), writing a generation later, plainly assumed: “The training
of Holy Scripture consists of three exercises: reading (lectio), disputing (disputatio)
and preaching (predicatio).”77 As the choirmaster and second-ranking dignitary of
74Ioannis Saresberiensis Metalogicon, ed. Hall, III.10, 130; Metalogicon, trans. McGarry, 189.
75Ioannis Saresberiensis Metalogicon, ed. Hall, III.10, 130–131; Metalogicon, trans. McGarry, 190.
76 John, in the same chapter, defines dialectic as consisting “entirely in a discussion carried on
between questioner and answerer” (inter opponentem et respondentem).

77 Petrus Cantoris Parisiensis Verbum adbreviatum, ed. Monique Boutry (Turnhout, 2004), I.1, 9. A
short version of the Verbum is printed in PL 205: 1–554. For a discussion about the differences between
the short and long versions of the Verbum, see the introduction by Boutry. See also the review of Boutry’s
edition by John W. Baldwin, “An Edition of the Long Version of Peter the Chanter’s Verbum abbre-
viatum,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 57, no. 1 (2006): 78–85.

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the cathedral chapter of Notre Dame, Peter was at the center of a circle of scholars
with wide-ranging views on contemporary society, and so his inclusion of disputation
as one of the three cornerstone functions of a theologian is particularly revealing.78
Without any sense that an apology might be necessary, Peter places disputation
squarely within the duties of theological study. He likens the master of theology to
the architect of a building, with reading providing the basement, disputation the
structural walls, and preaching the roof.79 To avoid the dangers associated with use-
less questioning (inutilitate questionum), he urges his fellow theologians to fashion
their debates not into altercations (altercationes) but into more productive conver-
sations (collationes), which will yield a common inquiry after truth.80 Calm delib-
eration should be the order of the day, not theatrical debates.81 The pedagogical art
of disputation that had been anticipated by Adam of Balsham and defended by John
of Salisbury was now, for the first time, explicitly incorporated into the cultural prac-
tices of Parisian education.
Among the many issues during the twelfth century that would come to divide
monastic theologians from scholastic theologians was this very practice of disputa-
tion, a concept that was still loosely defined but was increasingly central in the day-
to-day activities of a liberal arts training. During the several generations from An-
selm to Peter the Chanter, there was an unmistakable evolution in the meaning and
use of disputatio, from the simpler spiritual conversation or investigation to the more
intense debate—debates about new questions, debates about old questions, indeed
debates about the very usefulness of debating. What is more, disputation and dia-
logue became a common currency for scholars and clerics in their struggle to define
what constituted theology and what constituted education. Over the course of the
twelfth century, the terms and methods of analysis gained greater meaning as well
as greater precision. As Henri de Lubac pointedly remarked about this intellectual
shift, “while monastic ‘lectio’ tended . . . toward meditation and prayer, scholastic
‘lectio’ tends towards the question and the disputation. It is directed toward a kind
of disputation which, although it is not absolutely new, monopolizes the meaning of
this word more and more. What we have here again is a fact of language that can
serve as an emblem of the evolution which is in progress.”82 This cultural evolution
took a decisive turn in the early thirteenth century with the institutionalization of
disputation as a central component of university education.
78 For a more recent and revisionist assessment of the Chanter’s contributions to logic and theology,
but with attention focused on a different text, see Luisa Valente, Phantasia contrarietatis: Contraddizioni
scritturali, discorso teologico e arti del linguaggio nel “De tropis loquendi” di Pietro Cantore (d. 1197)
(Florence, 1997). For the Chanter’s contribution to preaching, see Nicole Bériou, L’avènement des
maı̂tres de la Parole: La prédication à Paris au XIII e siècle, 2 vols. (Paris, 1998), 1: 30– 48.
79 The architectural analogy of foundation, walls, and roof was a common device, often employed
to describe the various senses of scripture. For a discussion of the examples of Hugh of St. Victor and
Peter Comestor, see Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 3rd ed. (Oxford, 1983),
87, 242.
80 Another theological work of Peter’s consists entirely of questiones: Summa de sacramentis et ani-
mae consiliis, ed. Jean-Albert Dugauquier (Louvain, 1954).

81 In part this reflects the more general twelfth-century transition of biblical exegesis from a synthesis
of patristic wisdom to a separation of different schools of interpretation.

82 Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, vol. 1: The Four Senses of Scripture, trans. Mark Sebanc (1959;
repr., Edinburgh, 1998), 52.

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FIGURE 4: Two Paris masters of the late twelfth century: Alain of Lille (d. 1202) in dialogue with Peter the
Chanter. Manuscript from the Abbey of Ottoburen (1228–1246). British Library, MS Cod. Addit. 19767. Used
by permission.

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THE ABSORPTION OF DISPUTATION within the curriculum of the medieval university

marked the formal integration of contrapuntal debate at the intellectual level while
also illustrating its turn toward a cultural practice. Having originated in scholastic
circles, university disputation has been a hallmark of the Western intellectual tra-
dition from the Middle Ages down to the modern viva voce dissertation defense.83
Among the earliest examples of disputations held for the benefit of bachelors and
students are the Quaestiones disputatae of Simon of Tournai, a master in Paris from
ca. 1165 to 1201 who in his youth had attended the classes (and disputations) on law
in Bologna.84 Dating from the last decade of the twelfth century, on the eve of the
formal recognition of the University of Paris, Simon’s Quaestiones consist of 102
disputations containing 371 individual questions dealing with a wide, but standard,
array of topics relating to Christian theology, including the Trinity, Christological
problems, original sin, the morality of human actions, virtues and vices, and the
sacraments.85 Details about the conduct of these disputations are generally few, but
some sense of the events can nevertheless be discerned.86 Master Simon, seated in
his chair (Symon sedet ), directed each discussion by introducing the question of the
day, supplying the necessary authorities (auctoritates), responding to objections, and
finally offering the solution. The number of questions to be disputed varied from one
day to the next, and sometimes Simon had to remind his audience that a certain topic
had already been discussed (alibi discussum est ). At other times he interrupted the
disputation to postpone further discussion until another day.87 His popularity as a
debater is confirmed by the testimony of the English chronicler Matthew Paris (d.
1259), who pauses in his wide-ranging Chronica majora to tell us that even the largest
lecture hall could scarcely contain the crowds of students who flocked to hear Simon.
For if Simon lectured well, Matthew writes, he disputed even better.88 Other figures
of note in the Paris of King Philip II Augustus (r. 1179–1223) confirm this reputation:
Henry of Brussels, Gerald of Wales, and Thomas of Cantimpré each remarked on
how many students Simon seemed to attract with his disputations, speaking scorn-
fully of his inordinate pride.89 Not since the days of Peter Abelard had the dispu-
tations of a lecturer in theology provoked such sentiments of admiration, contempt,
and even jealousy.
Scholars are in agreement that the University of Paris was not founded, but rather
grew.90 Many of the intellectual and even structural components of what would be-
83 For general remarks, see the learned study by William Clark, Academic Charisma and the Origins
of the Research University (Chicago, 2006), esp. chap. 3. See also Ku-ming (Kevin) Chang, “From Oral
Disputation to Written Text: The Transformation of the Dissertation in Early Modern Europe,” History
of Universities 19, no. 2 (2004): 129–187.
84 Joseph Warichez, Étienne de Tournai et son temps, 1128–1203 (Paris, 1937), 17–22.
85 Seven manuscripts of Simon’s Disputationes are preserved. The standard critical edition of these
texts is Joseph Warichez, ed., Les Disputationes de Simon de Tournai (Louvain, 1932). Subsequent notes
refer to the individual disputations and page numbers contained in this edition.
86 We learn, for example, that the audience consisted of not only students, but the entire teaching
personnel as well.
87 Warichez, Les Disputationes de Simon de Tournai, Disputatio LIX, 168; Disputatio LIII, 154; Dis-
putatio XXX, 92.

88 Cited ibid., xliii: “legit igitur subtiliter valde et subtilius disputavit.”
89 Cited in Charles J. Liebman, The Old French Psalter Commentary: Contribution to a Critical Study
of the Text Attributed to Simon of Tournai (Canandaigua, N.Y., 1982), 76–77.

90 Cf. Stephen C. Ferruolo, “The Paris Statutes of 1215 Reconsidered,” History of Universities 5
(1985): 1–14, here 1.

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come the university were already firmly in place by the end of the twelfth century,
including a lively controversy over the place of disputation in the lecture halls.91 The
statutes of 1215 that gave recognition to the corporation of masters and students
(universitas magistrorum et scholarium) also laid down teaching programs and pro-
cedures (including appropriate days and times for lecturing and disputing), regulated
academic custom at official gatherings and clothing and occasions for mourning,
confirmed the rules for examinations, set the minimum age for lecturing in the arts
at twenty-one and for lecturing in theology at thirty-five, and repeated that masters
should exercise jurisdiction over scholars.92 Over the next several centuries, the dis-
putatio flourished in its new institutional home and became an essential ingredient
in the basic organization of academic learning.93
The formalized practice of disputation in Paris took root in the faculty of arts as
well as in the faculties of advanced learning: theology, medicine, and canon law.94
Several different forms of university disputations developed in the period following
1215.95 The disputatio ordinaria was held at regular intervals, usually in the morning,
for the benefit of bachelors and students.96 It was presided over by a master, who
announced beforehand the question that would be asked. One bachelor, the oppo-
nens, supplied arguments against the thesis, while another, the respondens, attempted
to answer the objections that were raised and to demonstrate their weakness.97 The
master typically gave a summing-up or determinatio at the end, but not in all cases,
91 On the social context of the early history of the University of Paris, see Jacques Verger, “A propos
de la naissance de l’Université de Paris: Contexte social, enjeu politique, portée intellectuelle,” in Jo-
hannes Fried, ed., Schulen und Studium im sozialen Wandel des hohen und späten Mittelalters (Sigmar-
ingen, 1986), 69–96. Important discussions are also to be found in Hastings Rashdall, The Universities
of Europe in the Middle Ages, new ed., ed. F. M. Powicke and A. B. Emden, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1936), vol.
1; and Stephen C. Ferruolo, The Origins of the University: The Schools of Paris and Their Critics, 1100–1215
(Stanford, Calif., 1984).
92 Henricus Denifle and Aemilio Châtelain, eds., Chartularium Universitatis parisiensis, 4 vols. (Paris,
1889–1897), 1: 78–79.
93 An indispensable guide to the study of the medieval university is H. de Ridder-Symeons, ed.,
Universities in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1992), vol. 1 in the four-volume History of the University in
Europe, ed. Walter Rüegg, published under the auspices of the Standing Conference of Rectors, Pres-
idents, and Vice-Chancellors of the European Universities (CRE). An early and still very valuable guide
to the basic patterns of learning is Charles Thurot, De l’organisation de l’enseignement dans l’Université
de Paris au Moyen-âge (Paris, 1850). See also Olga Weijers, Terminologie des universités au XIII e siècle
(Rome, 1987), esp. pt. 3. Fresh perspectives on the subject can be found in John Van Engen, ed., Learning
Institutionalized: Teaching in the Medieval University (Notre Dame, Ind., 2000).
94 For the faculty of arts, see especially Weijers, La “Disputatio.” For the development of the dis-
putatio in the faculties of theology, medicine, and law, see Bazàn et al., Les questions disputées et les
questions quodlibétiques.
95 The basic structure and procedures of the university disputations are outlined in Bernardo C.
Bazàn, “Les questions disputées, principalement dans les facultés de theologie,” in Bazàn et al., Les
questions disputées et les questions quodlibétiques, 21– 49. Further information on the definition of the
genre can be found in the chapters by Wippel, Fransen, and Jacquart. At the Italian universities and
at Oxford and Cambridge, which began as offshoots of the University of Paris in the early thirteenth
century, the documentation concerning academic practices is plentiful only from about the middle of
the thirteenth century. See A. G. Little and F. Pelster, Oxford Theology and Theologians, c. A.D. 1282–
1302 (Oxford, 1934), 29–30.
96 This basic form of disputation is also variously called a disputatio solemnis or disputatio publica.
In addition to disputatio quodlibetalis, these quodlibets could also be called disputatio communis and
disputatio generalis.
97 For a technical discussion of the art, see Ignacio Angelelli, “The Techniques of Disputation in
the History of Logic,” Journal of Philosophy 67, no. 20 (1970): 800–815.

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and sometimes not at the time of the disputation, but rather at a later date.98 The
questions dealt with during any one disputation were usually all related to the same
problem or type of problem, and the exercise was public in the sense that it was open
to bachelors from different schools, in contrast to the disputatio privata, which the
presiding master held in his own school and only for his own pupils.99
A second kind of disputation, the disputatio de quolibet, soon gained currency in
the university.100 Once thought to owe its genesis to Thomas Aquinas, the quodlibet
made its appearance sometime in the second quarter of the thirteenth century.101 In
contrast to the ordinary disputation, which focused on specific topics announced
beforehand and which was held for the benefit of students and faculty only, questions
posed at these disputations were offered de quolibet (“about anything at all”) and
could cover any number of subjects, ranging across theology, metaphysics, canon law,
and medicine. In addition, the initiative for the subjects debated lay with the au-
dience, and the disputing master never knew beforehand what questions would be
asked. Less frequent than the private disputations, these quodlibetical disputations
generally took place in the Latin Quarter’s rue du Fouarre (vicus straminis), and only
during Advent and Lent. Most especially, they were open to the general public and
attracted a diverse, even “international,” audience.102 Masters and scholars from
other schools might attend. All kinds of ecclesiastics and prelates, and even civil
authorities, might have been present—indeed, all the “intellectuals” of the time who
were attracted by skirmishes of this kind, and all of whom had a desire to ask ques-
tions and oppose arguments.103 So great was the popularity of disputing that by the
later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, the art and practice of debate evolved
into newer forms, such as the disputationibus de sophismatibus and the ars obliga-
toria.104
It is the early history of quodlibetal disputations that is most interesting from a
cultural historical perspective. In addition to the fact that they quickly became a
staple of the university calendar and spread beyond the faculty of theology in Paris
where they began, there are other reasons why these ritualized spectacles should
have been so popular. It has rightly been observed that the public gatherings at
quodlibetical disputations recall the performance of drama, which was flourishing in
98 There is some uncertainty as to exactly how long after the disputation the determination took
place. Palémon Glorieux maintained that it occurred on the first reading day following the disputation.
See Glorieux, “L’enseignement au Moyen âge: Techniques et méthodes en usage à la Faculté de théolo-
gie de Paris au XIIIe siècle,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen âge 35 (1968): 65–186,
here 126. But see also Little and Pelster, Oxford Theology and Theologians, 229, who are less certain about
how soon after the disputation the determination might have been given. Bazàn, “Les espèces du genre,”
in Bazàn et al., Les questions disputées et les questions quodlibétiques, 61–62, has nothing further to
contribute toward a solution.
99 The disputatio privata is less well documented than the other types of university disputations. See
Bazàn, “Les espèces du genre,” 62.

100 The most comprehensive treatment of this literature, even if it was intended only as a “first ori-
entational study,” remains Palémon Glorieux, La littérature quodlibétique de 1260 à 1320, 2 vols. (Le
Saulchoir, Kain, 1925–1935).
101 The quodlibetical disputation (and its twentieth-century historiography) is explained in detail in
the chapters by John Wippel in Bazàn et al., Les questions disputées et les questions quodlibétiques, 153–
222.
102 Glorieux, La littérature quodlibétique de 1260 à 1320, 2: 10.
103 Lawn, The Rise and Decline of the Scholastic “Quaestio disputata,” 16.
104 These later forms of argumentation flourished especially in England. For context, see William J.
Courtenay’s important study Schools and Scholars in Fourteenth-Century England (Princeton, N.J., 1987).

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FIGURE 5: University masters engage in scholastic disputation over the Aristotelian definition of happiness.
Note the presence and participation of students. Mid-thirteenth-century Parisian copy of a commentary on
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics by Eustratius (ca. 1120), the Greek bishop of Nicea. National Library of Swe-
den, MS Va 3, fol. 205v. Used by permission. For further discussion, see Mia Åkestam and Erika Kihlman,
“Lire, comprendre et mémoriser l’Éthique à Nicomaque: Le rapport texte-image dans ms. Stockholm, Kungl.
Bibl., Va 3,” in Olle Ferm and Per Förnegård, eds., Regards sur la France du Moyen âge (Stockholm, 2009),
110–153.

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France in the thirteenth century, and which also tended to efface distinctions be-
tween actor and audience, spectacle and daily life, ritual and representation.105 The
theatricality and indeed the entertainment value of these university events would not
have been lost on a bustling Parisian audience that was witness to novelties in dra-
matic performance, innovations in polyphonic music, much of it emanating from the
school of Notre Dame, and the growing popularity of a new genre of debate poems
that featured human or anthropomorphic characters disputing on a multitude of
topics.106
THE PRACTICE OF DISPUTATION CAN be said to have entered the public sphere when
it transcended the academic circles where it first developed and reached audiences
who were not trained in the methods of schools and universities. The flowering of
polyphonic composition offers an especially intriguing cultural manifestation of
scholastic disputation because it emanates not only from the same time and place
(late-twelfth-century Paris), but from the same circle of scholars and teachers.107 As
the eminent musicologist Richard Taruskin has noted, “the burgeoning of poly-
phonic composition followed the exact same trajectory [as scholastic education] . . .
it reached its first great, transfiguring culmination in the cathedral schools of Paris,
and in a new form it radiated from the cosmopolitan center throughout Western
Christendom, receiving a special ancillary cultivation in the universities.”108 We
might go further. In cultural terms, polyphony is one of a group of tactics deployed
105 Jody Enders, “The Theater of Scholastic Erudition,” Comparative Drama 27, no. 3 (Fall 1993):
341–363, here 344. On the general importance of audience participation, see Henri Rey-Flaud, Pour une
dramaturgie du Moyen âge (Paris, 1980), 15–22.
106 On medieval drama, see Richard Axton, European Drama of the Early Middle Ages (London, 1974);
O. B. Hardison, Jr., Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages: Essays in the Origin and Early
History of Modern Drama (Baltimore, 1965), who located the origins of drama in sacramental rituals of
the Catholic Church; and Jody Enders, Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama (Ithaca, N.Y., 1992),
who examines the interplay between legal rhetoric and dramatic practice in a broad array of sources from
antiquity to the Renaissance and cites the university quodlibet as participating in what she calls the
“aestheticization of rhetoric” (164). More recently, Carol Symes, A Common Stage, has undertaken a
culturally oriented and methodologically sophisticated analysis of theatrical activity in northern France,
positing the existence of a public and political sphere in which theater served as a site for the exchange
of information and ideas and a medium for debate, deliberation, and dispute. For a discussion about
the development of vernacular debate poetry, see the introduction in the anthology by Michel-André
Bossy, ed., Medieval Debate Poetry: Vernacular Works (New York, 1987), xi–xxiv.
107 The cultural-historical dimensions of medieval music are a topic of current scholarly attention.
See, for example, Andrew Kirkman, The Cultural Life of the Early Polyphonic Mass: Medieval Context
to Modern Revival (Cambridge, 2010); and Olivier Cullin, ed., La place de la musique dans la culture
médiévale (Turnhout, 2007).
108 Richard Taruskin, Music from the Earliest Notation to the Sixteenth Century (Oxford, 2005), 149.
For a comprehensive study of the musical culture of Notre Dame within the context of the cathedral
and the city, see Craig Wright, Music and Ceremony at Notre Dame of Paris, 500–1550 (Cambridge, 1989),
esp. chaps. 7–8. For the more embellished forms of Notre Dame polyphony (tripla and quadrupla), see
Guillaume Gross, Chanter en polyphonie à Notre Dame de Paris aux 12e et 13e siècles (Turnhout, 2007).
An up-to-date overview of what is known about the school and composers of Notre Dame by a leading
authority in the field is Edward H. Roesner, “Notre Dame,” chap. 30 in The Cambridge History of Me-
dieval Music, forthcoming. See also Janet Knapp, “Polyphony at Notre Dame of Paris,” in Richard
Crocker and David Hiley, eds., The Early Middle Ages to 1300 (Oxford, 1990), 557–635. On the university
context for early polyphony, see Marion S. Gushee, “The Polyphonic Music of the Medieval Monastery,
Cathedral and University,” in James McKinnon, ed., Antiquity and the Middle Ages: From Ancient Greece
to the 15th Century (London, 1990), 143–169.

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to enhance the delivery of liturgical song, the song being an enhanced reading of a
ritual text, and hence it is an enhancement of the ritual act itself. Polyphony served
to bring to the fore the harmonia—the consonantia implicit in the song—and thus
to highlight the text that the song embellished. Since most polyphony from the
twelfth century onward entailed responsorial chants either directly or indirectly, it
threw into relief the relationship of the Mass (the gradual, the alleluia, etc.) with the
scripture on which the chant commented, hence emphasizing the overall harmonia
inherent in the body of scripture. Harmony, in simple terms, is counterpoint slowed
down; counterpoint, like disputatio, is a cultural expression of dialectic and rhetoric.
Broadly speaking, the principles that Abelard applied to theology and that Gratian
applied to law, polyphony applied to music.
Closely affiliated with the early history of the University of Paris is another mu-
sical innovation that is even more explicitly a dialogue of voices: the motet. Simply
defined as a piece of music in several parts with words (from the Old French, mot ),
it first appeared in connection with Parisian scholastic circles, and in particular with
the career of Philip the Chancellor of Notre Dame, head of the University of Paris
from 1218 until his death in 1236.109 Very early on, the capacity of the motet to carry
arguments pro and contra, to engage in dialectic and irony, began to be systematically
exploited and used in increasingly sophisticated ways, so that by 1300, the motet (like
the quodlibet) deployed these tactics in virtuoso fashion.110 Recently described as
the least-studied major figure of thirteenth-century thought, Philip the Chancellor
exemplifies the cultural fabric that braided music, poetry, and university adminis-
tration.111 His poem Beata viscera (“O Blessed womb”), in honor of the Virgin, was
set to music by one of the most celebrated composers of Parisian polyphony, Pero-
tin.112 Philip is also credited with two well-known debates that are found in several
manuscripts with their melodies: Disputatio membrorum is a debate between various
parts of the body, and the even better known Quisquis cordis et oculi is an altercatio
between heart and eye.113 Close examination of other elements of his monophonic
109 See especially Thomas B. Payne, “Aurelianis civitas: Student Unrest in Medieval France and a
Conductus by Philip the Chancellor,” Speculum 75, no. 3 (2000): 589–614; and Payne, “Philip the Chan-
cellor and the Conductus Prosula: ‘Motetish’ Works from the School of Notre Dame,” in Terence Bailey
and Alma Santosuosso, eds., Music in Medieval Europe: Studies in Honour of Bryan Gillingham (Al-
dershot, 2007), 220–238. A wealth of additional material can be found in Payne, “Poetry, Politics, and
Polyphony: Philip the Chancellor’s Contribution to the Music of the Notre Dame School,” 5 vols. (Ph.D.
diss., University of Chicago, 1991).
110 For a comprehensive overview of the motet, see E. H. Sanders, “The Medieval Motet,” in Wulf
Arlt, Ernst Lichtenhahn, and Hans W. Oesch, eds., Gattungen der Musik in Einzeldarstellungen: Gedenk-
schrift Leo Schrade, erst Folge (Berne, 1973), 497–573. For a more recent and succinct overview of the
motet literature, especially in comparison with other musical forms of the thirteenth century, see Mark
Everist, “The Thirteenth Century,” in Everist, ed., Cambridge Companion to Medieval Music (Cambridge,
2011), 67–86, esp. 77–85.
111 R. E. Houser, trans., The Cardinal Virtues: Aquinas, Albert, and Philip the Chancellor (Toronto,
2004), 42 n. 87. For Philip’s general influence on thirteenth-century thought, see Odon Lottin,
“L’influence littéraire du chancelier Philippe,” in Lottin, Psychologie et morale aux XII e et XIII e siècles,
6 vols. (Paris, 1942–1960), 6: 149–169.
112 The source for this information is the thirteenth-century musical treatise De mensuris et discantu,
written by an unnamed Englishman and known to posterity as Anonymous IV. The story of the misnomer
and of its contents is nicely summarized by Taruskin, Music from the Earliest Notation to the Sixteenth
Century, 173–174. See also Gushee, “The Polyphonic Music of the Medieval Monastery, Cathedral and
University,” 157–163.
113 John Stevens, “Medieval Song,” in Crocker and Hiley, The Early Middle Ages to 1300, 418. For
discussion of the manuscripts, see L21 and K52 in Gordon A. Anderson, “Notre-Dame and Related

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conductus repertoire reveals a composer who was highly attentive to vocabulary,

logic, and the preaching power of the word.114 In a newly published edition of Philip’s
motets, Thomas B. Payne has observed that the correspondence of at least three
attributable multi-texted polyphonic works operates explicitly as a debate, thus pre-
senting the listener with a situation analogous to a scholastic disputation, particularly
since the subject matter is the praise and criticism of the clergy.115 “Just as the two
poems in the motetus and triplum contend, each taking sides in a disputation on the
morality and corruption of the clergy, so do all the voices spar rhythmically.”116 Not
only are there simultaneous utterances on both sides of the debate, but in some
instances there is the additional offering of a judgment by a third party, thus imitating
the final determination that concludes a scholastic disputation.117 Philip the Chan-
cellor well illustrates the penetration of scholastic ideas into multiple cultural
spheres, and it is no minor coincidence that his innovations in song, poetry, and
polemic coincided with a remarkable output in debate poems (in vernacular lan-
guages as well as Latin) during the early thirteenth century.118
Debate poems and polyphonic music offer tantalizing possibilities for extra-uni-
versity manifestations of scholastic disputation. An even more illustrative example
of the practice or application of disputation in the thirteenth century is the Church’s
confrontation with Judaism and Jews, longtime targets of ecclesiastical polemic, and
often in works cast in the dialogue form.119 To be sure, there existed a long tradition
of polemics adversus Iudaeos (“against the Jews”) going back to the church fathers,
Conductus: A Catalogue Raisonné,” Miscellanea Musicologica 6 (1972): 153–229, 7 (1975): 1–81. See
as well the overview of Philip the Chancellor’s poetry by Peter Dronke, “The Lyrical Compositions of
Philip the Chancellor,” Studi medievali, ser. 3, 28 (1987): 563–592.
114 Anne-Zoé Rillon, “Convaincre et émouvoir: Les conduits monodiques de Philippe le Chancelier,
un médium pour la predication?” in Cullin, La place de la musique dans la culture médiévale, 99–113.
For further connections between scholastic life and music, see Jacques Verger, “La musique et le son
chez Vincent de Beauvais et les encyclopédistes du XIIIe siècle,” ibid., 71–85.
115 Ypocrite pseudopontifices / Velut stelle fimamenti / Et gaudebit; Anima iuge lacrima; and O quam
necessarium / Venditores labiorum / Domino [or Eius]. See Philip the Chancellor, Motets and Prosulas,
ed. Thomas B. Payne (Middleton, Wis., 2011). Philip at the time was at odds with the bishop of Paris,
William of Auvergne. Perotin sided with Philip and supplied the musical (and rhythmically oppositional)
elements for the double motet Ypocrite pseudopontifices.
116 Ibid., xxv.
117 According to Payne, ibid., xix, the motets “adopt opposite stances in each of the upper voices,
with the motetus dispensing an opinion on one side of the disputation, and the triplum taking the other.
In each of these cases the disagreement between the texts is borne out ingeniously by their musical
settings as double motets: each position is disclaimed simultaneously with the other, resulting in a verbal
discord that, ironically, is offset by the harmonious musical setting that combines them.”
118 Debate in one form or another was a staple of courtly and clerical entertainment even before the
thirteenth century. There are debates between Wine and Water and Winter and Summer, as well as many
love dialogues, including De Ganymede and Helena and, most popular of all, the Knight versus the Clerk,
a debate about who is the better lover. Beginning in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, there
are debate poems in many of the vernacular languages. In Provençal they are called joc-partit, partimen,
and tenso; in German, Wechsel; and in Old French, jeux-partis (or partures), in which some two hundred
survive, many of them with their music attached. For a discussion of Philip the Chancellor’s debate poems
in this larger context, see Michel-André Bossy, “Medieval Debates of Body and Soul,” Comparative
Literature 28, no. 2 (1976): 144 –163. On the use of dialectics among the Troubadours, see Michelle
Bolduc, “Troubadours in Debate: The Breviari d’Amor,” Romance Quarterly 57, no. 1 (2010): 63–76.
119 Music and anti-Judaism have traditionally been treated as entirely separate fields. An original and
wide-ranging examination of the Christian musical attack upon Jews, opposing harmonious musicality
to Jewish noise, is Ruth HaCohen, The Music Libel against the Jews (New Haven, Conn., 2011), who
discusses the medieval period in chap. 1.

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the development of which can be traced in the writings of medieval Christian au-
thors.120 A catalogue of these anti-Jewish polemics points to a typology in which an
older style that paid particular attention to interpretations of the biblical text, such
as Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho (second century) and Augustine’s Adversus
Judaeos (fifth century), was distinguished from newer forms of argumentation in the
twelfth century that were characterized by a focus on “reason” (ratio) and that tar-
geted the Talmud and post-biblical Jewish literature.121 A sustained body of schol-
arship since the 1980s has illuminated the complex conceptions that underpin the
medieval intellectual encounter with Jews and Judaism, what Jeremy Cohen fa-
mously dubbed “the hermeneutical Jew.”122 Absent from this important field of his-
torical analysis is an explanation of one of the most basic and fundamental features
of this encounter: the fact that it was a dialogue, both metaphorically and literally
a disputation.
While it may seem logical that Jewish-Christian encounters would have been
given a new thrust by the formalization of disputation in scholastic circles and uni-
versities, there is in fact a paradox: throughout the thirteenth century, the Church
was perpetually concerned with regulating interactions between Christians and Jews.
The introduction of the “Jewish Badge” at Lateran IV in 1215 is the most obvious
example of an attempt to maintain segregation between Christian and Jewish com-
munities, but many other edicts of Church councils and missives of the popes spe-
cifically sought to forbid religious disputations of the sort mentioned in the dialogues
of the twelfth century.123 Thus in an addendum to the synodical rules issued around
120 Cf. Jaroslav Pelikan, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600) (Chicago, 1971), 15:
“virtually every major Christian writer of the first five centuries either composed a treatise in opposition
to Judaism or made this issue the dominant theme in a treatise devoted to some other subject.” The
two best treatments of the medieval Christian intellectual engagement with Jews and Judaism are Gilbert
Dahan, Les intellectuels chrétiens et les juifs au Moyen âge (Paris, 1990); and Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters
of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley, Calif., 1999). See also the important studies
by Anna Sapir Abulafia, Christians and Jews in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance (London, 1995) and
Christians and Jews in Dispute: Disputational Literature and the Rise of Anti-Judaism in the West (c. 1000–
1150) (Aldershot, 1998).
121 Heinz Schreckenberg, Die christlichen Adversus-Judaeos-Texte (11.–13. Jh.) (Frankfurt, 1991). A
leading advocate in arguing for a connection between the rational developments of the twelfth-century
renaissance and the negative impact on the Jewish-Christian debate is Anna Sapir Abulafia (see fn. 120).
The foundational brick in this line of inquiry was laid by Amos Funkenstein, “Changes in the Patterns
of Christian Anti-Jewish Polemic in the Twelfth Century” (in Hebrew), Zion, n.s., 33 (1968): 125–144.
An abbreviated and slightly reoriented version of the essay subsequently appeared in English as “Basic
Types of Christian Anti-Jewish Polemics in the Later Middle Ages,” Viator 2 (1971): 373–382.
122 Cohen, Living Letters of the Law, 2–3 n. 3. Cf. the expression “theological Jew” as described by
Dahan, Les intellectuels chrétiens et les juifs au Moyen âge, 585. The importance of anti-Jewish sentiment
in medieval Europe has not always been recognized. A landmark survey of historical writings that neglect
the place and importance of Jews in medieval Western Europe is Gavin I. Langmuir, “Majority His-
torians and Post-Biblical Jews,” Journal of the History of Ideas 27 (1966): 343–364, reprinted in Langmuir,
Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (Berkeley, Calif., 1990), 21– 41. For a recent summary of the subject
and its historiography, see Alex J. Novikoff, “The Middle Ages,” in Albert S. Lindemann and Richard
S. Levy, eds., Antisemitism: A History (Oxford, 2010), 63–78. For the iconography of anti-Judaism in the
Middle Ages, see especially Heinz Schreckenberg, The Jews in Christian Art: An Illustrated History (New
York, 1996), esp. 222–235 for images of dialogue and debate; and Sara Lipton, Images of Intolerance:
The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible Moralisée (Berkeley, Calif., 1999), 3– 4, who wisely
cautions against direct causation between visual representations and contemporary events.
123 The “veracity” of these Jewish-Christian dialogues that purport to be based on actual encounters
has long exercised the minds of scholars interested in Jewish-Christian intellectual relations. In my
opinion, the emphasis is at least partially misplaced, for it is a common literary device, and separating
truth from fiction is highly problematic (cf. Schmitt, The Conversion of Herman the Jew, chap. 1). What

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FIGURE 6: Jews disputing with bishops at the feet of enthroned Ecclesia, who personifies the Church and the
Virgin Mary and possibly also Queen Blanche of Castile. The figure on the left points to a Torah scroll, while
the crowned female figure looks approvingly in the direction of the bishops. Miniature in the Bible moralisée,
Paris, ca. 1240. Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Lat. 11560, fol. 87v. Image from Paul Weber, Geistliches
Schauspiel und Kirchliche Kunst (Stuttgart, 1894), 113.
1200 by Odo of Sully, the archbishop of Paris (1197–1208), it is stated that “laymen
shall, under pain of excommunication, be forbidden ever to dare to dispute with Jews
about the articles of the Christian faith.”124 The Council of Treves in March 1227
repeated the injunction that “ignorant clergymen shall not dispute with Jews in the
presence of laity.”125 Rising to yet higher levels of authority, Pope Gregory IX in
March 1233 wrote to the archbishops and bishops and the other prelates of the
Church in Germany to prohibit them “most stringently” from “at any time dar[ing]
to dispute with Jews about their faith or their rites, lest under pretext of such dis-
is culturally interesting is the emphasis placed on giving the dialogue or disputation an air of realism,
for by the early thirteenth century this became a matter of ecclesiastical and royal concern, not merely
the personal preoccupation of a singular polemicist. For disputations involving merchants rather than
clerics, see Ora Limor, ed., Die Disputationen zu Ceuta (1179) und Mallorca (1286): Zwei antijüdische
Schriften aus dem mittelalterlichen Genua (Munich, 1994). For an iconoclastic interpretation of thir-
teenth-century disputations, see H. Kraus, “Christian-Jewish Disputation in a 13th Century Lancet at
the Cathedral of Troyes,” La gazette des beaux-arts 72 (1968): 151–158, who argues for a “cordiality of
relationship” and friendly intellectual discourse on the basis of the visual depiction of disputation. A
more judicious appraisal of the iconography of debate is offered in Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens,
Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (Princeton, N.J., 2003), 101–104.
124 Solomon Grayzel, ed., The Church and the Jews in the XIIIth Century: A Study of Their Relations
during the Years 1198–1254, Based on the Papal Letters and the Conciliar Decrees of the Period, rev. ed.,
2 vols. (New York, 1966), 1: 300–301.
125 The Church and the Jews 19 (March 1, 1227): 318–319.

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putation (sub pretextu disputationis) the simple-minded slide into a snare of error,
which God forbid.”126 The concern to regulate debates stemmed at least in part from
complaints about their outcomes. In the 1190s, the prolific man of letters Peter of
Blois warned that “as a result of illicit and careless debates, a virulent crop of heresies
runs wild.”127
Ecclesiastical decrees explicitly limiting both open and private exchanges be-
tween Christians and Jews represent one aspect of the papal monarchy’s consoli-
dation of power. The circumstances that led to the Paris disputation in 1240 rep-
resent another: the Church’s sanctioning of properly controlled public disputations.
Just as the Dominican Order’s preaching activities demonstrated the importance of
disputation as a weapon for combating heretics and non-believers, so too did the
Paris disputation, or the “Talmud trial,” as it is often termed, demonstrate the
Church’s attempt to manipulate disputation on an unprecedented scale.128
The immediate cause for the events of 1240–1242 was a series of condemnatory
bulls issued by Pope Gregory IX in 1239 ordering the rulers and prelates in Europe
to impound the Talmud and other Jewish writings on the first Sabbath during Lent
in 1240.129 Gregory’s call was a delayed reaction to a plea he had received in 1236
from an evidently embittered Jewish apostate named Nicholas Donin, who presented
the pope with thirty-five accusations against the Talmud and its Jewish exponents.130
There is little that can be said with certainty about Donin’s Jewish background, or
for that matter his motives.131 At least a dozen of the thirty-five articles condemned
the Talmud for its perceived absurd homilies, in much the same way that Peter Al-
fonsi and Peter the Venerable had done a century earlier.132 Donin’s accusations,
however, were uniquely transformed into a staged event when King Louis IX (r.
126 The Church and the Jews 69 (March 5, 1233): 200–201.
127 Contra perfidiam Judaeorum, PL 207: 825. See John D. Cotts, The Clerical Dilemma: Peter of Blois
and Literate Culture in the Twelfth Century (Washington, D.C., 2009), 237.
128 On the role of disputation in Dominican education, see M. Michèle Mulchahey, “First the Bow
Is Bent in Study”: Dominican Education before 1350 (Toronto, 1998), 167–175. For reasons of space, I
do not here engage the use of disputation in the anti-heretical campaigns and the closely affiliated rise
of the Inquisition, both of which present relevant avenues for further research on the culture of dis-
putation.
129 Nicholas Donin’s original accusations about the alleged blasphemies contained in the Talmud
were submitted to Yehiel ben Joseph, who was then forced to respond. According to the Christian
account of the disputation, the discussion begins with Donin’s announcement that he intends to question
Yehiel about the Talmud, which he states is four hundred year old, and ends with a so-called “confession”
in which Yehiel ben Joseph and Judah ben David admit that the Talmud passages were correctly quoted,
but resolutely deny that they contained any blasphemies against Christ or Christians. See Isidore Loeb,
La controverse sur le Talmud sous Saint Louis (Paris, 1881), 21–54; Joel E. Rembaum, “The Talmud and
the Popes: Reflections on the Talmud Trials of the 1240’s,” Viator 13 (1982): 202–223; Robert Chazan,
“The Condemnation of the Talmud Reconsidered (1239–1248),” Proceedings of the American Academy
for Jewish Research 55 (1988): 11–30; Hyam Maccoby, Judaism on Trial: Jewish-Christian Public Dispu-
tations in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1982), 19–38; Gilbert Dahan, ed., Le brûlement du Talmud à Paris,
1242–1244 (Paris, 1999); and Cohen, Living Letters of the Law, 317–325.
130 For considerations about Donin’s background and motives, see Jeremy Cohen, “The Mentality
of the Medieval Jewish Apostate: Peter Alfonsi, Hermann of Cologne, and Pablo Christiani,” in Todd
M. Endelman, ed., Jewish Apostasy in the Modern World (New York, 1987), 20– 47, esp. 35– 41.
131 But see Jeremy Cohen’s attempt to reconstruct the motives of three other apostates of the High
Middle Ages, ibid.

132 It seems reasonable to assume that Nicholas was familiar with these earlier works, or at any rate
with the arguments contained therein. But whereas the works of Alfonsi and Peter the Venerable re-
mained words on the page (or, in Alfonsi’s case, an imaginary and autobiographical dialogue with his
former self), here the dispute has become “public” by virtue of its live hearing.

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1226–1270) responded to the pope’s bulls by confiscating rabbinic texts and sum-
moning leading French rabbis to his court in order to defend the charges.
Donin’s decision to take his plaint directly to the pope may reveal a greater de-
termination on his part than had been exhibited by earlier Jewish converts, but there
is a larger cultural context that needs to be appreciated. Donin’s move also reflects
the new concerns of the papacy, whose authority was far greater in the thirteenth
century than it had been in the twelfth. The same can be said of the French monarchy,
which had grown measurably since the reign of Philip II Augustus.133 Thus it was not
the critique of Judaism and its texts that was new in 1240, or even the part played
by a Jewish convert in launching the attack. Rather, it was that the institutional
establishments were markedly more competent in handling (or presuming that they
could handle) a public disputation with the most knowledgeable Jews of the day.134
The overall appearance of the encounter as a “show trial” belies the efforts of the
monarchy to present (we might even say to perform) the event in such a manner as
to give the impression of a contrapuntal, scholastic debate that would reveal a deeper
truth.135 Most important of all, Paris in the mid-thirteenth century had become the
epicenter of a culture of debate and disputation, one that King Louis IX himself
actively promoted. In an intriguing passage in Joinville’s Life of Saint Louis (com-
pleted in 1309), a story is told of “a great debate” between clerics and Jews at the
monastery of Cluny.136 The abbot reprimands the knight for reacting with violence,
while the knight, in turn, chides the abbot for organizing such a debate in the first
place. The moral of the story, the king explains to his biographer in language that
echoes contemporary Church councils, is “that no man, unless he is a skilled theo-
logian, should debate with Jews.” In another passage in the panegyric, Louis presides
at supper over a debate between Joinville and Master Robert de Sorbon (Louis’s
chaplain and the founder of the Collège de Sorbonne) on the respective merits of
laymen and friars, pronouncing his judgment (or, in scholastic terms, determination)
following the discussion.137 In life and in legend, King Louis IX was a patron of the
schools and a champion of organized and controlled disputation.
Some scholars have posited that the disputation of 1240 was in fact only an in-
quisitorial proceeding and involved no actual debate per se.138 Careful analysis of
133 For historical context, see William Chester Jordan, The French Monarchy and the Jews: From Philip
Augustus to the Last Capetians (Philadelphia, 1989), who discusses the Talmud trial at 137–139.
134 The inclusion of learned Jews as opposition has precedent. For example, both Gilbert Crispin (late
eleventh century) and Walter of Châtillon (mid-twelfth century) claimed that their disputations were
held with learned authorities of the Jewish community.
135 See the astute comments of Karl F. Morrison, Understanding Conversion (Charlottesville, Va.,
1992), 132, concerning public debates between Jews and Christians: “Insofar as they could be re-
garded as instruments of conversion, they belonged to a repertory of play that included theatrical
performances, the spectacle of liturgy, and the visual arts.” For a similar reading of dialogue as per-
formance in the polemical writings of early-thirteenth-century Spain, see Lucy K. Pick, Conflict and
Coexistence: Archbishop Rodrigo and the Muslims and Jews of Medieval Spain (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2004),
esp. chap. 5.
136 Jean de Joinville, Vie de Saint Louis, ed. Jacques Monfrin (Paris, 1995), §§51–53. For a recent
English translation, see Joinville and Villehardouin, Chronicles of the Crusades, trans. Caroline Smith
(New York, 2008), 155.
137 Joinville, Vie de Saint Louis, §§31–32; Joinville and Villehardouin, Chronicles of the Crusades, 150.
138 A precise chronology of the events that took place in Paris in 1240 is desirable but unfortunately
is hampered by the limited and occasionally contradictory information contained in the Christian and
Hebrew accounts.

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Latin manuscript 16558 in the Bibliothèque nationale has established that the pro-
ceedings were in fact divided into two stages: the disputation between Donin and the
French rabbis, principally Yehiel ben Joseph, and the more formal ecclesiastical
inquiry that eventually led to the burning of the Talmud in 1242.139 Thus the Talmud
trial of 1240 bears witness to the confluence of two major and related developments:
the formal public disputation as a method for demonstrating truth, and the inquis-
itorial trial as a method for legally proving that truth and convicting the guilty par-
ties.140 The principal Christian clerics who served as witnesses during the inquest
were Archbishop Walter of Sens, William of Auvergne (bishop of Paris), Geoffrey
of Belleville (chaplain to King Louis IX), Adam of Chambly, and Eudes of Châ-
teauroux (chancellor of the University of Paris). Although the meeting took place
on the king’s direct orders, Louis IX did not personally preside over the disputation.
That task was left to his mother, Queen Blanche of Castile, well known for her
patronage of arts and letters. In addition to Yehiel ben Joseph, three other rabbis
are known to have taken some part in the trial—“Jews who were regarded among
themselves as experts,” according to the Christian account.141 Excepting Gerald of
Wales’s dubious account of Abelard’s debate with a Jew in the presence of King
Philip I, the disputation of 1240 marks the first recorded instance of a Jewish-Chris-
tian disputation in the presence of royalty, the first instance of a Jewish-Christian
disputation that was presided over by a university official, and the first recorded
instance of university officials’ pursuit of the characteristically academic disputatio
in a non-academic context. As a result of the proceeding, the books of the Talmud
were found guilty as charged, and an estimated twenty to twenty-four wagonloads
of manuscripts—perhaps ten to twelve thousand volumes, according to Jeremy Co-
hen—were burned in the Place de Grève over the course of one and a half days in
1242.142
The burning of the Talmud that resulted from the disputation and trial in 1240
proved to be the first in a series of large-scale attacks on rabbinic Judaism that
emanated from the papal court and were carried out on the orders of the French
monarchy and the Dominican friars.143 Cohen has argued that the Dominican in-
volvement with this event constituted a new thrust in the Christian confrontation
139 Chen-Melech Merchavia, The Church versus Talmudic and Midrashic Literature, 500–1248 (in
Hebrew) (Jerusalem, 1970), 240ff., as cited in Cohen, Living Letters of the Law, 323.
140 Dominican involvement in thirteenth-century inquisition is an area of lively current research.
For a deft handling of these features in the context of the battle against heresy, see Christine Caldwell
Ames, Righteous Persecution: Inquisition, Dominicans, and Christianity in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia,
2009).
141 See Maccoby, Judaism on Trial, 164. The three other Jewish witnesses summoned to the gathering
were Judah ben David of Melun, Samuel ben Solomon of Château Thierry, and Moses of Coucy, whose
Sefer Mitzvot Gadol (Great Book of Commandments) is one of the earliest codifications of Jewish law
(Halakhah).
142 Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism (Ithaca, N.Y.,
1982), 63.
143 In May 1244, Pope Innocent IV renewed Gregory’s original injunctions and asked Louis IX to
burn any copies of the Talmud that were found to have survived the first burning. When the Jews this
time appealed the sentence to Rome, complaining that they could not practice their religion without
the Talmud, the pope commissioned a legatine tribunal to reopen the inquiry. The person chosen to head
that inquiry was Eudes of Châteauroux (now cardinal-bishop of Tusculum), and the verdict was upheld,
this time with a list of more than forty illustrious signatories from the academic and clerical communities
of Paris.

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on 29 July 2018
FIGURE 7: Christians and Jews in dispute. The gestures and finger-pointing recall the scholastic method of point
and counterpoint. Woodcut by Johann von Armssheim (1483).
with Judaism, one that went beyond the earlier theological basis of a limited tol-
erance by attacking Judaism on the grounds of being heresy. As much as the events
of 1240 testified to a new, and chiefly Dominican, engagement with Judaism, the trial
also bore witness to the evolution of scholastic disputation as a cultural practice. For
while the king’s role in convoking the event and the setting for the disputation at the
royal court were novel for the period, the presence of Eudes of Châteauroux, the
chancellor of the University of Paris, strongly suggests that the disputation was con-
ceived in accordance with academic principles, and in any case under academic scru-
tiny and approval. The two-part disputation and inquisitorial trial, followed by the
official verdict, evokes the now-established pattern of the university disputatio and
final determination. Furthermore, the dating of the Talmud trial is contemporary
with the first appearance of the disputatio de quolibet, and while the topic of the
disputation at the royal court was no surprise to the participants, the manner in which
it has come down to us does present notable similarities to Paris’s “agonistic” en-
vironment, and it is fully consistent with Joinville’s memorialization of the king. In
sum, the disputation of 1240 represents the confluence between the institutional-
ization of scholastic disputation in Paris and the age-old Christian polemic against
Judaism.

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on 29 July 2018
IN FIVE DISCERNIBLE STAGES, disputation emerged from pedagogy in a monastic setting

to become one of the defining features of medieval intellectual life, with formative
cultural manifestations at multiple levels of society. First, Anselm and his circle pi-
oneered a more dynamic and persuasive approach to articulating the tenets of faith,
one that relied heavily on the dual power of reason and dialogue; second, the rise
of new schools in Italy and northern France and the transference of dialogical writing
and learning to these circles allowed disputation to be absorbed into a new “scho-
lastic” milieu; third, the recovery of Aristotle’s New Logic helped to catalyze this new
and controversial use of disputation by providing models of dialectic argumentation;
fourth, the institutionalization of the university disputatio gave disputation a formal
academic context that it would retain for centuries to come; and fifth, the application
of disputation in the intensifying confrontation with Jews brought academic methods
into the age-old Jewish-Christian debate and made public disputation a fixture of late
medieval culture. The proliferation of dialogues, debate poems, recorded disputa-
tions, visual images of debate, and polyphonic music over the same decades points
clearly in the direction of disputation’s evolution into a cultural practice. By the
thirteenth century, a “culture of disputation” had taken root, centered chiefly in
Paris, transcending the monastic origins from which it sprang, and extending to many
facets of elite and non-elite society.
A cultural logic of disputation now emerges. Taking place on the frontier between
learned and popular culture, between public and private spheres, between polemic
and poetry, and between tragedy and comedy, the rise of disputation out of dialogue
represents a cultural mutation in medieval society that can be fully understood only
with a broad and interdisciplinary approach to cultural history, one that adequately
accounts for the evolution of ideas into practices, and across both time and place.
The acknowledged centrality of disputation in the Late Middle Ages and well into
the early modern period, where dialogues and disputations abound, suggests that
there are more areas to be explored and more connections to be found. A complete
understanding of the history of disputation demands further analysis using an in-
clusive, not exclusive, approach to medieval culture.
Alex J. Novikoff is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Rhodes

College in Memphis, Tennessee, where he has taught since 2008. He specializes
in medieval intellectual and cultural history, historiography, and Christian-Mus-
lim-Jewish relations. His work has appeared in such journals as Speculum, The
Haskins Society Journal, Medieval Encounters, The Journal of Medieval Iberian
Studies, and Pensiero Politico Medievale. His book The Culture of Disputation in
Medieval Europe, which builds on the arguments of this article, will be published
by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2013.

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FIGURE 1: A disputation between Saint Augustine and Faustus the Manichean.

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Serious challenges remain to understanding the place of scholasticism in the

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cultural traditions using a variety of narrative texts or nonverbal forms of commu-

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of the stumbling blocks to appreciating its cultural dimension is the tendency to

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formations: The Long Twelfth Century (Notre Dame, Ind., 2012).

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This path to knowledge, along with an unprecedented commitment to demonstrating

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by other dialecticians. Even if the aspiring student should be outdone by weightier

R. W. Southern (Oxford, 1962), xxii, 39– 40.

wood, N.Y., 1984), s.v. “disputabo” to “disputet.”

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might vary from a simple “discussion” or “conversation” to a more intense “dispute”

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Critic,” Speculum 47, no. 2 (1972): 234 –245.

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des Wilhelm von Conches,” in Jacobi, Gespräche Lesen, 199–230.

Zeit: Symbolisch-prophetische Deutung der Geschichte (Stuttgart, 1985).

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legal disputes and the harmonizing of conflicting interpretations.52 In time, the

(Chicago, 2008), 77.

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67 Ioannis Saresberiensis Metalogicon, ed. J. B. Hall (Turnhout, 1991), II.10, IV.3.

Account of His Metalogicon,” History of Universities 6 (1986–1987): 1– 46.

is the same word employed by Adam of Balsham.

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between questioner and answerer” (inter opponentem et respondentem).

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mae consiliis, ed. Jean-Albert Dugauquier (Louvain, 1954).

of patristic wisdom to a separation of different schools of interpretation.

repr., Edinburgh, 1998), 52.