ABSTRACT
Arts subjects in Italy occupied a rather subordinate position until raised to prominence in the era of the Renaissance. The Spanish universities were less specialized and usually provided a fuller spread of disciplines, including theology, that had a rather low profile in the Italian and French provincial universities. The Spanish universities were less specialized and usually provided a fuller spread of disciplines, including theology, that had a rather low profile in the Italian and French provincial universities. Students at the English universities, in common with their counterparts right across continental Europe, were the recipients of a conservative teaching process. The main function of university teaching was to inculcate in students the appropriate segments of an inherited corpus of learning that was an amalgam of Greek, Graeco-Roman, Arabic and the European Christian traditions of scholarship. The twin arts of grammar and rhetoric had been fundamental pillars of the literary humanism of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
