ABSTRACT
Universities, like cathedrals and parliaments, are a product of the Middle Ages. The origin and nature of these earliest universities is the subject of these three lectures. The first will deal with university institutions, the second with university instruction, the third with the life of university students. In recent years the early history of universities has begun to attract the serious attention of historical scholars, and mediaeval institutions of learning have at last been lifted out of the region of myth and fable where they long lay obscured. The occasion for the rise of universities was a great revival of learning, not that revival of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to which the term is usually applied. But an earlier revival, less known though in its way quite as significant, which historians now call the renaissance of the twelfth century. In northern Europe the origin of universities must be sought at Paris, in the cathedral school of Notre-Dame.
