ABSTRACT
Issued in 1302, while Pope Boniface VIII was engaged in his second unsuccessful struggle with Philip IV the Fair of France, the constitution Unam sanctam contained some of the medieval papacy's strongest statements about its supremacy in temporal, as well as spiritual, affairs. The text was based on previous papalist writings, including those of Bernard of Clairvaux, and on the papalist reading of the Pseudo-Dionysian doctrine of hierarchy. The unicorn had been an object of fascination for encyclopedists and poets since antiquity, and in the Middle Ages it acquired more symbolic meanings as it took on christological qualities. In the Middle Ages, the term for a university was studium or stadium generate, with the word universitas referring to the institutional or corporate shell enclosing and regulating the communities of masters and students. Medieval jurists and moralists defined usury as any predetermined charge for a loan of money or goods. The taking of usury was a canonical offense punishable by excommunication.
