ABSTRACT
The development of book learning in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries has usually been treated by historians somewhat monolithically, and the story that they have been most interested in telling is one of the simple 'transmission' and 'assimilation' of ancient Greek texts. Learning, and the promotion of learning, were of great importance to both of the two major Orders of friar, the Dominicans and the Franciscans. The natural philosophy of the friars was built on writings from Greek antiquity, as well as on the Bible and the Fathers. The friars created studia within their own Orders in which they taught their members natural philosophy and other subjects, and they also entered the studia created by the secular masters, which they saw as a rival form of learning which needed to be controlled. In order to understand and appreciate the precise nature of the friars' interest in learning, and to understand something of its later impact on the universities, it is necessary to distinguish the different approaches to learning evident in twelfth-and thirteenth-century Europe.
