Th is book examines the procedures governing the censure of Parisian academics during the heyday of the medieval University of Paris. J.M.M.H. Thijssen defines academic censure as "the prohibition or condemnation of teaching disseminated by a university-trained scholar concerning fine points of scholastic theology and philosophy" (p. x). Because his focus is on the procedures followed to obtain condemnation and the jurisdictional theories they imply, Thijssen discusses little of the substance of the condemned views. An exception is William of Ockham's suspect theories, because they applied directly to the nature of the jurisdictions claiming the right to censure doctrine.
Thijssen defines heresy in the third sense distinguished by William of Ockham: as opposed to (1) verbatim denial of the faith and (2) untruths obvious even to the illiterate, there is (3) error "perceptible only to the literate and learned who are well versed in Divine Scripture, after a long and subtle deliberation" (p. 1). These specialized definitions (of heresy and censure) confine Thijssen's discussions to the professional deliberations of academic experts at the University of Paris and technically excuse him from considering other types of heresy in whose condemnation the University of Paris also played a role.
The censures Thijssen examines occurred at Paris mostly from 1277 to 1387 and produced a manuscript record in the Collectio errorum in anglia et parisius condempnatorum, best known in its eighteenth-century edition by Charles DuPlessis d'Argentre as the Collectio Judiciorum de Novis Erroribus. Seen from one angle, this book is an extended interpretation of this record.
Thijssen's opening chapter sets out a taxonomy for the types of investigations concerning doctrine taught at the university. Disciplinary investigations can come from the relevant faculty, usually Theology (but as Chapter 3 shows, Arts in 1340) or the suspect's religious order, as in the Dominicans' investigations of Durand of St. Pourcain in 1313 and 1317. Judicial procedures occur before the bishop of Paris (Etienne Tempier's condemnation of 1277) or the papal court (William of St. Amour, 1256; William of Ockham, 1323).
Thijssen distributes the hearings from 1277 to 1387 within these categories and evaluates important differences. For example, in Chapter 2, he shows that the 219 articles condemned in 1277 were sanctioned under episcopal, not papal authority, and he explains how significant it is that neither the Arts nor the Theology faculty conducted the investigation. Later (p. 104), it emerges that even William of Ockham was unclear on this point; he attributed the condemnation of 1277 to the Faculty of Theology. Chapter 3 similarly untangles the difficulties surrounding the Arts faculty's condemnation of Ockhamite teachings in 1340.
Some of Thijssen's most interesting comments concern the conflict of accusation and defense. Within the university, the accused claim "intentio auctoris"; the prosecutors judge "prout sonat" or the impression the doctrine would make on students or the public. Thijssen describes this dialectic as "a complicated hermeneutical game" (p. 31). The situation becomes reversed, however, in considering how to interpret authoritative texts. Implications of this insight emerge in the discussion of the Arts faculty's action of 1340. Here Thijssen exposes an irony in the fact that in interpreting the errors of bachelors of theology, supervising masters preferred to emphasize the literal sense of the written doctrine over the intention of the author. Yet in interpreting authoritative texts, the Faculty of Arts claimed in its censure of Ockhamite teaching that a close literal reading was too narrow, and that "the literal sense also expresses the intention of the author and is partly determined by the context of the topic under discussion" (p. 65). This irony points to a larger problem, the question of the defendant's respect for the correcting authority.
The question of pertinacity (discussed briefly on pp. 3-4, 33) is central, because, if one were to examine the impact of the various cases on the careers of the suspects, as Thijssen does in Chapter 1, the crucial factor in the damage done the accused depends on their retraction or submission. Yet Thijssen confines the discussion of pertinacity largely to a single tract by John Gerson (Chancellor of the University 1395-1429). The treatise De Protestatione circa Materiam Fidei of 1415 does not suffice to give this point the weight it needs. Furthermore, its late date ignores the development of nearly two centuries of jurisprudence concerning all forms of legal contempt. Connections to these doctrines were available to him, since Thijssen refers to Master Raymond, condemned for contumacy by Innocent IV's legate, Odo of Chateauroux, in 1247. Master Raymond, it seems, had been jailed for teaching certain errors, liberated for promising to cease, and found contumacious because he had continued presumptuously to spread them to "certain uneducated people" ( quibusdam simplicibus, pp.33-34).
The issue of what we today call academic freedom remains implicit until the final chapter. After pointing out the obvious anachronism in the term, Thijssen explores the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century context(s) for the idea of censure in religious teaching. Parisian thinkers saw the issue in several ways. On the one hand, they believed in an absolute religious truth which cannot be infringed. On the other hand, they balanced competing claims of jurisdiction as between the Faculty of Theology (or of Arts in 1340), religious orders, bishops, and popes. Ockham claimed a further conflict between these authorities and the truth itself, where the truth has priority over the ordinary ecclesiastical officials.
Combining Thijssen's first and last chapters, therefore, takes the modern framework for the "conflict of faith and reason" to a new level: one of contending jurisdictions. This insight informs the book as a whole. Discussing a case of 1387, Thijssen observes that the Faculty of Theology at Paris assumed it had the right to police itself. Here, he says correctly, is "a theme as old as the. . . university" (p. 111). It is clear that the masters consistently appropriated the censure of their own members (colleagues and students) as an essential perquisite of a self-governing corporation. This claim does not emerge clearly in Thijssen's account, however, until the last case he examines, Pierre d'Ailly's prosecution of Juan of Monzon in 1387 on behalf of the Faculty of Theology.
Thijssen concludes that university censures were directed towards bachelors (advanced students), against whom the masters acted, not in judicial, but in disciplinary proceedings. It is a matter of elders disciplining juniors (p. 114). This conclusion, however, confines the university too much, as if its expertise in discovering doctrinal deviance were limited to the studium itself. Instead, the masters, in developing their claim to autonomous self-correction, capitalized on their broader social utility, on their importance to the faith, to the institutional church and even, occasionally, to the French kings.
An example that Thijssen's definition of heresy permits him to disregard is the role of the Parisian masters in the condemnation of Marguerite Porete. In 1310, twenty-one regent members of the Faculty of Theology denounced as heretical a list of articles extracted by the inquisitor William of Paris from her Mirror of Simple Souls. Later, Parisian canonists declared her relapsed, since, they claimed, she had agreed not to disseminate her book after the bishop of Valenciennes had consigned it to the fire in 1308. Thus one need not await the Faculty of Theology's consultation on Joan of Arc (1429-31), as Thijssen implies, for a "different policy" on judging "individuals who were not, and had never been, members of the University of Paris" (p. 117).
In other words, in the effort to arrive at a study of academic freedom that is not anachronistic, Thijssen has overcorrected by producing an internal history of censure at the University of Paris as if it were isolated politically and doctrinally from the rest of the Church. Thijssen himself refers to the university's exercise of "doctrinal control" (pp. 113, 117). He explains how the reputation of the studium depended on its being seen as a font of orthodoxy possessing expertise on doubtful questions. During the schism of 1378-1417, he states, both lines of popes sought the university's backing (p. 112). Thus the retreat intra muros is not satisfactory. The University of Paris depended on outside appreciation of its extramural effectiveness.
Thijssen's image of a guild of scholars devoted merely to chastening bachelors would have disappointed Gregory IX. In his Bull of 1231, Parens Scientiarum, Gregory praised the university's utility as a workshop, producing breastplates of the faith, swords of the spirit, and brass instruments to herald sounding preaching! In the wake of the Albigensian Crusade and the establishment of another university in defeated Toulouse, this rhetoric surely points to an external mission for the university and its graduates. Further, in 1247, when Master Raymond was condemned for contumacy, southern France was the site of inquisitors' efforts to take relapse as a sign of contempt and justification for harsher penalties. Experts invoked the doctrine of pertinacity far beyond the Latin Quarter, and this broader application to popular heresy should not be severed from its occurrence in the university and the latter made to look exclusively academic.
In sum, Thijssen succeeds in illuminating an important element in the intellectual discipline of the University of Paris. He highlights one of its essential functions as a guild: the formation of masters. Yet by focusing only on the procedures for the censure of teaching and of actions against heresy in Ockham's narrowest definition, Thijssen ignores the university's role in the Church's larger struggle against heterodoxy. Without this external effectiveness against more widespread heresy, the corporation would not have attracted the political support needed to attain even the limited control over opinion analyzed in this well crafted but very restrained book.