and thought and temperamental inclination in the thirteenth as well as in the twelfth century. Nor was Italy as yet becoming scientific, or greatly interested in physical hypothesis; although medicine was cultivated in various centres, Salerno, for example, and Bologna. But for the twelfth, and for the thirteenth century as well, Italy's great intellectual achievement was in the two closely neighbouring sciences of canon and civil law. These made the University of Bologna as pre-eminent in law as Paris was in theology. There had been schools of grammar and rhetoric at Bologna and Ravenna, before the lecturing of Irnerius on the Pandects drew to the first-named town the concourse of mature and seemly students who were gradually to organize themselves into a university.[1] Thus at Bologna law flourished and grew great, springing upward from an antecedent base of grammatical if not literary studies. The study of the law never cut itself away from this foundation. For the exigencies of legal business demanded training in the scrivener's and notarial arts of inditing epistles and drawing documents, for which the ars dictaminis, to wit, the art of composition was of primary utility. This ars, teaching as it did both the general rules of composition and the more specific forms of legal or other formal documents, pertained to law as well as grammar. Of the latter study it was perhaps in Italy the main element, or, rather, end. But even without this hybrid link of the dictamen, grammar was needed for the interpretation of the Pandects; and indeed some of the glosses of Irnerius and other early glossators are grammatical rather than legal explanations of the text. We should bear in mind that this august body of jurisprudential law existed not in the inflated statutory Latin of Justinian's time, but in the sonorous and correct language of the earlier empire, when the great Jurists lived, as well as Quintilian. Accordingly a close study of the Pandects required, as well as yielded, a knowledge of classical Latinity. Thus law tended to foster, rather than repress, grammar and rhetoric; and had no unfavourable effect on classical studies. And even as such studies "flourished" in Italy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, they did not
- ↑ Cf. post, Chapter XXXIII. and XXXVII.
