Schools Of the three levels of teaching whose tradition charges the “foundation” to Charlemagne - parochial, episcopal and palatine in its capital - it is the second which best resisted.
In the future French-speaking Switzerland, Geneva and Sion have a school placed under the responsibility of the chapter, via the cantor. The competence of this last also extends to the unit from the diocese; the abbot of Saint-Maurice enjoys the monopoly of teaching in Chablais. The communes take part at most in whole or part of the wages of the Masters. In Geneva, the common pay the teachers and can, so to dismiss them and find a substitute to them. But the chapter preserves the upper hand on the school.
In Lausanne, on the other hand, the school is a communal institution: the middle-class men recruit the Masters and revoke them, pay them, decide schoolings, provide them buildings to teach and live. On the local plan, Gregoire IX had issued to the XIII E S. the obligation for very cleaned to have with him a clerk who, in addition to various liturgical functions, was to be able to hold the school. It is difficult to say up to what point one observed these regulations. For the diocese of Geneva, one does not exclude that “in certain villages, perhaps of the priests held an elementary class and exempted at least rudiments of reading”.
In Romainmôtier, the monastery has into 1390 a magister puerorum, maintained by the thin incomes a small benefit. Of the XV E S., certain countrymen, small lords and notaries, but also large peasants, think of sending their sons in the urban schools of their area.
Masters
Those of the Masters whom one could identify appear to enjoy a certain consideration, to have some goods, to attend the members of the clergy or local elite; but they are also readily unstable. They are sometimes graduates or Masters be arts, never doctors, and several undoubtedly do not have any diploma. They live, either of a benefit, or of communal wages, or of the schooling poured by the parents. The programs are centered on “grammar”, i.e. the rudiments of Latin, even if such bishop prescribes that the Masters will teach also logic and philosophy. One finds Masters of song, liturgical song gets along. A progress seems to be established in the attribution of the buildings of teaching; communes pass from the hiring to construction.
Literature The sources hardly say any more and we are badly well informed on the density of the schools, the rate of schooling, the level of culture, even for the elites. One sees around 1300 a knight inhabitant of Zurich, Roger Manesse, lawyer, patron and amateur of poetry, like his son, canon and principal of the chapter of Grossmunster, to gather a collection of Lieder.
In 1747, J. - J. Bodmer a little quickly identified this collection with the manuscript of Heidelberg, which contains works of 140 German and Swiss troubadours. The marvellous book, decorated of 138 miniatures on full page, comes, if not of Manesse, in any case of the area located between Zurich and Constance.
Without neglecting popular poetry, Sempacherlied or Ballade of Such, or the chroniclers, such both Diebold Schilling, the uncle in Bern (fine of XVe S.) and the nephew in Lucerne (first years of XVIe S.), one will quote, among the poets of German-speaking Switzerland, Konrad Fleck to the XIII E S., author of a version of Flora and Blanchefleur, topic medieval par excellence; Johannes Hadlaub in Zurich, which belongs to the literary circle of Manesse; Konrad von Würzburg, Franconien established with Basle, “Master of the news versified and perfect goldsmith, mannerist before the letter”.
In French-speaking Switzerland, Othon de Grandson left alluviums, virelais, ballades and songs, whereas Martin le Franc is the author of the Champion of the Ladies, allegorical poem to the glory of the fair sex.
The first Swiss university Paris, Bologna, Montpellier As of XIIIe S., one sees natives of current Switzerland outward journey studying in the universities of Europe. From 1215, canons from Lausanne go to Paris, “Schools”; their stays are short there - a few months - and they do them at an already ripe age. The university of Bologna exerts since 1265 a very particular attraction: 225 Swiss students come there until the end the century; the majority are of origin noble and are intended at the ecclesiastical state; some are already equipped with benefit. They study especially the right, civilian or gun; but one finds also medical students, such this High-Valaisan, Jean of the Moon, which professes there later. Their number decrease then: in fact from now on French faculties carry it. Another Valaisan, of Loèche, studies in Montpellier between 1310 and 1313; a Freibourgese, Guillaume Arsent or Draper, still called Guillaume of Lausanne (of the name of the chief town of the diocese) are mentioned in Paris, where he studies, then sign of 1331 to 1339.
Basle
But it is necessary to wait until 1460 so that the first “Swiss” university opens, in Basle. The city had lived great moments at the time of the council which had been held there of 1431 to 1449; left in brass band, the meeting blanched then, mined by the discords, the plague, the behavior of another council, that of Ferrare-Florence, the presence, once again, of two competitor popes. But, if it “leaves an after-taste of bitter melancholy”, the council had created in 1432 Studium general, extended in 1440 by the antipope Felix V to four faculties of the time, theology, right, arts and medicine; the institution carries already the title of Alma universitatis studii curiae romanae; its disappearance follows the dissolution of the council, on order of the Emperor, and the From Basel ones feel empty. However, one of the most brilliant participants in the council, Enea Silvio Piccolomini, reach pontificate in 1459 under the name of Pie II; the burgomaster Hans von Flachsland goes to Italy; the pope, disputes some with the duke of Austria which had just created a university in Freiburg in Brisgau, is happy of being able to found another, concurrent, it thus accedes to the request. The bubble of foundation, which raises the situation of the city “at the border of several nations”, is dated November 12th, 1459, the unveiling takes place on on April 4th, 1460 by the bishop and the burgomaster.
Teaching is given of course in Latin, the students are almost all German-speaking, the German, French, Italian professors; a Greek teaches the language of Homère, but it is not attached officially to the University, just like, later, hébraïsant it Conrad Pellican. The institution takes part in the controversies of time, in particular the quarrel of the universals: is reality in the general ideas, or those are they only abstractions, names, whereas only the existences individual, concrete, are real? To speak vulgarly, it is the problem of the tree and the forest.
It has its traditions very quickly; the bishop is the chancellor and will remain it even after the adoption of the Reform. The students profit from privileges, like that to be able to be tortured only in the presence of the vice-chancellor. But one prohibited the port of the weapons and the insults with the middle-class men to them; they were to be also committed not being been avenging, in the event of failure, on the person of their inspectors. They underwent the practice of the depositio rudimentorum, old rite of initiation in the world of the adults, symbolizing the passage of the uncultivated child to the civilized student: before being allowed with the registration, they were to face the saw, the axe and the plane, to be made strip of a coat in skin of animal and of a hat with large horns, and to even extract a “tooth from wild boar”.
Later destiny
The university knows then tops and bottoms. The first decade knows an annual average of 260 students; with the fourth, they are nothing any more but 130. In the first years of XVIe S., Zwingli and the last bishop of Lausanne, Sebastien de Montfaucon, study there simultaneously. The Reform gives fresh impulse to the institution, which will be illustrated with XVIIe and XVIIIe S. by Bernoulli. At the time of the Revolution, it is reduced to little thing, but it begins again with XIXe S. When one discusses, as from 1820, of the creation of a federal university and, in this case, of the place who will shelter it, Alexandre Vinet affirms that this university, he should be based “to collect the science and the lights of Germany on the Swiss ground, to naturalize there, to acclimatize to it”; as one cannot create it ex nihilo and that the simple Academies do not enter on account, it is quite naturally in Basle that it should have its seat.
Bibliography
Alfred Berchtold, Basle and Europe, Lausanne 1990