Tours, Laon, Chartres, Rheims and Paris. To these schools students
poured in from all over the world in numbers mounting to many
thousands for such as Paris for example, and the mutual rivalries
were intense and sometimes disorderly. Groups of students would
choose their own masters and follow them from place to place, even
subjecting them to discipline if in their opinion they did not live
up to the intellectual mark they had set as their standard. As
there was not only one religion and one social system, but one
universal language as well, this gathering from all the four
quarters of Europe was perfectly possible, and had much to do with
the maintenance of that unity which marked society for three centuries.

At the time of Abélard the schools of Chartres and Paris were at
the height of their fame and power. Fulbert, Bernard and Thierry,
all of Chartres, had fixed its fame for a long period, and at Paris
Hugh and Richard of St. Victor and William of Champeaux were names
to conjure with, while Anselm of Laon, Adelard of Bath, Alan of
Lille, John of Salisbury, Peter Lombard, were all from time to time
students or teachers in one of the schools of the Cathedral, the
Abbey of St. Victor or Ste. Geneviève.

Earlier in the Middle Ages the identity of theology and philosophy
had been proclaimed, following the Neo-Platonic and Augustinian
theory, and the latter (cf. Peter Damien and Duns Scotus Eriugena)
was even reduced to a position that made it no more than the
obedient handmaid of theology. In the eleventh century however, St.
Anselm had drawn a clear distinction between faith and reason, and
thereafter theology and philosophy were generally accepted as
individual but allied sciences, both serving as lines of approach
to truth but differing in their method. Truth was one and therefore