could hardly have developed at all, for the materials available for it
previous to the twelfth century were decidedly scanty. The books
presently to be described furnished a body of advanced and solid
instruction, suited to the needs of the times. They formed one of the
permanent influences which both developed and maintained centers of
higher education, for the new learning was not less potent in
attracting students than the fame of individual teachers or the new
method of study.

The greater number of the books which formed the body of university
instruction were recoveries from the mass of ancient and long-disused
Greek and Roman learning, together with a few works of Arabic and Jewish
origin. To this group belong the works of Aristotle, the body of Roman
Law, and the medical works of Galen, Hippocrates, and various Arabic and
Jewish physicians. In the main, these had been hitherto unknown in
western Europe, or at least practically for-gotten since the days of the
Roman Empire. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries they were
collected and made generally accessible to students. Those not
originally written in Latin were now translated into Latin; manuscript
copies were multiplied and widely diffused.

But the intellectual activity of the times accomplished much more than
the recovery of some fragments of ancient learning; it also created two
new fields of study,--Scholastic Philosophy and Theology, and Canon
Law,--and produced the text-books which marked them off as distinct and
professional studies. The book which established the _method_ of these
studies was Abelard's "Yes and No" (see p. 20); but the works which
furnished the substance of university instruction were, in Theology, the
"Sentences" (Sententiae) of Peter Lombard, and in Canon Law, the
"Decree" (Decretum) of Gratian, which was also known as the "Harmony of