announcement of Odofredus, a distinguished teacher of Law at Bologna,
about the middle of the thirteenth century, which Rashdall thinks is
equally applicable to methods in other subjects. Odofredus says:

First, I shall give you summaries of each title before I proceed to
the text; secondly, I shall give you as clear and explicit a statement
as I can of the purport of each Law (included in the title); thirdly,
I shall read the text with a view to correcting it; fourthly, I shall
briefly repeat the contents of the Law; fifthly, I shall solve
apparent contradictions, adding any general principles of Law (to be
extracted from the passage), and any distinctions and subtle and
useful problems arising out of the Law with their solutions, as far as
the Divine Providence shall enable me. And if any Law shall seem
deserving, by reason of its celebrity or difficulty, of a Repetition,
I shall reserve it for an evening Repetition.

It will be seen that both students and professors were bound to the text,
as were the teachers of the Seven Liberal Arts in the cathedral schools
before them. There was no appeal to the imagination, still less to
observation, experiment, or experience. Each generation taught what it had
learned, except that from time to time some thinker made a new
organization, or some new body of knowledge was unearthed and added.

Another method much used was the debate, or disputation, and participation
in a number of these was required for degrees (R. 116). These disputations
were logical contests, not unlike a modern debate, in which the students
took sides, cited authorities, and summarized arguments, all in Latin.
Sometimes a student gave an exhibition in which he debated both sides of a
question, and summarized the argument, after the manner of the professors.
As a corrective to the memorization of lectures and texts, these