In the course of the thirteenth century, the intellectual initiative passed from Orléans to Paris, from school to university, from the antiqui to the moderni. This changed topography of learning had important implications for the ways in which texts were transmitted and read. The continuing ramification of higher education into ever more vocational areas of study and training was a response to the rediscovery of Aristotelian learning and to the pastoral effects of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. The technologising of preaching and the development of more sophisticated analyses in applied pastoral theology went hand-in-hand with refinements in logical terminology. When scholastic lectio replaced monastic lectio as the dominant style of academic reading, new questions were asked about how books meant. The modistic analysis of the written word, developed from the practices prevailing in the exposition of secular classical texts, acquired new subtleties in its application to the literary strategies of the Bible and was again in turn reapplied to secular texts with some added emphases drawn from scriptural commentary. Throughout the thirteenth century a fruitfully symbiotic relationship existed between exegesis of the sacred page and of the secular text, mediated through a common interest in the affective force of all literature. These developments depended for their success on a continuing and reliable supply of literate and competent students.

Although the logic of language came to be studied with new rigour, it would be wrong to suggest that the old ways of learning decayed. The interplay between disciplines and institutions was always more subtle and profound than medieval satirists and modern social historians care to allow: even logicians must learn to read, and must sit at the knee of Dame Grammar.