Throughout the Middle Ages, scholars in northern Europe were engaged in a project of argument, codification, and synthesis. Their task was to make a curriculum for the emerging universities that would enable students to see Christian teachings as a coherent and rational system, as something teachable. The intellectual inheritance bequeathed to these scholars encompassed the classical world, the Bible, the writings of the Church Fathers, as well as a limited range of texts written in the early Middle Ages. In addition, they had received a number of important texts via Muslim and Jewish scholars who were working in centres such as Toledo and Cairo. Medieval scholars had to reconcile this vast array of textual material with the Christian truth that they held to be absolute. Their job was to give students the benefit of the wisdom and the methods of the ancients, but always couched in the guiding knowledge of Christian revelation.

The adjective “scholastic” has been used to describe this work of universitybased theologians in the Latin West between approximately 1100 and 1450. They are called “scholastic” because they emerged from the cathedral schools of Europe. The scholae emerged during the eleventh century, concomitant to the economic and demographic renewal that took place over that century in western Europe. In places such as Paris, Chartres, and Tours, young clerics undertook training in the trivium (grammar, dialectic, rhetoric) as training for future careers in episcopal and secular administration. Prior to the development of the schools, higher education was conducted almost entirely in monasteries, and framed within the pedagogical objective of biblical exegesis. These flourishing towns, however, required clerics capable of ministering in an urban environment, to more fluid populations, engaged in a variety of economic activities. The intellectual program of the new schools was always intimately linked with the social transformations occurring in Europe at that time.

Their intellectual program was paradoxically timid and bold. It was timid, at least to our eyes, because these scholars were always aware of the fragility of human knowledge in a postlapsarian world. Knowledge was always partial, as a result of the expulsion of humanity from the Garden of Eden. Yet, humans had been made in God's image, and so existed in a relationship of resemblance to God.