Among the authentic writings of St Thomas Aquinas is one, addressed to the question: Utrum veritas sit fortior inter vinum et regem et mulierem? (‘Is the truth is stronger, when you compare it with wine, with the king, and with a woman?’) Slight as it is, it reveals both an attitude and a sophisticated approach to university education, which it would do us no harm to reflect on.

The piece is quite literally a quodlibet, which in modern usage sounds as though it ought to be a trifling thing anyway, an intellectual bagatelle. The question considered here, you may think, confirms as much. In fact the Disputatio de quolibet was something of a high-point in the intellectual life of the faculty in which it was held. And we find there, much more typically, the mature thought of the faculty’s most eminent teachers. But we do find bagatelles too, and perhaps even that, or the reasons behind it, can be instructive.

In medieval universities, the teaching was directed by a double aim: to impart coherent and substantiated bodies of knowledge, scientias; and to instruct in crafts in which those sciences could not only be developed, but could be put to use. To instruct, as the statutes sometimes put it, in the usus scientiarum. In accordance with this aim, there were two main types of teaching-vehicle. One was the lecture (lectio), in which coherent bodies of knowledge could be transmitted economically and in a context minimising distortion in transmission.