The Evil Eye, Thanatology, and Other EssaysPark, Roswell
Religion
The Evil Eye, Thanatology, and Other Essays
Park, Roswell
Bruno, Giordano, 1548-1600; Evil eye; Knights of Malta; Medicine; Mythology; Religion; Students
When it came to the matter of discipline, the good old-fashioned
birchen rod was not an unknown factor in university government. There
seems to have been always a certain relationship between classic
studies and corporal punishment. In mediæval university records
allusions to this relationship began about the fifteenth century. In
Paris, about this time, when there were so many disgraceful factional
fights, the rectors and proctors had occasionally to go to the
colleges and halls and personally superintend the chastisement of
the young rioters. We find also in the history of the University of
Louvain that flogging was at one time ordered by the Faculty of Arts
for homicide or other grave outrages. It is worth while to recall
for a moment how grave offences were dealt with in those days. At
the University of Ingolstadt one student killed another in a drunken
quarrel, and was punished by the university by the confiscation of
his scholastic effects and garments, but he was not even expelled. At
Prague a certain Master of Arts assisted in cutting the throat of a
friar bishop, and was actually expelled for the deed. In those days
drunkenness was rarely treated as a university offence. The penalties
which were inflicted for the gravest outrages and immoralities were
for the greater part puerile in the extreme. In most serious cases
excommunication or imprisonment were the penalties, while lesser
offences were punished by postponement of degree, expulsion from the
college, temporary banishment from a university town, or by fines.
In Leipzig, in 1439, the fine of ten new groschen was provided for the
offense of lifting a stone or missile with a view of throwing it at
a master, but not actually throwing it; whereas the act of throwing
and missing increased the penalty to eight florins, while successful
marksmanship was still more expensive. Later statutes made distinction
between hitting without wounding and wounding without mutilation,
expulsion being the penalty for actual mutilation. With the beginning
of the sixteenth century the practice of flogging the very poorest
students appears to have been introduced. During these Middle Ages
they had a peculiar fashion of expiating even grave offences. For
example, at the Sorbonne, if a fellow should assault or cruelly beat
a servant he was fined a measure of good wine--not for the benefit of
the servant, but for all the culprit's fellow-students. Those were the
days, too, when trifling lapses incurred each its own penalty. A doctor
of divinity was fined a quart of wine for picking a pear off a tree in
the college garden or forgetting to shut the chapel door. Clerks were
fined for being very drunk and committing insolences when in that
condition. The head cook was fined for not putting salt in the soup.
Most of these fines being in the shape of liquors or wines, I imagine
that the practice was more general because the penalty was shared in by
all who were near.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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