EVOLUTION OF THE _STUDIUM GENERALE_. In the preceding chapter we described briefly the new movement toward association which characterized the eleventh and the twelfth centuries--the municipal movement, the merchant guilds, the trade guilds, etc. These were doing for civil life what monasticism had earlier done for the religious life. They were collections of like-minded men, who united themselves into associations or guilds for mutual benefit, protection, advancement, and self-government within the limits of their city, business, trade, or occupation. This tendency toward association, in the days when state government was weak or in its infancy, was one of the marked features of the transition time from the early period of the Middle Ages, when the Church was virtually the State, to the later period of the Middle Ages, when the authority of the Church in secular matters was beginning to weaken, modern nations were beginning to form, and an interest in worldly affairs was beginning to replace the previous inordinate interest in the world to come. We also noted in the preceding chapters that certain cathedral and monastery schools, but especially the cathedral schools, [1] stimulated by the new interest in Dialectic, were developing into much more than local teaching institutions designed to afford a supply of priests of some little education for the parishes of the bishopric. Once York and later Canterbury, in England, had had teachers who attracted students from other bishoprics. Paris had for long been a famous center for the study of the Liberal Arts and of Theology. Saint Gall had become noted for its music. Theologians coming from Paris (1167-68) had given a new impetus to study among the monks at Oxford. A series of political events in northern Italy had given emphasis to the study of law in many cities, and the Moslems in Spain had stimulated the schools there and in southern France to a study of medicine and Aristotelian science. Rome was for long a noted center for study. Gradually these places came to be known as _studia publica_, or _studia generalia_, meaning by this a generally recognized place of study, where lectures were open to any one, to students of all countries and of all conditions. [2] Traveling students came to these places from afar to hear some noted teacher read and comment on the famous textbooks of the time.