In 1115, a young philosopher named Peter Abelard arrived at the cathedral school of Notre-Dame and did the unthinkable: he publicly demolished the arguments of his master, William of Champeaux. It was intellectual patricide. It was also the birth of something new—the idea that truth was found not through authority but through rigorous debate.
This episode traces the emergence of the university from the cathedral schools of medieval Europe, following the rebels and scholars who demanded the freedom to question everything. From the taverns of Paris where students brawled and debated to the papal bulls that granted these strange new institutions their independence, we witness the creation of a revolutionary machine for producing knowledge.
From Abelard's arrogance to the founding of Oxford and the Sorbonne, discover how medieval Christendom accidentally invented the institution that would undermine its certainties—and give humanity its most powerful engine for discovering truth.