The precise origins of the very first universities are lost in obscurity, though the picture becomes ever clearer as we move into the thirteenth century. And it is no surprise that the Church should have done so much to foster the nascent university system since, according to historian Lowrie Daly, it was "the only institution in Europe that showed consistent interest in the preservation and cultivation of knowledge." The institution that we recognize today, with its faculties, courses of study, examinations, and degrees, as well as the familiar distinction between undergraduate and graduate study, comes to us directly from the medieval world. Nothing like it had existed in ancient Greece or Rome. The university, which developed and matured at the height of Catholic Europe, was a new phenomenon in European history. It was, after all, in the High Middle Ages that the university came into existence. The substantial output of medieval scholarship that was produced in the twentieth century should have put this inane caricature to rest once and for all, but here we have another case of specialized knowledge that hasn"t managed to trickle down to the general public.
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