Frank Rexroth, Knowledge True and Useful: A Cultural History of Early Scholasticism. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023, xvii, 375 pp.

The rise of the European universities is a heavily researched area of study, usually focusing on institutional history or an intellectual history of the relevant early faculties. Knowledge True and Useful, the English translation of Frank Rexroth’s Fröhliche Scholastik (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2018), takes a different approach by presenting the prehistory and very early years of the universities, especially the University of Paris, as a process of cultural formation within circles of academic elites around a new conception of knowledge that was “scientific” in the modern sense of the word. During this time the teachers of cathedral schools, monasteries, and various peripatetic wanderers who taught as free agents, were influenced by new conceptions of knowledge and developed novel cultures of learning, teaching, and dialogue in response.