Scholasticism a set of scholarly and instructional techniques developed in Western European schools of the late medieval period, including the use of commentary and disputed question. ‘Scholasticism’ is derived from Latin scholasticus, which in the twelfth century meant the master of a school. The Scholastic method is usually presented as beginning in the law schools – notably at Bologna – and as being then transported into theology and philosophy by a series of masters including Abelard and Peter Lombard. Within the new universities of the thirteenth century the standardization of the curriculum and the enormous prestige of Aristotle’s work (despite the suspicion with which it was initially greeted) contributed to the entrenchment of the method and it was not until the educational reforms of the beginning of the sixteenth century that it ceased to be dominant. There is, strictly speaking, no such thing as Scholasticism. As the term was originally used it presupposed that a single philosophy was taught in the universities of late medieval Europe, but there was no such philosophy. The philosophical movements working outside the universities in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and the ‘neo-Scholastics’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries all found such a presupposition useful, and their influence led scholars to assume it. At first this generated efforts to find a common core in the philosophies taught in the late medieval schools. More recently it has led to efforts to find methods characteristic of their teaching, and to an extension of the term to the schools of late antiquity and of Byzantium. Both among the opponents of the schools in the seventeenth century and among the ‘neo- Scholastics,’ ‘Scholasticism’ was supposed to designate a doctrine whose core was the doctrine of substance and accidents. As portrayed by Descartes and Locke, the Scholastics accepted the view that among the components of a thing were a substantial form and a number of real accidental forms, many of which corresponded to perceptible properties of the thing – its color, shape, temperature. They were also supposed to have accepted a sharp distinction between natural and unnatural motion. See also NEO-SCHOLASTICIS. C.G.Norm.