Scholasticism

Scholasticism is best understood not as a set of doctrines, but as a method, or body of intellectual practices. In particular, Scholasticism developed as the method through which Christian thinkers of the patristic and medieval periods gradually transformed the narratives of Scripture into a theological system. Scholastic method, then, has its roots in the earliest Christian times. It reached its fullest development in the schools of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The disintegrating Scholasticism of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries laid the foundations for modern forms of intellectual discourse.