FACOLTÀ UNIVERSITARIA. — The expression may be explained historically in two senses. According to the first and simpler, f. meant the license (facultas) ubique docendi; but the term subsequently came to designate the body of studies concerning which the facultas could be conferred.
It should also be noted that the term « university » did not indicate the totality of studies taught in several branches of knowledge, but rather the organized corporation of students or professors (corpus, collegium, societas, communitas, consortium or universitatis consortium, or also communio consortium, or simply universitas scholarium or magistrorum).
The term f. subsequently came, especially under the influence of the scholastic organization of studies, to indicate the totality of studies relating to a particular field or discipline. Thus it was used for law, divided into civil and canon law; for grammar, rhetoric, and philosophy; and likewise for theology, medicine, or physics. In this sense the term facultas is correlative to that of collegium. The organization of doctors, docentes, in the same branch of learning was likewise designated in this way: there were the collegium iuridicum, the collegium medicinae, and similar bodies.
These colleges could be separate and form a university in themselves. According to the concept of the university of studies today, they might have seemed incomplete. More often, a single universitas was divided into internal sectors, corresponding to an equal number of colleges or facultates, thereby preparing the more modern concept of universitas studiorum. The various f. or colleges had their own heads and a certain internal autonomy within the universitas. A typical division of this kind is found in the University of Padua from the earliest period of its history. Bologna, too, added to its original nucleus for the teaching of law (ars or facultas iuridica) other artes at the beginning of the thirteenth century, or f. for medicine and philosophy.