 All of these forms, disputation, quaestio, and quodlibetal question, represent what has been called “the institutionalization of conflict” in medieval intellectual life. Raising questions or objections about anything from basic matters of Christian belief — the existence of God, the coherence of the doctrine of the Trinity — to important contemporary controversies — the power of the papacy or secular princes, ecclesiastical corruption — was not only permitted but encouraged as part of the structure of university life. Thus, there was an important kind of intellectual and academic freedom enshrined in these practices of formal and public debate. On the other hand, those questions were also in some ways controlled exactly because they were brought into an existing institution and structured in a particular way. Thus, the questions, even though asked, were in another way made less dangerous and subversive by being posed and controlled from within the university, which itself operated under the watchful eye of the Church. (For a study of the ways in which medieval philosophical disputation made its way out of the university, affecting the larger culture, see Novikoff 2013.)