Thomas Aquinas (1224/5–74), who wrote the most influential medieval theory of the emotions, takes us from the court and monastery to the schools. Thomas knew about courts, for he was born to a family of the lower nobility; his father was lord of the castle of Roccasecca, located about halfway between Rome and Naples and, at the time, part of the Kingdom of Sicily. Thomas also knew about ties of love and fidelity; indeed, two of his brothers fought for Emperor Frederick II (ruler of the Kingdom of Sicily), and one of them was executed for participating in a conspiracy against Frederick. Monasteries were also familiar to Thomas: around the age of five, he became an oblate (a child “offering”) at the monastery of Monte Cassino.

Still as an oblate, Thomas left Monte Cassino around 1239 to study the liberal arts in Naples. Between the time of Aelred's studies in a cathedral school and the capitulation of Raimond VII of Toulouse to the crusaders, universities had come to dominate higher education – at Paris, Montpellier, Oxford, Salerno, Bologna, and elsewhere. In general, the teachers (masters, scholastics) of the liberal arts stressed logic (also called dialectic); beyond the arts, at a few universities, some masters taught the “higher” studies of theology, law, and medicine. The university of Naples, founded by Frederick II to rival the already famous University of Bologna, was fairly unusual in offering lectures on Aristotle's natural philosophy and metaphysics. But even before finishing his education in the liberal arts, Thomas left the Benedictines and joined the Dominican Order in Naples in 1244. He was around twenty years old.

The Dominicans were “mendicants” (the Franciscans were another such group). “Mendicant” means “beggar,” and the chief features uniting the mendicant religious orders were their vocation of poverty and their begging of alms. Such orders were at home in the cities. The Dominicans, who received papal confirmation from Honorius III in 1216 – about a year after Raimond VI and his son petitioned Innocent III to restore their lands – were officially known as members of the Order of Friars Preachers. They were soon drawn to the universities, in part to recruit students and masters to their order and in part to study and prepare themselves to preach.