Universities played a vital role in the intellectual life of Europe from 1500 to 1789. They educated the intellectual elite and professional classes of Europe. An enormous number of political and religious leaders obtained university degrees or studied in universities without taking degrees even though the percentage of the population attending universities was extremely low. Universities provided the institutional home in which scholars carried on advanced research and created most of the humanistic, medical, legal, and scientific advances. The period from 1500 to 1650 was an era of unprecedented achievement for universities. They remained important, but to a lesser degree, from 1650 through the end of the eighteenth century.
Characteristics
A university had several linked components. Professors conducted research and taught theology, canon law, civil law, medicine, and the arts subjects of grammar, rhetoric, the classics of ancient Rome and Greece, logic, philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy, plus other subjects on occasion, such as medical botany and Hebrew. Written statutes told them which texts and disciplines to teach. A limited formal academic structure provided rules for instruction and student conduct. Students came, lived, studied, and obtained degrees. The university awarded degrees certifying that the recipient had a high level of expertise in a discipline with the approval of a supreme legal authority, such as emperor, pope, or the ruler of the state in which the university existed.
Europe had forty-seven universities in 1500, then added another twenty-eight new universities that survived by 1650. Thereafter the number of new university foundations slowed considerably, while some older ones were closed or merged. The net gain between 1651 and 1790 was ten, making a total of about eighty-five European universities in 1790. The lands that are now Germany, Italy, France, and Spain had, in that order, the largest number of universities, while another fifteen were to be found in the rest of Europe. Although any designation of the most important universities is open to disagreement, the list would include Bologna, Padua, Pavia, and Pisa in Italy; Paris in France; Cologne and Heidelberg in Germany; Vienna in Austria; Louvain in Belgium; Leiden in the Netherlands; Oxford and Cambridge in England; St. Andrews in Scotland; Alcalá de Henares and Salamanca in Spain; Coimbra in Portugal; and Cracow in Poland.
Universities were not the same across Europe. Universities in northern Europe and Italy differed greatly in the importance given to different disciplines, the level of instruction, and the age of students. Paris and Oxford, the prototypical northern universities, emphasized instruction in arts and theology. Most northern European universities had a majority of young students fourteen to eighteen or nineteen years of age studying for the bachelor's degree in arts, plus a smaller number of advanced students, often future clergymen seeking master's and doctoral degrees in theology. They had a handful of students studying for doctorates in law and medicine. Most northern European universities, especially those in German-speaking lands, had only one or two professors each for medicine and law.
Italian universities emphasized law and medicine at an advanced level and had many professors for these subjects. For example, the University of Bologna had an average of forty professors of law and twenty to twenty-five professors of medicine in the sixteenth century. They taught arts subjects such as logic and philosophy as well as preparation for medicine and law. But they taught little theology and did not award bachelor's degrees. The greatest number of students obtained doctorates in law, the next largest number doctorates of medicine, followed distantly by students winning doctorates of arts or theology. The master's degree with the right to teach was awarded with the doctoral degree without a separate examination. Students at Italian universities were typically eighteen to twenty-five years of age. Because of the emphasis on law and medicine at the doctoral level, many northern Europeans, especially Germans, obtained bachelor's degrees in the north, then came to Italy to obtain doctoral degrees in these disciplines.
The size of universities varied greatly, partly because the age of students differed. Paris, with an estimated 12,000 to 20,000 students, most of them young, was undoubtedly the largest university. Up to 500 teachers, the vast majority in arts instructing younger students while studying for advanced degrees, taught at Paris. Salamanca also had several thousand mostly younger students. The University of Bologna, the largest Italian university, had about ninety professors and 1,500 to 2,000 students, all studying for doctorates, in the sixteenth century. But the vast majority of universities were smaller: thirty to forty professors taught 300 to 800 students. Some universities had only ten to twenty professors teaching 100 to 300 students. Student enrollment fluctuated from decade to decade as war, disease, and the presence or absence of a famous professor caused students to move from one university to another. Students frequently began at one university and took a degree at a second or third. They could do this easily because the texts studied were the same from university to university, and all lectures, texts, disputations, and examinations were in Latin.
A course met five days a week, typically Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday, with the professor lecturing for an hour or longer. In a typical lecture, the professor began by reading a section from a standard authority, such as a scientific work of Aristotle, a medical text of Galen (c. 130–c. 200), a legal passage from the Corpus iuris civilis, the collection of ancient Roman law, or the New Testament for theology. The students sitting on benches normally had copies of the text or passages. The professor next delivered a detailed analysis of the text, explaining how it should be interpreted, rejecting some interpretations, reconciling others, bringing to bear other texts, and explaining its larger meaning. He might range far beyond the original text. This was the heart of university instruction. In due time the professor published these detailed analyses of authoritative texts. Other professors used them in their own research and teaching or published contrary interpretations. Students taking notes and annotating the passage in their own copies had useful professional information, such as a full explanation of a legal text and guidance about how it might be used in cases. The lecture concluded with questions and answers between students and professors. They sometimes moved into the piazza or atrium for this less formal part of teaching.
Another important academic exercise was the disputation. A student or professor posted a notice announcing that he would defend a series of positions in his discipline at a certain time and place. Anyone was free to come and argue. Disputations offered practice in learned argument, which was considered a valuable skill in all disciplines and professions. For medical students, the annual public anatomy was also essential. Students stood in tightly packed rows to watch as a dissector cut open a body as a professor explained the organs. Public anatomies were scheduled for the coldest time of the year and went on without stop until the body putrefied days and weeks later.
After three or four years of study, the student presented himself before a committee of examining professors as a candidate for the bachelor's degree. Examinations for the doctoral degree were more complex. After four to seven years of additional study, the candidate presented himself to an examining committee, appointed by a college of doctors of law, medicine, arts, or theology. Colleges of doctors consisted of professors and other local men holding doctoral degrees in a subject. A typical examination required the student to explain several passages (called puncta or points) chosen at random from the required texts in the discipline, followed by wide-ranging questions from the examiners. A candidate for a medical degree might also be required to give his opinion on a medical case proposed to him. Students who satisfied the examiners of their competence were awarded doctoral degrees recognizing them to be experts in a subject and authorized to teach it. The degree was conferred in public ceremonies marked by much rejoicing and considerable expense.
Humanism
The introduction of humanism was the most important curricular change in the sixteenth century, and it involved much more than teaching the literary and historical classics of ancient Rome and Greece in their original languages. Humanists and professors with humanistic training transformed the study of several disciplines because they used their linguistic and historical skills and critical outlook of humanism in their research and teaching. The use of the Greek text of Aristotle and ancient commentaries in place of medieval commentaries offered new insights in philosophy. The rediscovery of ancient mathematical texts aided mathematicians, including Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), a professor of mathematics at the University of Pisa (1589–1592) and the University of Padua (1592–1610). Applying the techniques of humanistic textual criticism to the Corpus iuris civilis led to a better understanding of the historical context of Roman law. Called humanistic jurisprudence, this new approach had great influence in French and German universities but little in Italian universities.
Humanism had the greatest impact in medicine through a series of developments sometimes called "medical humanism." Professors of medicine used humanistic skills to examine the medical texts of Galen and other ancients in the original Greek. They found the medieval Latin translations of Galen wanting, so they produced better Latin translations for classroom use. Their enhanced understanding of the texts soon led them to find fault with Galen himself. The medical humanists also placed greater emphasis on anatomical study achieved through more frequent and more knowledgeable dissections of human bodies. Italian universities added professorships of medical botany in order to improve the study of the medicinal properties of plants. The universities of Padua and Pisa simultaneously founded the first university botanical gardens in 1543. Henceforward, students came to the garden in springtime to examine plants and learn about their medicinal properties. Clinical medicine began in the 1540s when a Paduan professor took students to hospitals in order to lecture on a disease at the bedside of the ill patient. Even though universities remained dedicated to lecturing on authoritative texts, these innovations gave greater emphasis to hands-on study, a tendency that continued in the following centuries. Universities in Italy, especially Padua, pioneered the changes in teaching and research, while universities elsewhere quickly followed.
In many northern European universities, especially in Germany, the introduction of humanists and humanistic studies into universities at the beginning of the sixteenth century produced bitter conflict with theologians. The fundamental issue was, how should the sacred texts of Christianity be studied and interpreted? The theologians answered by traditional medieval Scholastic methods, using the tools of logic, the philosophical framework of Aristotle, and guidance from Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and other great medieval theologians. Only in this way could God's truth be uncovered and error avoided. The humanists answered, not through Scholasticism and medieval commentaries, but through careful linguistic, grammatical, and rhetorical analysis of the texts in their original language, Latin, Greek, or Hebrew. This enabled man to understand God's personal message and to be persuaded to follow him. The two sides fought bitterly. The humanists heaped scorn on university theologians for confusing the word of God with man's interpretations, while the Scholastic theologians dismissed the humanists as grammarians lacking the theological training to understand what they read. The differences were great, because the stakes were university positions in this life and salvation in the next. The advent of the Protestant Reformation exacerbated the conflict as many, but not all, younger German humanists joined Luther while older humanists and most Scholastic theologians remained Catholic. In Italian universities, by contrast, humanists and the few theologians who taught in universities there mostly ignored each other.
The sixteenth was a century of enormous achievement for universities. It is difficult to name another century in which university professors produced so much important scholarship. Numerous major religious leaders also held university professorships. Martin Luther (1483–1546), professor of theology at the modest, newly founded (1502), and geographically isolated University of Wittenberg, began a religious revolution. His chief lieutenant, Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560), was a professor of Greek at Wittenberg. And many of their Catholic opponents were professors. Leaders with university training from other areas of life were equally important.
The eruption of the Protestant Reformation had both negative and positive impact on universities. Enrollment initially dropped sharply in German universities, especially those in lands that became Lutheran. But enrollment recovered by the end of the sixteenth century, and a few new universities, both Catholic and Protestant, were established. Despite their differences, students continued to move from university to university across religious boundaries. For example, German Protestant students continued to study and to get degrees in law from the Italian universities in Bologna, Padua, Pavia, and Perugia because the most famous professors of law taught there and because Italian civil governments protected them from prosecution for their religious beliefs.
Decline: 1650 to 1790
Universities continued to lead Europe in research and training leaders into the seventeenth century. But then new and different institutions of higher education rose to challenge them.
Protestants needed schools to train their clergymen in the new doctrines. Catholic universities obviously would not do this, and establishing new Protestant universities was difficult and expensive. Hence, small schools for theology and arts sprang up in the Protestant world. The Calvinist Genevan Academy (founded in 1559) was a famous example. It had seven or eight teachers for theology, Greek, Hebrew, arts, and law. The majority of the graduates became ministers. Some of these new schools sought to become universities teaching a broad range of subjects, but few succeeded.
In the Catholic world the new religious orders of the Catholic Reformation, led by the Jesuits, did the same on a much larger scale. The Society of Jesus, founded in 1540, originally established schools to train boys aged ten to sixteen in the humanities. A handful of Jesuit schools began to add upper-level classes in philosophy and theology in order to train members of the society. These schools, which were open to lay students, proved to be very popular because the Jesuits were excellent scholars and teachers and because the schools were free. Thus, a growing number of Jesuit schools with classes in logic, metaphysics, natural philosophy, mathematics, and theology appeared. Occasionally a Jesuit school also offered an introductory law course. Other religious orders of the Catholic Reformation followed the lead of the Jesuits.
Prodded by princes, the Jesuits also established boarding schools for noble boys and youths from about the ages of ten to twenty. These schools added classes in French, dancing, and horsemanship, all necessary skills for sons of the ruling classes, to the humanities, philosophy, and religion classes. Schools for nobles offering the opportunity to mix with peers attracted students who would otherwise have attended universities. They were expensive, but so were universities. Other Catholic Reformation religious orders again imitated the Jesuits.
Religious order schools offered a structured education in a morally upright and safe environment. By contrast, universities had loosely organized curricula, a licentious life style, and brawling students. Most university students carried swords, and many carried firearms. It is small wonder that many parents preferred religious schools, especially the boarding schools, for their sons. For example, the school for nobles at Parma, founded in 1601, rose from 550 students in 1605 to 905 in 1660, and a minority of the students were non-Italian. Approximately one-third of the students attended the higher classes, which duplicated the first year or two of university studies. Every young male from the ages of eighteen to twenty who attended a religious order school was a possible enrollment loss for universities. Protestant lands also established numerous highly regarded and socially selective schools that taught part of the arts curriculum of universities.
Learned societies offered intellectual and financial competition to universities needing scholars. A famous example was the Royal Society of London for the Advancement of Natural Knowledge, founded in 1662. Financially underwritten by member subscriptions, it supported scientific research, provided opportunities for contacts with other scholars, and published the results of research. Learned societies proliferated. Most Continental societies received funding from governments; some offered salaries to members who carried on studies in mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, and other subjects. And they did not have to teach. Overall, scientific societies offered attractive nonuniversity alternatives to scholars needing support. Scientific societies created an international network enabling scholars in a discipline to communicate their research.
The philosophes of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment attacked universities as not useful to society. They judged the traditional university curriculum to be incapable of training citizens to contribute knowledge to improve the state. So they persuaded rulers to create new, specialized institutions of higher learning to teach practical subjects, such as agricultural technology, engineering, military tactics, surgery, even the fine arts. These highly specialized and practically oriented schools competed with universities for students.
Some of the criticism of the philosophes was justified, but much was not. Universities had kept up with innovations in learning. Although Latin remained the common language of instruction and writing, and universities continued to teach traditional subjects, they had added professorships in new subjects such as history and geography. They had discarded Aristotelian science in favor of Galileo's mathematical physics and had then adopted experimental science, all in the course of a century. And university research in medicine continued to lead the way, as university professors produced all of the important medical advances of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Professors in traditional subjects produced nontraditional works of scholarship. For example, Adam Smith (1723–1790), who taught logic and moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow from 1751 to 1764, produced An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in 1776. Universities continued to award degrees certifying that the lawyer, judge, physician, clergyman, teacher, and civil servant were qualified to practice their professions. Learned societies, religious schools, and specialized schools could not do this. Overall, universities played essential intellectual and social leadership roles in European life that no other institution could replace.
Bibliography
Brockliss, L. W. B. French Higher Education in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: A Cultural History. Oxford, 1987. Comprehensive study.
Curtis, Mark H. Oxford and Cambridge in Transition 1558– 1642: An Essay on Changing Relations between the English Universities and English Society. Oxford, 1959.
De Ridder-Symoens, Hilde, ed. A History of the University in Europe. Vol. 2, Universities in Early Modern Europe (1500–1800). Cambridge, U.K., 1996. Information on all aspects of universities with emphasis on general patterns and the university in society. Good on northern universities.
Farge, James K. Orthodoxy and Reform in Early Reformation France: The Faculty of Theology of Paris, 1500–1543. Leiden, 1985. A detailed study of the personnel and activities of the major Catholic theological faculty.
Grendler, Paul F. The Universities of the Italian Renaissance. Baltimore and London, 2002. Comprehensive study of Italy's sixteen universities, 1400–1625, with extensive bibliography.
History of Universities. Avebury and Oxford, 1981–. Annual volume founded by the late Charles B. Schmitt. Includes articles, bibliographical surveys of recent research, and reviews.
Jurriaanse, M. W. The Founding of Leyden University. Leiden, 1965.
Maag, Karin. Seminary or University? The Genevan Academy and Reformed Higher Education, 1560–1620. Aldershot, U.K., and Brookfield, Vt., 1995. Important for Calvinist influence plus the universities of Heidelberg and Leiden.
Mc Conica, James K., ed. The History of the University of Oxford. Vol. 3, The Collegiate University. Oxford, 1986. Excellent study of all aspects of Oxford between 1485 and 1603.
Rummel, Erika. The Humanist-Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and Reformation. Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1995. Study of the battles between humanists and Scholastics, mostly in Germany.
Schmitt, Charles B. Aristotle and the Renaissance. Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1983. Short survey describing how Renaissance university scholars approached Aristotle in innovative ways.
Tyacke, Nicholas, ed. The History of the University of Oxford. Vol. 4, Seventeenth-Century Oxford. Oxford, 1997.
Wear, A., R. K. French, and I. M. Lonie, eds. The Medical Renaissance of the Sixteenth Century. Cambridge, U.K., 1985. Excellent collection of studies on medical humanism, anatomy, and other aspects of the medical Renaissance.
—PAUL F. GRENDLER
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