This study explores one means of imparting Latin literacy in early medieval society: the so-called "external school," often presumed to have been a common feature of medieval monastic education. It questions the prevalence of this institution and whether the external school can be used as evidence of relatively widespread literacy among the non- clerical Carolingian population in particular.
By precisely defining and chronicling external schooling, M.M. Hildebrandt invites the reader to reconsider conventional notions about the nature of the Carolingian educational program. The author...

Benedictine Monks at the University of Paris, A.D. 1229-1500 presents biographical information concerning the 671 Benedictine and Cluniac monks identified as attending the University of Paris in the late Middle Ages. Special attention is given to the 126 monks from this group promoted to the doctorate in theology and canon law. The author has used a wide range of sources, discussed thoroughly in the introduction, in the preparation of this work. Important primary sources include university, faculty, and collegiate records, papal registers, abbatial lists, minutes of general chapters...

The history of universities has long been an object of scholarly research. Nonetheless, the proposed questions and themes have too often been handled in isolation. The present collection, divided into three thematic sections, attempts to connect subjects which are bound together in the context of the idea of the university and the course of its historical realization.
The first section concentrates on the rational process which characterized the development of the university. Section two is devoted to the relationship between the organizational forms of the university and the literary...

This volume includes nine studies both on the history of the University of Paris and on French universities in general during the Middle Ages, mainly from an institutional and social point of view.
The first part is devoted to the XIIIth century, i.e. to the birth of the university, to its first institutions, to the growth of the earliest colleges and to the struggle between the scholars and external authorities, namely the Pope, the Bishop, the Chancellor and the King.
The second part deals with the XVth century: the geographical recruitment of students, careers of teachers and the...

This book makes a substantial contribution to the study of Florentine history. It answers an important but hitherto unresolved question: why did the Florentine Republic keep a university in its capital city between 1385 and 1473 rather than follow the example of other Italian states in maintaining a university in a subject town?
Based on a wide range of newly-found sources, it discloses that the University owed its survival to the support of the Florentine elite, especially the Medici family and its followers. It reveals systematically the close ties between the University and major...

In this work, the author contributes to our understanding of the formation of medicine as a university discipline by explaining how a collection of medical works known as the Ars medicine ("The Art of Medicine") came to form the basis of medical teaching in the early universities. Based upon extensive manuscript research, this study explains how the collection evolved to suit the needs of university medical teaching and how it helped to establish Hippocratic-Galenic medicine as the new medical othodoxy. Focusing upon the medical faculty at the University of Paris, the book investigates...

This volume collects essays published in the last 20 years. They deal with medicine in the university world of thirteenth to sixteenth century Italy, discussing both the internal academic milieu of teaching and learning and its relation to the lively urban social, economic, and cultural context in which medieval and Renaissance Italian university medicine grew up. Topics covered include the complex interaction of continuity and change in the transition from scholastic to humanistic medicine; humanist presentations of medical lives; the activities of physicians who moved among the worlds of...

This volume studies the teaching of Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics (the standard textbook for moral philosophy) in the universities of Renaissance Italy. Special attention is given to how university commentaries on the Ethics reflect developments in educational theory and practice and in humanist Aristotelianism. After surveying the fortune of the Ethics in the Latin West to 1650 and the work's place in the universities, the discussion turns to Italian interpretations of the Ethics up to 1500 (Part Two) and then from 1500 to 1650 (Part Three). The focus is on the...

The volume presents a collection of articles on medieval history of universities, published over three decades. Covering the schools in northern France in the 12th century to the German universities of the 15th century the "studia" are considered as a system of learning and living. The high expectations of medieval society, the constitutional framework of learning, central institutions of the universities, individual careers and especially the grip of the church on the teaching of theologians receive attention. Academic freedom and orality of communication are both taken into account. In this...

The papers published here were presented at an international symposium held in 2002 at Heidelberg, at which international experts investigated the literary output at the end of the 14th century and at the beginning of the 15th of the first three universities founded within the medieval Holy Roman Empire north of the Alps: Prague, Vienna and Heidelberg. The articles provide insights into a great variety of academic texts till now rarely examined and the specific conditions of their production, and trace the interrelations between these universities which were narrowly interlinked by many...