L'Université de Caen aux XVe et XVIe siècles. Identité et représentation (review)

Lyse Roy's dissertation on the University of Caen was defended in 1994 at the Université du Québec à Montréal. She has wisely taken several years of reflection and additional research before turning it into this comprehensive, well-organized book that duly acknowledges the work of her predecessors but also intelligently exploits a surprisingly large amount of archival material: matriculation rolls, procès-verbaux of meetings, financial records, and contemporary accounts by two sisteenth-century professors. The book has a short but informative English introduction and strategically placed French summaries throughout its five chapters.

The town of Caen, located in Basse Normandie near the English Channel, owed the founding of its university (1432) to the short-lived English occupation of Normandy at the end of the Hundred Years War. In 1452, the same year that King Charles VII ordered a reform of the University of Paris by the Norman cardinal archbishop of Rouen, he "recreated" the University of Caen to bolster the allegiance of Normandy and to assure trained civil servants. Although Caen never achieved the rank enjoyed by the universities of Paris and Orléans nor even the lesser rank of Angers, Bourges, or Valence, it survived the opposition of Paris and the ambivalent stance of the powerful Parlement of Rouen to serve Normandy well, despite several periods of institutional decline that ultimately sapped its autonomy.

Chapter 1 recounts the university's English and French origins and reviews the vicissitudes in its history over fifteen decades. Chapter 2 lays out its institutional structure (statutes, faculties, colleges) and the intellectual matters of curricula, degree requirements, and faculty publications. Chapter 3 fulfills the requirements of modern university history with intelligent prosopographical analyses of students and teachers and their social status. Chapter 4 deals with the love-hate relationship with the city and citizens of Caen that all medieval universities faced vis-à-vis the cities in which they functioned. In an attempt to gain urban support for the privileges and exemptions that were essential to its survival, the university tried to integrate the city into its ceremonies, theatrical presentations, and festivals. Chapter 5 depicts its dramatic decline after significant numbers of professors and students converted to Calvinism, ending with the Parlement of Rouen's 1586 reform of the university that reimposed Catholicism and introduced Jesuit pedagogy. The author seems to appreciate the latter but to deplore the discipline that accompanied it. This reader has to wonder if, in those times, the pedagogy could have succeeded without the discipline.

The lengthy Appendix I provides the 1515 library inventory of 278 books apportioned between theology (39%), law (29%), medicine (13%), arts (12%), and other books (7%). This list would have been much more valuable had an attempt been made to identify these books more specifically by their printers and dates of publication—information that was not beyond reach, since donors' names in most of the books have been identified at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. (Like many books originating in North America, this book continues to employ the former name of this institution.) Appendices II, III, and IV consist of charts of the matriculation registers, the geographical provenance of students (almost exclusively restricted to the seven Norman dioceses and the neighboring diocese of Le Mans), and the number of professors who took the statutory oath in general assemblies from 1457 to 1533.

Lyse Roy frequently deplores the loss of university autonomy that came with the reforms imposed by the Parlement in 1521 and 1586, but it is hard to see how the university could have otherwise survived. Her book provides more information about litigation, salary levels, and theatrical productions than some readers may want to know, but it is an important and welcome addition to the history of French universities.