Commune and Studio in Late Medieval and Renaissance Siena (review)

This is a long and detailed institutional history of the University of Siena from 1357 to 1500, with occasional ventures into the sixteenth century. The book is almost exclusively a study of actions of the city government toward the university (legislation, finances, etc.) based on an exhaustive study of the archival records, many of which other scholars have explored.

The history of the University of Siena in these 150 years is straightforward and well-known. After its beginning in or about 1246, the university went through difficult times in the last forty years of the fourteenth and the first few years of the fifteenth century before stabilizing. Its most innovative feature was the Casa della Sapienza, a state-directed student residence. The communal government founded the Casa della Sapienza in order to attract non-Sienese Italians and ultramontane students at a time when the university was at a low ebb. State control and close integration into the university made the Casa della Sapienza different from privately founded and operated student colleges in other Italian university towns. Opened in 1416, the Casa della Sapienza attracted a steady stream of students. It reached a height of forty-seven students in residence and usually had thirty to forty in the fifteenth century.

From the 1420s onward, the university's fortunes improved. For the rest of the fifteenth century Siena was a middle-sized university best known for law. It attracted students from Siena, Tuscany, the rest of Italy, and some non-Italians, the majority Spaniards and Germans. Denley concludes that the University of Siena was successful because it offered "a medium-sized, compact, well-organised and closely supervised university in a relatively peaceful city" (406), an unsurprising view congruent with the judgments of previous scholars.

This book began as a doctoral dissertation submitted in 1981. After nearly thirty years of research and over 500 folio-sized pages, Denley's findings about the University of Siena between 1357 and 1500 are disappointing. It was completely controlled by the communal government, student organizations had little power, and the professors identified with the power elite of Siena, all of which scholars have known for some time. Denley does not uncover anything original, unless one counts as significant such tidbits as the Commune of Siena first broached the idea of the Casa della Sapienza in 1388, rather than in 1393. There is little here that Lodovico Zdekauer, Giulio Prunai, Giuliano Catoni, Paolo Nardi, Giovanni Minnucci, and Leo Košuta have not already found, or others summarized. Occasionally Denley raises his head from his notecards to make small and obvious comments about ways in which Siena resembled other Italian universities, points previously made by other scholars (although he is loath to acknowledge this).

There are missed opportunities even within Denley's self-imposed boundary of institutional history. He raises the issue of the relationship between the university, the faculty of theology, and local convents. Simona Negruzzo (whose work is not cited) published in 1995 an excellent book about theology at the University of Pavia, which might have served as a model for an examination of the status of theology and the relationship between university and convents at Siena. But immediately after raising the issue, Denley drops it, even though members of local convents taught theology, metaphysics, and logic in the university. Another example: Denley comments that the Sienese state was a middle-sized state and the studium was a middle-sized university, and that both did reasonably well in these roles. He speculates that there is some connection between their similar status, but says nothing more.

Government decrees and payment records are only a part of institutional history. Universities were and are devoted to teaching and scholarship, which means that teachers and students are part of the institution. But there is no speculation about the number of students, and no information about the content...