The Universities of the Italian Renaissance (review)

The early Italian university was a far cry from its modern counterpart. There was no library collection or, initially, any fixed university building; the faculty was relatively small; and its curriculum was narrowly focused. But as Paul Grendler's authoritative study The Universities of the Italian Renaissance shows, the template for many of the most important subsequent innovations in Western intellectual culture was worked out in a remarkably fertile period for the Italian university between about 1450 and 1600.

Grendler's history lucidly maps out the emergence of sixteen institutions of higher education throughout the Italian peninsula and Sicily between 1150 and 1596. Universities forms a sequel to Grendler's earlier and equally significant examination of Italian pre-university education, Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300-1600.

The first section of Grendler's study explores the creation, administration, and functioning of each of the Italian universities. Bologna and Padua were the largest, but several of the others compensated for their modest size with the superior quality of their faculties. A university could only take root where there was an infrastructure capable of sustaining (and dealing with) a male student population. Above and beyond educational fees, the cost of room and board was always a considerable issue for students, but the presence of extra-urban lodgers had a notable impact on the economies of their host cities, a heavy factor in the Venetian Republic's continuing to allow German Protestants (as well as Jews and the Greek Orthodox) to study in Padua in the wake of the Reformation and after the Council of Trent.

The attention Grendler devotes to faculty compensation demonstrates that the star system is no recent invention of the elite universities of the United States: while the average salary at Bologna in 1526-27 was about 306 Bolognese lire, the superstar legist Mariano Sozzini the Younger earned 5200 lire (1300 scudi) in 1552, one-sixth of the university's budget! Grendler elsewhere discusses a Pavian document from 1547 that gives a figure of 192 lire (28 Venetian ducats) for the rent of a house and meals for five students, including salary and board for two servants - the equivalent of two-thirds of a Venetian bricklayer's annual salary - but this is the only information in the book which renders possible a comparison of the actual value of university-related economic data for the reader unacquainted with the bewildering maze of Italian currencies in the sixteenth century; a subsequent edition would do a great service by including some sort of contextual economic apparatus.

Even when they did not begin as such, all Italian universities came to be administered by the communes in which they were located, and doctoral degrees (the norm, as the baccalaureate never gained a foothold in Italy) were granted through the territorial political authority after a course of study involving several years of regular attendance at lectures and a final comprehensive examination. Exceptions to this pattern were the doctorate in canon law, which was granted locally but authorized by the papacy (a privilege revoked after the Council of Trent); degrees granted by Counts Palatine, a curious extension of the authority invested in them by the Holy Roman Emperor; and the degrees granted by what Grendler refers to as 'partial' and 'paper' universities. These unusual arrangements permitted the awarding of the doctorate upon examination, with little or no time spent in the lecture hall. Erasmus earned his much-ridiculed doctorate in Turin in this way, after a period of only a few weeks there in the summer of 1506.

Grendler's enormously useful second section, dedicated to each of the disciplines taught in the early Italian university, spells out the creative tension in curricula which had been defined by the medieval intellectual tradition's investment in Aristotle. In every area but theology - a relatively late, and singularly static, entrant into the curricular mix - humanist developments, particularly in terms of philology, had a tremendous impact on the continuing relevance of...