Studenten und Gelehrte: Studien zur Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte deutscher Universitäten im Mittelalter / Students and Scholars: A Social and Cultural History of Medieval German Universities (review)

Since the appearance of his seminal work, Deutsche Universitätsbesucher im 14. und 15. Jahrhundert(Stuttgart, 1986), Rainer Christoph Schwinges has been among the foremost scholars of late-medieval universities. His most recent work—a collection of his essays spanning the last quarter-century—is ample testimony to both the depth and breadth of his contributions to the field.

After a brief foreword, Schwinges divides the twenty-five essays that follow into five thematically organized sections. The themes, as Schwinges himself acknowledges, necessarily overlap one another. This overlap can at times be distracting, especially when coupled with the unavoidable repetition inherent in such a collection. In fact, several essays duplicate entire paragraphs and pages from earlier sections. Nevertheless, taken together, the essays clearly articulate Schwinges’s central argument that “no university, whether in Germany or elsewhere, hovered above medieval society or formed an island in a sea of social inequality” (p. 206). Here Schwinges’s long battle to overturn the last vestiges of Herbert Grundmann’s more idealistic portrait is clearly evident.

Many of the most groundbreaking essays appear in section 3. Here Schwinges explores social and economic distinctions within the university by exploiting prosopographical data drawn from university matriculation records. Schwinges highlights the underlying social, political, and economic structures that shaped, and in many ways, determined, the careers of medieval university students. Perhaps most important, and controversially, these essays downplay the role of universities as vehicles of significant social mobility. In fact, he argues, the very structure of medieval universities reinforced social distinctions.

Also of interest are Schwinges’s more recent forays into cultural history, especially the essay “Stiefel, Wams und Studium,” which applies insights drawn from Schwinges’s prosopographical work to the experiences of a single individual. Here, in the person of Gerhard von Wieringen, a university student’s daily life, aspirations, career opportunities, and support networks are revealed in intimate detail. Schwinges employs these details deftly to illustrate both the limits and potential of university study. Although these essays represent something of a departure for Schwinges, they provide some of the most compelling reading.

The index is unfortunately too brief to serve adequately such a significant collection of articles, as is the foreword. Moreover, readers may have found it helpful to have the original date and source of the articles included in the table of contents, especially in light of the author’s desire that this work also serve as evidence of developing trends within the field of late-medieval university history. Several of the English-language articles, especially the one that begins this collection, appear to have been hastily translated. Finally, the text is marred by several editing problems, most notably in the scanning of articles that originally appeared in Hilde de Ridder-Symoens’s two-volume A History of the University in Europe(Cambridge, UK, 1992, 1996).

None of these complaints, however, diminish the significance of the works represented in this volume. Although specialists will likely be familiar with most of the essays, they will appreciate the convenience of having these essays accessible in a single volume. Nonspecialists looking to better understand the development of European universities and their roles within late-medieval and early-modern society will surely find much to consider.