L'Académie de Lausanne entre Humanisme et Réforme (ca. 1537-1560) by Karine Crousaz (review)

Research on early-modern educational reforms has tended to focus on the Holy Roman Empire, where both Protestant and Catholic rulers founded academies and universities to train the pastors, teachers, and civil servants needed to staff the expanding bureaucracies of the early-modern state. There are relatively few works on the Reformed academies of Francophone lands, in part because few records from those schools survived the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Crousaz's book, which originated as a dissertation at Lausanne, provides significant new insights into the motives and operation of the first Protestant academy to be established in a French-speaking territory.

Crousaz's goal is to counter the impression given by earlier studies of the Lausanne Academy that focused undue attention on the study of theology, as if the Academy were chiefly a school for future pastors. Her examination of the Academy's creation and early years demonstrates the importance of the school more broadly as a training ground for Bern's future elite and as a place where French Protestants could send their sons to get the best humanist education available without fear of persecution. She uses a broad range of sources, both published and unpublished, to give a detailed picture of both personnel and pedagogy at Lausanne.

Crousaz presents her findings in six lengthy chapters. The first sets the religious and educational context for the creation of the Academy, especially the spread of humanism and Bern's conquest of the Vaud. In chapter 2 she provides a detailed history of the school's development over its first two decades. The question mark in the title reflects the fact that although Bern endowed lectureships in Greek and Hebrew for educating the territory's clergy in 1537, the Academy itself was not founded until the early 1540s. Her study continues through the Academy's "golden years" during the 1550s to the major controversy that led most of its professors and students to leave Lausanne for Geneva, where they helped found the Geneva Academy. The third chapter looks at finances, not only the salaries for teachers and the cost of buildings and books but also the public stipends used to support boys studying at the Academy. Chapter 4 discusses the professors at the Academy, highlighting the importance of Curio Secundo Curione and Maturin Cordier, whose reputations as humanist pedagogues helped draw students to Lausanne. Chapter 5 examines the students, particularly those who received public stipends. Chapter 6 discusses the curriculum at all levels, from the lowest grades in the schola privata where boys began the study of Latin to the lectures in Greek, Hebrew, arts, and theology in the schola publica, which corresponded to the lower level of a university. In several appendices she reproduces documents illustrative of the curriculum and gives the names of boys who received stipends from Bern.

One might wish that Crousaz could have continued her study beyond 1560 to show how the Academy evolved beyond the first generation. By concentrating on a relatively short period of time, however, she is able to go into greater depth. It is that depth and level of detail that sets her book apart from earlier works about the Lausanne Academy and makes it a welcome contribution to the study of early-modern education more generally.