The Universities of the Italian Renaissance (review)

Reviled by contemporaries and neglected by modern scholars, the Italian Renaissance universities have finally received their due, and over the last thirty years the specialists who have studied them constitute a veritable who's who of Renaissance research, beginning with Paul Oskar Kristeller, Eugenio Garin, Paolo Sambin, Charles B. Schmitt, and continuing through the penultimate generation. In this book, Paul Grendler has distilled a good portion of this work as well as a lifetime of his own experience studying Italian culture. The result is a contribution that is erudite as well as entertaining; an instructive treatise as well as a useful reference tool for anyone interested in the topic.

As the story unfolds, we are reminded of the chief moments in Renaissance university history, from the regeneration after the Black Plague to the restoration after the Italian Wars. The "grand medieval impulse to create universities," as Grendler terms it, became the grand Renaissance impulse, mutatis mutandis, exerted by communal and princely governments from time to time for reasons of prestige. We are invited to assist at each of the main moments in the yearly life cycle of a university: from the matriculation of students to the holding of public lectures; from student disputations to the awarding of the degree. And we follow, step by step, the administrative itinerary, from the hiring of professors to the introduction of new subjects; from the establishment of new instructional tools like gardens of simples and anatomical theaters, to the exchange of information regarding the comportment of students and teachers. For a while in the thirteenth century, the university of Bologna was essentially run by the students; this dangerous lapse was soon corrected, and throughout the Renaissance, universities were run exclusively by governments with a generous amount of useful advice proffered by the senior professors.

Sweeping through each of the main categories of intellectual endeavor within the universities, Grendler provides individual histories of the various subject areas: medicine, mathematics, logic, natural and moral philosophy, humanities, law, theology, including the points of intersection, as for instance between mathematics (including astronomy and astrology) and medicine, due to the heavenly bodies' therapeutic significance. A single theme unites the various strands in this part of the argument with the analysis of the universities' cultural and political relations. That theme is reform: within each of the disciplines, doctrines and methods inherited from the Middle Ages were replaced, where possible, by new ideas drawn from the studia humanitatis. Already well under way by the early fifteenth century, the trend became inescapable in the sixteenth century.

Considering the amount of effort that has gone into this volume, as well as the quantity of earlier scholarship on which it is based, we still know surprisingly little about some aspects of university history—for instance, about the students. Setting aside what they may have thought or done about university reform, what did they do after graduation? If the account of presences in the growing civil services is still impressionistic, so also is the account of education's political and social role. Even the size of the student body itself is still notoriously difficult to establish. Apart from the continuation, at least through the fifteenth century, of the students' customary medieval peregrinatio among several universities before finally (if ever) settling down to a degree, there was the increasingly prevalent habit of showing up only on examination days, leaving lecture halls half-empty except for curious visitors and students dwelling year-round in the university town. Such behavior defies any simple headcount based on the remaining enrollment records. When students happened to be in residence, they—and their favorite taverns and other meeting places—are visible only as occasional entries in the police records of increasingly vigilant and punitive state bureaucracies (presumably, run by ex-students), at the expense of a better picture of student life. University dress is conspicuous here mainly...