Les Échanges entre les universités européennes à la Renaissance (review)

This volume of twenty-four essays considers the international character of European universities from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries. Its title is slightly misleading. The focus here is not so much upon the exchange between universities as it is upon the social and cultural impact of a highly mobile early modern student body and professoriate. Thus, Nicole Bingen follows French students in Italy; Pierre Civil considers the fate of Spanish students and Charles Béné that of Croatian students abroad; Patrick Ferté examines the role of Toulouse at the crossroads of Spain and Italy while Marie-Claude Tucker looks at Scots studying law there; Rainer C. Schwinges studies recruitment patterns at German universities. Several essays raise important issues. James K. Farge, who has amassed more than 40,000 records for students at the University of Paris in the early sixteenth century, discusses the range of institutional sources available and demonstrates the need to use these critically and comparatively. Hilde de Ridder-Symoens, studying Douai, shows how creative use of alternative sources can compensate for a lack of institutional documentation. Ian Maclean, similarly drawing on evidence which allows for sharp qualitative distinctions, reveals how students travelling to study medicine at Padua, Basle and Montpellier would have been offered strikingly different forms of medical instruction, and Richard Cooper shows how the student body at Turin, as at other universities studied in this volume, became less international in the second half of the sixteenth century, when the university came more and more to function as a training ground for a local administrative and clerical corps. Two essays in particular stand out from the pack. Jean-Marie Le Gall studies the fortunes of the religious orders in the universities. Though the orders were among the first to found colleges in the thirteenth century, the interests of the orders and the universities diverged considerably in later centuries. While learning could play an important role within monastic reform movements, colleges did not constitute important instruments of spiritual and institutional renewal within the orders (the Jesuits excepted) until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Le Gall argues convincingly that the seeming disinterest of the orders in the universities was calculated: the universities could contribute little to the reaffirmation of ideals of communal living and the sacerdotal nature of monastic life. Lucia Felici investigates the Erasmusstiftung at Basle — Erasmus's bequest created more than 12,000 subsidies and bursaries for students to attend the University of Basle in the sixteenth century. Until Calvinism was established in 1570, these were largely offered without geographical or confessional prejudice. Felici paints a vivid portrait of the dynamic relationship which existed between a large cosmopolitan body of students and professors, the rather small university and the international Basle presses. Many of these essays are based on extensive research, some of which is presented here for the first time. While as is to be expected, contributions are of varying quality, the volume as a whole deserves to be consulted by all students of the early modern university.