Violence, lechery and lectures: the medieval university

What did the Middle Ages ever do for us? One invention it provided to western civilization was the university: the gathering of students and teachers into one urban space to follow a formalised structure of advanced education. This course will introduce the development of these institutions, their variety and their social context. It will ask you to consider not only what advantages they may have brought but what problems they created. What dynamics encouraged their establishment? How did they relate to existing structures of power, and did they play a part in transforming those structures? We will also discuss how the universities themselves may have altered under the influence of intellectual changes from outside their walls.

We will do all this by spanning across the extent of Europe, from Glasgow to Salerno and from Cracow to Coimbra, but we will also focus on England: one part of Europe which was underpopulated in terms of universities but where a particular style of institution developed. This course, therefore, will invite you to think about the setting in which you are staying during this summer programme and to ask yourself how Cambridge is defined by its medieval colleges and university institutions.