Early Modern Universities: Networks of Higher Education contains twenty essays by experts on early modern academic networks. Using a variety of approaches to universities, schools, and academies throughout Europe and in Central America, the book suggests pathways for future research.

This book includes most of the contributions presented at a conference on “Univ- sities and Science in the Early Modern Period” held in 1999 in Valencia, Spain. The conference was part of the “Five Centuries of the Life of the University of Valencia” (Cinc Segles) celebrations, and from the outset we had the generous support of the “Patronato” (Foundation) overseeing the events. In recent decades, as a result of a renewed attention to the institutional, political, social, and cultural context of scienti?c activity, we have witnessed a reappraisal of the role of the universities in the construction and development of early modern science. In essence, the following conclusions have been reached: (1) the attitudes regarding scienti?c progress or novelty differed from country to country and follow differenttrajectoriesinthecourseoftheearlymodernperiod;(2)institutionsofhigher learning were the main centers of education for most scientists; (3) although the universities were sometimes slow to assimilate new scienti?c knowledge, when they didsoithelpednotonlytoremovethesuspicionthatthenewsciencewasintellectually subversivebutalsotomakesciencearespectableandevenprestigiousactivity;(4)the universities gave the scienti?c movement considerable material support in the form of research facilities such as anatomical theaters, botanical gardens, and expensive instruments; (5) the universities provided professional employment and a means of support to many scientists; and (6) although the relations among the universities and the academies or scienti?c societies were sometimes antagonistic, the two types of institutionsoftenworkedtogetherinharmony,performingcomplementaryratherthan competing functions; moreover, individuals moved from one institution to another, as did knowledge, methods, and scienti?c practices.

A greater fluidity in social relations and hierarchies was experienced across Europe in the early modern period, a consequence of the major political and religious upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At the same time, the universities of Europe became increasingly orientated towards serving the territorial state, guided by a humanistic approach to learning which stressed its social and political utility. It was in these contexts that the notion of the scholar as a distinct social category gained a foothold and the status of the scholarly group as a social elite was firmly established. University scholars demonstrated a great energy when characterizing themselves socially as learned men. This book investigates the significance and implications of academic self-fashioning throughout Europe in the early modern period. It describes a general and growing deliberation in the fashioning of individual, communal and categorical academic identity in this period. It explores the reasons for this growing self-consciousness among scholars, and the effects of its expression - social and political, desired and real.

This is the first history of Oxford and Cambridge drama during the Tudor and Stuart period. It guides the reader through the theatrical worlds of England's universities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Early Modern Drama at the Universities opens up an exciting and challenging body of evidence and offers the reader a choice of three inroads into the corpus: institutions, intertexts, and individuals. How to get noticed at university? How to get into university in the first place, or a job afterwards? Sandis pinpoints the skills that were required for success and the role of playwriting and performance in the development of those skills. We follow Oxford and Cambridge students along their educational journey--from schoolboys to scholars to graduates in the workplace. For the first time, we see the extent to which institutional culture made the drama what it was: pedagogically-inspired, homosocial, and self-reflexive. It was primarily on a college level that students lived, worked, and proved themselves to the community. Therefore, this study argues, to understand university drama as a whole we must recreate it from the building blocks of individual college histories. The hundreds of plays that we have inherited from Oxford and Cambridge are steeped in Classical culture; many are written in Latin. Manuscript, not print, was the accepted medium for keeping records of student plays, and these handwritten copies were unique and personal. It is time to recognize these plays in the context of early modern English drama, to uncover the culture of drama at the universities where many leading playwrights of the age were trained.

Dramatic performances at the universities in early modern England have usually been regarded as insular events, completely removed from the plays of the London stage. Shakespeare and University Drama in Early Modern England challenges that long-held notion, illuminating how an apparently secluded theatrical culture became a major source of inspiration for Shakespeare and his contemporaries. While many university plays featured classical themes, others reflected upon the academic environments in which they were produced, allowing a window into the universities themselves. This window proved especially fruitful for Shakespeare, who, as this book reveals, had a sustained fascination with the universities and their inhabitants. Daniel Blank provides groundbreaking new readings of plays from throughout Shakespeare's career, illustrating how depictions of academic culture in Love's Labour's Lost, Hamlet, and Macbeth were shaped by university plays. Shakespeare was not unique, however. This book also discusses the impact of university drama on professional plays by Christopher Marlowe, Robert Greene, and Ben Jonson, all of whom in various ways facilitated the connection between the university stage and the London commercial stage. Yet this connection, perhaps counterintuitively, is most significant in the works of a playwright who had no formal attachment to Oxford or Cambridge. Shakespeare, this study shows, was at the center of a rich exchange between two seemingly disparate theatrical worlds.

Knowledge Transfer and the Early Modern University focuses on the teaching and cultural activities of the Akademia Zamojska, one of the most renowned universities of Central-Eastern Europe in the Early Modern Age. The Akademia Zamojska played its own part in the debate on the methodology of politics as a discipline, also offering an original contribution to the development of the concept of ‘political prudence’ which was to become so popular in the universities of Central Europe in this period. The institution embodied a largely successful attempt to knit up closer connections between the world of intellectual culture and that of political praxis.

Covering the period c.1530-c.1760, this book analyses the aims, facilities and achievements across all levels of education in England, institutional and informal, acknowledging in context the education situation in the rest of the British Isles, western Europe and North America.

History of Universities XXXIV/2 contains the customary mix of learned articles which makes this publication an indispensable tool for the historian of higher education. This volume offers a history of the teaching of ethics in early modern Europe.

This volume is the first attempt to assess the impact of both humanism and Protestantism on the education offered to a wide range of adolescents in the hundreds of grammar schools operating in England between the Reformation and the Enlightenment. By placing that education in the context of Lutheran, Calvinist and Jesuit education abroad, it offers an overview of the uses to which Latin and Greek were put in English schools, and identifies the strategies devised by clergy and laity in England for coping with the tensions between classical studies and Protestant doctrine. It also offers a reassessment of the role of the 'godly' in English education, and demonstrates the many ways in which a classical education came to be combined with close support for the English Crown and established church.