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The Universities of the Italian Renaissance

Posted on: Thursday, 8 January 2004, 06:00 CST

The Universities of the Italian Renaissance. By Paul F. Grendler. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 2002. Pp. xx, 511. $49.50.)

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 medievalperegrinatio 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 yearround 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 by its absence-especially where student nudity was a practical joke or protest. Ceremonial furnishes antiquarians with but a quaint spectacle, in spite of its appeal even to our day. And until we have a comparative history of university monuments, ornaments, and architecture, including landscape in the age of university gardens, we can know little about the topographies upon which generations of students shuffled their youthful feet.

Classrooms, moreover, were more than mere stages upon which faculty delivered the principles of the arts and sciences. Yet we know almost as little about what was declaimed as we do about what students made of it-apart from second- and third-hand reports largely by administrators. Professors' papers, including lesson plans, occasionally wound up in university libraries. Paul Oskar Kristeller painstakingly verified the existence of this material by consulting the shelf lists at Padua and elsewhere. Nancy Siraisi and others have studied portions of it. To be sure, then as now, some professors simply cribbed from their (or others') published works or else read from manuscripts they intended to publish. To this extent, the history of university intellectual life, especially from the sixteenth century onward, coincides with the history of Renaissance intellectual life as a whole, and the method of research can safely rely on the many printed texts and occasional modern editions, along with specialized studies of the better-known figures. Inevitably, perhaps, this portion of the history covers some well-trodden ground. In the section on logic we are retold of the emergence of more empirically oriented forms of inference as the scientific revolution took root. In the section on natural philosophy we find rehearsed the mathematization of the physical world by the pre- Galileians. In the section on medicine we review Andreas Vesalius' critique of Averroes. We rediscover the difference between the via Thomae and the via Scott in the section on theology. In the section on law we are reintroduced to familiar friends like Andrea Alciato, pioneer humanist jurist, and Lelio Torelli, whose editio princeps of the Pisan Pandects set humanist jurisprudence on a new footing.

At times, the larger themes seem to crowd out the smaller ones that must have formed the context. How to account for all the varieties of university Aristotelianism? Even to analyze in full the Platonic challenge would take a book again this size. At other times, the narrow focus on the sixteen or so soi-disant universities gets in the way of the intellectual story. Understandably, the Collegio Romano is neglected as an institution, due to the axiom (p. 4) whereby universities must have faculties of law and medicine; yet as we find in chapter 7, scholars on its faculty had a fundamental influence on Galileo Galilei's methodological revisions. In a related way, we are told that "the Counter Reformation did not greatly change Italian universities" (p. 195) inasmuch as professors and students continued to enjoy a certain amount of freedom of inquiry in spite of tighter ecclesiastical discipline, and expedients continued to be found for awarding degrees to Protestant students. Yet we know that cultural life as a whole was profoundly affected.

As long as students obeyed the rules and professors continued to draw adequate salaries, according to this reading, universities flourished; and presumably, learning took place. By around the year 1600, things began to change. A varied supply of education began to correspond to an increasingly varied demand. Religious orders and noble colleges competed with universities and private tutors for student attendance. Professors struggled to defend their imperiled privileges. Meanwhile, a world of peaceful and orderly university environments "within benevolent city-states gave way to a world of status-reinforcing institutions instrumentalized by increasingly power-hungry elites. Renaissance education was replaced by its early modern opposite. Never mind that "the organization and structure of Italian law remained fundamentally the same from the age of Bartolo until that of Napoleon. Stability reigned, because the great glossators and commentators had successfully adapted ancient Roman Law to the needs of European society" (p. 472). Scipione Maffei and Gaetano Filangieri, the preNapoleonic precursors of modern jurisprudence, would have disagreed with that. But seen from the perspective of the late eighteenth century, and perhaps from our own, distinctions begin to disappear, and the general lines of a story as colossally complex, in its institutional, cultural, social, and intellectual ramifications, as a fifteenth-century commentary on some ancient text, begin to assume a relatively uniform contour. Who will dare to bring the wrinkles back into view?

BRENDAN DOOLEY

International University Bremen

Copyright Catholic University of America Press Oct 2003

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