The early modern period represents a formidable era for the history of higher learning. Institutions multiplied, differing in their organization, structure, size, reputation, curriculum, and relations with political and religious authorities, yet they all played significant roles in transforming their society and were all affected by major changes that stimulated the expansion of high culture. Indeed, the educational landscape became much more complex than it had been in the Middle Ages, being confronted with the centralization of the state, the advent of the printing press, the progress of knowledge, the proliferation of religious confessions, and tensions between these events.
This collective work brings together twenty essays, which are of a high quality and written by recognized specialists in the field. It covers various geographical areas: France, Italy, Switzerland, England, the Dutch Republic, Ireland, and Scotland. The chronological framework, although extending from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century, favors above all the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As a general proposal, the book considers the university not in opposition to or on the margins of the new institutions of knowledge that emerged in the modern period, which have been privileged in historiography as being solely vehicles for modernity; rather, it presents institutions of higher learning, old and new, as part of a local, national, or international educational network, and integrates them into the network of the republic of letters.
Institutions are not analyzed in isolation and for themselves, but as beings integrated into a larger whole. This book situates itself at the crossroads of a renewal of the history of scholarly culture by integrating the history of networks, currently in full expansion, as well as the new history of knowledge which sets places of knowledge, the circulation of knowledge, and the mobility of scholars at the heart of its concerns. In this book, the nodes (basic units) are made up of institutions but also people (teachers, students, authors) and objects that mediate knowledge, which are interrelated and interconnected. The educational landscape of the modern period thus takes on a more dynamic dimension, and these essays challenge several (mostly negative) received ideas about the universities of the modern period.
The book is divided into four parts. The first part, entitled “The Political Entanglement of Institutions,” highlights the complexity of the relationships between political and religious powers and institutions of higher learning and their impact on the curriculum. Moreover, through the individual trajectories of scholars, we can observe their role in the progress of knowledge and the integration of the intellectual currents of the period.
The second part, entitled “Locality and Mobility: Institutions, the Migrations of Scholars and Scholarships,” makes room in the institutions of higher learning for women and natives of Spanish America: two social groups often neglected by traditional historiography. We also see the complexity of the educational network in the Dutch Republic, where the new institutional forms made it possible to respond more specifically to the needs of civic culture. In addition, the issue of mobility is addressed through Swiss students financially supported by cities to study abroad in the sixteenth century, or through the topic of scholarly tourism in the eighteenth century, which essentially ignores university towns.
The third part, “Communication, Collaboration and the Circulation of Academic Knowledge,” puts forward the concept of network on another scale by examining, for example, the performativity of English university theater conceived as a ritual that created some social ties and jeopardized others. As for the case of the University of Aberdeen, the institution was positioned at the heart of an international network fed by the European mobility of Aberdonians. Finally, the subjects of the book's last part (“Cooperative Interregional Worlds: Production, Markets, Travel and Trade”) is the networks of the academic book market (Paris, Basel, Zurich) and their circulation of books and collectible items.
By providing remarkable national syntheses and original one-off analyses, by refusing to present old institutional forms in opposition to new ones but rather seeking to examine their connections, this work contributes to renewing the field of the history of universities and scholarly culture in early modern Europe and, I hope, will motivate research to follow this new path.
