Frying Pans, Limpets, Donkeys and Becs-jaunes: Thinking about Violence in Late Medieval Universities

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay examines the initiation ceremonies to which new recruits were often subjected in late medieval universities. These ceremonies theatricalised and ritualised violence, playing with metaphors and symbols and toying with the fine line between representation and reality. Why draw quite such attention to the notion that one was de-bestialising a new student (in the case of Heidelberg, Avignon, and others), re-clothing a country bumpkin (in the case of Siena, for example), or policing imagined violence by a hapless freshman (Pavia)? It was, I argue, because these ceremonies were engaging with the ways in which universities provided spaces to think about violence. The student perpetrators (both consciously and unconsciously) took aim at the hypocrisy of academic claims to represent a civilising space; they challenged the boundaries between physical violence and cruel words; and they parodied and drew attention to the hypocrisy of university regulations in institutions which in many ways continued to glorify violence. The parodic, subversive ruliness of the initiation ceremonies was a way to engage with ideas about violence.