Universities in the Holy Roman Empire

Abstract

The history of universities in the Holy Roman Empire has long interested scholars, and it is striking to see a raft of new publications based on doctoral dissertations addressing not only particular foundations in Central Europe but also wider research questions. They have in common an interest in the ways in which university foundations responded to the non-academic interests of late medieval society. The books all assume a degree of knowledge about the role of late medieval universities—yet they were very different from their modern counterparts. Therefore, I will set out some general characteristics of universities in the Holy Roman Empire before turning to the individual books. The pre-modern university was not an institution of tertiary education comparable to today’s universities. It was a corporately constituted association of masters and students, which was legally and economically privileged in a number of ways. From the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, universities...