What was is like to be a student in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance? The university is a medieval invention, and the famous Studium of Bologna was one of the first. This event will showcase multidisciplinary research, not into the university as an institution, but into daily student life, and how that is presented in a new book and a dedicated museum. The presence of students shaped towns like Bologna, Siena, Pavia and Padova into university cities, that are still recognizable as such.
Program
‘la Scolara’ from 1492 in the San Petronio (Bologna, Italy).
16.00 Welcome by Dr. Susanna de Beer, Vice-director and Director of Ancient Studies and Classical Reception
16.15 Dr. Annemarieke Willemsen (National Museum of Antiquities, Leiden / KNIR Museum Fellow): “The material culture of student life in medieval and Renaissance Italy”
The university is one of the great inventions of the Middle Ages. In the 12th to 16th century, male adolescents from various backgrounds travelled to become part of new centres of learning. First to the ‘big three’: Bologna, Oxford and Paris, but around 1500 there were already over 70 universities in Europe, of which 25 in Italy. Students came for famous professors or innovative teaching, but were also attracted by student life as such. They stayed in colleges or pensions, needed clothes, food, stationary and above all text books. They also drank, sang, gambled, and got into fights. Their presence shaped towns into university cities, often still recognizable. The medieval university is well documented, but not bottom-up. My forthcoming book Back in College therefore concentrates on the daily life of university students. It takes a multidisciplinary view, from archaeological finds, works of art, literature and a soundscape of university life. This paper will focus on Italian students.
17.00 Prof. dr. Maria Teresa Guerrini (Università di Bologna & Museo degli Studenti MEUS): “Life and death of students in early modern Bologna”
Manuscript with students from Bologna, 1497-1516 (MEUS Bologna).
The life and death of the students of fifteenth-sixteenth-century Bologna emerge from documents but also from monuments that reveal traces of a very strong student identity in the city of the Alma Mater. The contribution will take up these testimonies, also presenting a map of the students’ places, and introducing a Museum (MEUS) that is linked to the animated student life, located in the heart of today’s University quarter, in Palazzo Poggi, the Rector’s building.
