This book includes most of the contributions presented at a conference on “Univ- sities and Science in the Early Modern Period” held in 1999 in Valencia, Spain. The conference was part of the “Five Centuries of the Life of the University of Valencia” (Cinc Segles) celebrations, and from the outset we had the generous support of the “Patronato” (Foundation) overseeing the events. In recent decades, as a result of a renewed attention to the institutional, political, social, and cultural context of scienti?c activity, we have witnessed a reappraisal of the role of the universities in the construction and development of early modern science. In essence, the following conclusions have been reached: (1) the attitudes regarding scienti?c progress or novelty differed from country to country and follow differenttrajectoriesinthecourseoftheearlymodernperiod;(2)institutionsofhigher learning were the main centers of education for most scientists; (3) although the universities were sometimes slow to assimilate new scienti?c knowledge, when they didsoithelpednotonlytoremovethesuspicionthatthenewsciencewasintellectually subversivebutalsotomakesciencearespectableandevenprestigiousactivity;(4)the universities gave the scienti?c movement considerable material support in the form of research facilities such as anatomical theaters, botanical gardens, and expensive instruments; (5) the universities provided professional employment and a means of support to many scientists; and (6) although the relations among the universities and the academies or scienti?c societies were sometimes antagonistic, the two types of institutionsoftenworkedtogetherinharmony,performingcomplementaryratherthan competing functions; moreover, individuals moved from one institution to another, as did knowledge, methods, and scienti?c practices.

"This book contains twenty essays by expert scholars of higher learning in the early modern period. Together they discuss topics that historians of universities have largely ignored: notably the extensive collaboration, and occasional conflicts, between university scholars, instructors, and administrators on the one hand, and students at academies, independent and dependent colleges, gymnasia, and Latin schools on the other. The contributions also cover a wide geographical range, covering universities, schools, academies, and the history of the book, in many European states, and Latin America"--

A greater fluidity in social relations and hierarchies was experienced across Europe in the early modern period, a consequence of the major political and religious upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At the same time, the universities of Europe became increasingly orientated towards serving the territorial state, guided by a humanistic approach to learning which stressed its social and political utility. It was in these contexts that the notion of the scholar as a distinct social category gained a foothold and the status of the scholarly group as a social elite was firmly established. University scholars demonstrated a great energy when characterizing themselves socially as learned men. This book investigates the significance and implications of academic self-fashioning throughout Europe in the early modern period. It describes a general and growing deliberation in the fashioning of individual, communal and categorical academic identity in this period. It explores the reasons for this growing self-consciousness among scholars, and the effects of its expression - social and political, desired and real.

Early Modern Universities: Networks of Higher Education contains twenty essays by experts on early modern academic networks. Using a variety of approaches to universities, schools, and academies throughout Europe and in Central America, the book suggests pathways for future research.

The author casts new light not only on the short lived educational revolution of the sixteenth century but on education in other societies, both past and present.

Knowledge Transfer and the Early Modern University focuses on the teaching and cultural activities of the Akademia Zamojska, one of the most renowned universities of Central-Eastern Europe in the Early Modern Age. The Akademia Zamojska played its own part in the debate on the methodology of politics as a discipline, also offering an original contribution to the development of the concept of ‘political prudence’ which was to become so popular in the universities of Central Europe in this period. The institution embodied a largely successful attempt to knit up closer connections between the world of intellectual culture and that of political praxis.

This is the second volume of a four-part History of the University in Europe, written by an international team of scholars under the general editorship of Professor Walter RÜegg, which covers the development of the university in Europe (both East and West) from its origins to the present day. Volume 2 attempts to situate the universities in their social and political context throughout the three centuries spanning the period 1500 to 1800.

This volume offers a wide-ranging overview of the 16th-18th century disputation culture in various European regions. Its focus is on printed disputations as a polyvalent media form which brings together many of the elements that contributed to the cultural and scientific changes during the early modern period.

This volume brings together the leading experts in the history of European Oriental Studies. Their essays present a comprehensive history of the teaching and learning of Arabic in early modern Europe, covering a wide geographical area from southern to northern Europe and discussing the many ways and purposes for which the Arabic language was taught and studied by scholars, theologians, merchants, diplomats and prisoners. The contributions shed light on different methods and contents of language teaching in a variety of academic, scholarly and missionary contexts in the Protestant and the Roman Catholic world. But they also look beyond the institutional history of Arabic studies and consider the importance of alternative ways in which the study of Arabic was persued. Contributors are Asaph Ben Tov, Maurits H. van den Boogert, Sonja Brentjes, Mordechai Feingold, Mercedes García-Arenal, John-Paul A. Ghobrial, Aurélien Girard, Alastair Hamilton, Jan Loop, Nuria Martínez de Castilla Muñoz, Simon Mills, Fernando Rodríguez Mediano, Bernd Roling, Arnoud Vrolijk. This title, in its entirety, is available online in Open Access.

In this groundbreaking collection of essays the history of philosophy appears in a fresh light, not as reason's progressive discovery of its universal conditions, but as a series of unreconciled disputes over the proper way to conduct oneself as a philosopher. By shifting focus from the philosopher as proxy for the universal subject of reason to the philosopher as a special persona arising from rival forms of self-cultivation, philosophy is approached in terms of the social office and intellectual deportment of the philosopher, as a personage with a definite moral physiognomy and institutional setting. In so doing, this collection of essays by leading figures in the fields of both philosophy and the history of ideas provides access to key early modern disputes over what it meant to be a philosopher, and to the institutional and larger political and religious contexts in which such disputes took place.