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.

History of Universities XXXVI/2 contains the customary mix of learned articles and book reviews which makes this publication an indispensable tool for the historian of higher education.

How can we portray the history of Renaissance knowledge production through the eyes of the students? Their university notebooks contained a variety of works, fragments of them, sentences, or simple words. To date, studies on these materials have only concentrated on a few individual works within the collections, neglecting the strategy by which texts and textual fragments were selected and the logic through which the notebooks were organized. The eight chapters that make up this volume explore students' note-taking practices behind the creation of their notebooks from three different angles. The first considers annotation activities in relation to their study area to answer the question of how university disciplines were able to influence both the content and structure of their notebooks. The volume's second area of research focuses on the student's curiosity and choices by considering them expressions of a self-learning practice not necessarily linked to a discipline of study or instructions from teaching. The last part of the volume moves away from the student's desk to consider instructions on note-taking methods that students could receive from manuals of various kinds.

History of Universities XXXVI/2 contains the customary mix of learned articles and book reviews which makes this publication an indispensable tool for the historian of higher education.

Alicja Bielak's chapter in this book, 'On the Margins of Paduan Medical Lectures. Self-reflection and Critical Attitude in the Notes of Jan Brozek (1585-1652)', is published open access and free to read or download from Oxford Academic History of Universities XXXVI/1 contains the customary mix of learned articles and book reviews which makes this publication an indispensable tool for the historian of higher education.

History of Universities XXXIV/2 contains the customary mix of learned articles which makes this publication an indispensable tool for the historian of higher education. This volume offers a history of the teaching of ethics in early modern Europe.

This book discusses the printers’ devices used in Poland-Lithuania in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The compositions that served to identify the products of individual printers are explored here as previously unacknowledged research material for cultural studies: they allow for the reconstruction of the mentality of contemporary printers as well as their co-workers and reading public. The book investigates relationships within early modern intellectual communities and shows that the textual and visual discourses of the printers’ devices were pan-European, reflecting the networked communities of European centres of learning and commerce. It documents the broad range of the output of Polish-Lithuanian presses as well and is therefore also a study of book culture in a multinational and multilingual state, whose inheritance is poorly recognised internationally.

We are so accustomed to use digital memories as data storage devices, that we are oblivious to the improbability of such a practice. Habit hides what we habitually use. To understand the worldwide success of archives and card indexing systems that allow to remember more because they allow to forget more than before, the evolution of scholarly practices and the transformation of cognitive habits in the early modern age must be investigated. This volume contains contributions by nearly every distinguished scholar in the field of early modern knowledge management and filing systems, and offers a remarkable synthesis of the present state of scholarship. A final section explores some current issues in record-keeping and note-taking systems, and provides valuable cues for future research.

How can one study the absence of knowledge, the voids, the conscious and unconscious unknowns through history? Investigations into late medieval and early modern practices of measuring, of risk calculation, of ignorance within financial administrations, of conceiving the docta ignorantia as well as the silence of the illiterate are combined with contributions regarding knowledge gaps within identification procedures and political decision-making, with the emergence of consciously delimited blanks on geographical maps, with ignorance as a factor embedded in iconographic programs, in translation processes and the semantic potentials of reading. Based on thorough archival analysis, these selected contributions from conferences at Harvard and Paris are tightly framed by new theoretical elaborations that have implications beyond these cases and epochal focus. Contributors: Giovanni Ceccarelli, Taylor Cowdery, Lucile Haguet, John T. Hamilton, Lucian Hölscher, Moritz Isenmann, Adam J. Kosto, Marie-Laure Legay, Andrew McKenzie-McHarg, Fabrice Micallef, William T. O ́Reilly, Eleonora Rohland, Mathias Schmoeckel, Daniel L. Smail, Govind P. Sreenivasan, and Cornel Zwierlein.

The history of eastern European is dominated by the story of the rise of the Russian empire, yet Russia only emerged as a major power after 1700. For 300 years the greatest power in Eastern Europe was the union between the kingdom of Poland and the grand duchy of Lithuania, one of the longest-lasting political unions in European history. Yet because it ended in the late-eighteenth century in what are misleadingly termed the Partitions of Poland, it barely features in standard accounts of European history. The Making of the Polish-Lithuanian Union 1385-1569 tells the story of the formation of a consensual, decentralised, multinational, and religiously plural state built from below as much as above, that was founded by peaceful negotiation, not war and conquest. From its inception in 1385-6, a vision of political union was developed that proved attractive to Poles, Lithuanians, Ruthenians, and Germans, a union which was extended to include Prussia in the 1450s and Livonia in the 1560s. Despite the often bitter disagreements over the nature of the union, these were nevertheless overcome by a republican vision of a union of peoples in one political community of citizens under an elected monarch. Robert Frost challenges interpretations of the union informed by the idea that the emergence of the sovereign nation state represents the essence of political modernity, and presents the Polish-Lithuanian union as a case study of a composite state. The modern history of Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Belarus cannot be understood without an understanding of the legacy of the Polish-Lithuanian union. This volume is the first detailed study of the making of that union ever published in English.