# University during the Renaissance



## TopHat (Jun 7, 2014)

Hi!
I'm doing some research about education during the Renaissance, primary in Italy, but cant find any useful information.    Hopefully someone here might have some answers.

What was it like to study at a university at that time, how was it different from today? And how could you afford it? Did you have to pay from your own pocket?

If you can't answer these questions, do you guys know where I might find some information on this matter?

Yours,
TopHat.


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## ACSmyth (Jun 7, 2014)

I'm no historian, but I've been reading a bit about the Renaissance recently.

I've turned up some websites that might be of use
Medieval university - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Education History: VIII EDUCATION DURING THE RENAISSANCE
Renaissance Education Ã—Ã·Ã•ÃŸÂ£ÂºÃ•Ã¦Ã…Ã³Ã“Ã‘ (Artsdome)

Basically, the main characteristic of the Renaissance was looking back at antiquity, not forward as we tend to think. The humanist movement believed that humanity had moved away from the perfection it had achieved in ancient times, and encouraged the study of Roman and Greek literature as a way to move back to that. Well-educated people were well versed in logic, rhetoric, and grammar. Texts studied were Roman ones written in Greek, and Greek ones which had been translated into Latin in antiquity, as knowledge of ancient Greek had been pretty much lost. But then some people set about relearning ancient Greek so they could read the originals, and also anything that turned up in libraries that hadn't been translated into Latin. During this time many previously unknown or forgotten texts were uncovered, although of course, a lot had also been lost forever over the intervening centuries.

Specialisms like mathematics, music, astronomy and astrology (which were pretty much parts of the same field then), theology, and medicine, formed their own little faculties, but all these people would have a decent knowledge of "the humanities" and Latin at least.

That's pretty much all I got, sorry. One of the key movers and shakers in the early Renaissance was Erasmus, so you might glean more from googling him. Also, the Renaissance covers 1300-ish to mid 1600s-ish, so education might well change significantly over that period. You might do well to narrow your time period to Italy in the time of Dante Alighieri, or the time of Leonardo da Vinci, or whatever.


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## skip.knox (Jul 12, 2014)

Sorry for the long delay, I only just noticed this one. What are you asking about here? Do you want to know what lectures were like? What a campus looked like?

It would help if you said what your characters were going to be doing. FYI, there are multi-volume works on the history of universities in the Middle Ages, so there's plenty of material available. Not on the Net, of course. Library work, there.


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