The Students and Their Books

The topic of this volume is the teaching and learning practices in the major and minor academic centers of renaissance Europe and their relevance for early modern intellectual history. Academic knowledge is here regarded not as a finished product but as a process, induced by multiple factors and several conditions: the personalities and intellectual profiles of teachers and learners, the dialectic between their respective interests and roles, the institutional context, from the immediate one given by the particular school or university, with their courses and curricula, to the more remote one given by governing political power or surveilling religious authority, or the interplay between the two. Last but not least, one should consider the several impulses of an epoch that seem to impart to the historical course a sudden acceleration, inducing decisive, sometimes disruptive, changes to intellectual development: the spread of humanistic culture, the religious reformation and its consequences, the encounter with new epistemologies, the access to education of new social subjects, and – behind all these and as their common catalyst – the progressive establishment of the press as a means of learning consolidation and dissemination.