No period in the history of universities has been more intensively studied than the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, numerous gaps remain. Many archival documents, innumerable writings, and many of the lecture scripts of university teachers are still unpublished. Biographical accounts of teachers and students, their social and familial origins, their patterns of association in the course of their studies, and their subsequent careers are markedly lacking. Such prosopographical investigations, which have already been taken in hand for particular universities or for certain regions of provenance, are indispensable for a genuinely social history of universities. Only when such studies have been done will it be ‘possible to trace the channels of intellectual currents and influence, to reconstruct the composition and structure of intellectual groups and their connections with each other, and the lines of transmission and diffusion of certain intellectual traditions such as Aristotelianism in the thirteenth, Roman law in the fourteenth, humanism in the fifteenth, and the Reformation in the sixteenth centuries’.

For these reasons, our project can reflect only the present state of research. The aim of this introductory chapter is to show, with reference to a few themes, which perspectives have been opened up through studies of medieval universities, which problems have arisen from those studies, and what knowledge can be drawn from them.

Mythology and historiography of the beginnings

In 1988, the University of Bologna celebrated its nine-hundredth anniversary. However, neither our own investigation nor that of others into the history of medieval universities has produced any evidence for such a foundation of the University of Bologna in 1088.