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INTRODUCTION NANCY G. SIRAISI Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York Laments over the decline of universities go back at least as far as Petrarch. In the 1360s the poet was already mourning the dis- appearance of eloquent professors and diligent students like those with whom memory peopled his own student days at Bologna forty years before.1 If such remarks are not as a rule very illuminating about actual conditions in either the fourteenth or the twenty-first century, neither, perhaps, is the dichotomy of "flowering" and "decline" that has until fairly recently characterized university his- tory in general. For the early modern period, such a historiogra- phy can sometimes yield peculiarly conflicted evaluations in which negative judgements-whether on political or intellectual grounds - of universities as institutions combine with celebration of the achievements of individuals connected with them. Nowhere has this disjuncture been more evident than in discussions of the rela- tion of the universities to the so-called Scientific Revolution. Older interpretations routinely dismissed sixteenth- and seventeenth-cen- tury universities as quiescent, traditional, and increasingly provin- cial institutions that made little or no contribution to new science (or in some instances actively hindered its development).
Early Science and Medicine – Brill
Published: Jan 1, 2001
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