The University of Bologna

The story

Learning from the ancient codes

In the Middle Ages, anyone who wanted to study usually went to a school near a monastery or a cathedral, where a teacher taught a small group of pupils. The subjects were mainly grammar, religion and a little logic. A place where you could learn law, medicine and philosophy at a high level did not yet exist, at least in the West.

Around the year 1000 a new interest in law began to spread. Towns were growing, trade was increasing, and lords and communes quarrelled over lands and privileges: experts in law were needed. The “Corpus iuris civilis”, the great collection of Roman laws ordered in the 6th century by the Emperor Justinian, was rediscovered and studied with passion. It ran to thousands of pages, hard to understand, that needed explaining.

Irnerius and the school of Bologna

In Bologna, a city in Emilia where important roads crossed, a teacher named Irnerius began, around 1100, to read and comment on those texts directly, writing short explanations in the margins of the pages, called “glosses”. For this reason he and his followers are called “glossators”. His fame drew students from all over Europe. In time a real school of law took shape, growing from year to year.

The date of 1088, remembered as the year the university was born, is not a documented date: it was chosen in the 19th century, in 1888, when a commission of historians, which included the poet Giosuè Carducci, decided to celebrate the eight-hundredth anniversary. Historians know that teaching in Bologna began gradually during the 11th and 12th centuries, with no founding act.

Students in charge

Something curious happened in Bologna: it was the students, and not the professors, who organised the university. Many came from elsewhere, were foreigners in the city and so had no rights and no protection. To defend themselves they joined together in associations called “universitates”, divided by country of origin, the “nationes”. They paid the professors themselves, and for this reason could control them: the professors had to keep to the timetable, finish the syllabus and not be absent without permission, and if they made mistakes they could be fined.

The students also stood up for themselves against the city. When they were not well treated, they threatened to leave for another city, taking with them the customers of their landlords too. To protect the travellers who went to study, in 1155 (the request) and in 1158 (the proclamation at Roncaglia, the most accepted date) the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa issued a decree, the “Habita”, which gave students and teachers special protections, including the right to be judged by their own teachers (or, for clerics, by the bishop).

A school for the whole of Europe

To the law lessons in Bologna were soon added medicine, the arts (grammar, rhetoric, logic) and, with a bull of 1360 and teaching beginning in 1364, theology. A famous jurist, Accursius, gathered the glosses together in the 1200s into a work, the “Glossa ordinaria”, which for centuries was the basic text for studying law. Lessons were in Latin, and the professors read the texts aloud while the students, who had no books of their own, took notes. Among the students of Bologna there were, perhaps, Dante (his presence is probable but not documented), and certainly Petrarch and Copernicus.

The students' life was not easy: rents were high, food was dear, and many needed money from families far away. From the letters that have come down to us we can see that they often asked their parents for money and books, and complained about it like students today.

Women, too, sometimes left their mark. In the 1700s Laura Bassi, born in Bologna, obtained in 1732 a degree in philosophy and a teaching post in philosophy, and in 1776 the chair of experimental physics, becoming one of the first women to teach at a European university.