Patterns of Attendance at the University of Paris, 1400–1800

Abstract

During the past ten years, historians of early modern Europe in Britain, France and the United States have shown an increasing interest in the history of education. Doubtless encouraged by the contemporary formulation of an educational sociology, they in turn have begun to investigate the form and function of education in pre-industrial societies. For the most part, however, research has been limited to the study of elementary education with the purpose of understanding the effect of its expansion on literacy and popular attitudes. Less attention has been paid to the social history of higher education, particularly to the role of the universities. The one exception is the case of Oxford and Cambridge for which studies abound through the efforts of Professor Stone and his pupils. But outside England, apart from Kagan's work on the Spanish universities, studies have been few and limited to accounts of patterns of attendance over relatively short periods of time that give little indication of the general picture. Indeed, information about the history of attendance at most universities in the early modern period has still to be gleaned from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century studies – useful as sources of administrative history, but seldom revealing on questions that interest the present-day historian. Apparendy, too, there is little chance of the position improving in the future. With the exception of a project envisaged by the French early modernists, Chartier, Frijhoff and Julia, interest in the social history of universities seems to be diminishing.