Medieval & Reformation Universities
11th to 17th century

 

1088 AD	Founding of University of Bologna by law students in northern Italy; city of 40,000 residents in 1250. Generally accepted to be the first and oldest European university
1090	Founding of the University of Paris by teachers/masters; Abelard (1079-1149) among its earlier teachers
1096	Founding of Oxford University, at Oxford, 50 miles northwest of London
1160
1179	Pope Alexander III (1159-81), who studied law at Bologna, endorsed cathedral schools and right of University of Bologna to issue teaching licenses
1209	Scholars defect from  Oxford to establish Cambridge University
1217	Founding of the University of Salamanca, Spain
1229	Founding of the University of Toulouse, France
1231	Pope Gregory IX (1227-1241) recognized the political autonomy of Europe’s universities
1235	Founding of the University of Orleans, France
1249	Founding of University College, Oxford, the first of the University’s endowed residential colleges
1250	Establishment of four colleges at the University of Paris, including the Sorbonne
1263	Founding of Balliol College, Oxford University
1264	Dominican scholar and University of Paris professor Thomas Aquinas completed his Summa Theologica
1290	Founding of the University of Coimbra, in Lisbon, Portugal
1441	England’s King Henry VI founds King’s College, Cambridge; linked to Eton as its feeder school.
1517	Martin Luther, a graduate of the University of Erfurt  and professor at the University of Wittenberg, formally breaks from the Roman Catholic Church and launches the Reformation
1534	John Calvin (1509-64), graduate of the University of Paris, makes his break from Rome and establishes his principal base in Geneva.
1535	England’s Henry VIII breaks with Rome and transforms Oxford and Cambridge into universities of the Protestant Reformation; Catholic colleges closed
Henry VIII 1491-1547; monarch 1509-1547
1546	Trinity College founded at Oxford by Henry VIII; would be a center of Puritan activity later in the century; 15 graduates of Trinity among the participants in the “Great Migration” to New England, including John Winthrop.
1547	Edward VI succeeds to the English throne upon death of Henry VIII; becomes incapacitated in 1553 and brings on a dynastic crisis.
1553	Henry’s daughter Mary succeeds to the throne; attempts to reinstate Catholicism as a state church
	Some 800 Protestants leave England for the Continent to wait out Mary’s reign. The “Marian Exile.”
1558	Elizabeth, Mary’s half-sister, succeeds to the throne; makes it her business to confirm England’s Protestantism.
1582	Founding of the University of Edinburgh; later a center of the Scottish Enlightenment
1584	Emmanuel College founded at Cambridge by Elizabeth’s finance minister on the prior site of a Dominican priory.  Becomes center of Puritan camp with Anglicanism. Some 29 participants in the “Great Migration” to England in 1630s among its graduates when college lost favor with Charles I and his bishop, William Laud..
1603	Upon Elizabeth’s death, James I succeeds to the English throne. First of the Tudor monarchs. Reigns until his death in 1627.
1625	Charles I succeeds his father to the throne; takes increasingly hardline against Puritan critics of his brand of quasi-Catholic Anglicanism. Bishop William Laud his enforcer.

 

Last updated; January 27, 2014
ram31@columbia.edu