Schemes for Students’ Mobility in Protestant Switzerland during the Sixteenth Century

Résumé 0

Preprint Version, 2017. Revised version of the paper delivered on 10 October 2015, Northumbria University, (Newcastle), as part of the Project: Worlds and Networks of Higher Learning: Modes of Interaction between Universities, Academies and Schools, 1400-1750, financed by the British Academy and directed by Anja-Silvia Goeing (Northumbria University), Mordechai Feingold (California Institute of Technology) and Glyn Parry (University of Roehampton). To be published in : Early Modern Universities: Networks of Higher Learning, Anja-Silvia Goeing, Mordechai Feingold and Glyn Parry (eds), 2020/2021. "Swiss educational structures experienced major transformations during the sixteenth century, transformations which were driven by the cultural movement of humanism and by the Protestant and Catholic Reformations. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Swiss Confederacy counted only one institution of higher learning: the University of Basel. In 1560, if we take into account the allied territory of Geneva, Switzerland benefited also from four newly created Protestant academies in Zurich, Bern, Lausanne and Geneva. These academies offered instruction in arts and theology, comparable in level and nature to that in the universities of their time. However, the academies did not have the right to grant academic titles. At that time, this ability was restricted to institutions that had received a privilege from the pope or the emperor, and these Catholic authorities would not give it to institutions in Reformed (Calvinist or Zwinglian) territories. In this chapter, we are going to look at how students were helped financially by the Swiss political and religious authorities in order to travel and study abroad. We will see that the policy regarding student scholarships varied considerably among the different Swiss Protestant cities. I will briefly present these policies, city by city, starting with Basel, and moving chronologically through the newly created academies. We will then be able to answer more precisely questions about the motivations that pushed political and ecclesiastical authorities to send some of their best students abroad. For instance, did they want them to get degrees from foreign universities? Finally, we will observe that religion played a considerable role in the choice of a foreign university or academy. Even within the Protestant camp, the divisions between Calvinists, Zwinglians, Bucerians, and Lutherans played a major part in this choice. [...]"