This is the second volume of a four-part History of the University in Europe, written by an international team of scholars under the general editorship of Professor Walter RÜegg, which covers the development of the university in Europe (both East and West) from its origins to the present day. Volume 2 attempts to situate the universities in their social and political context throughout the three centuries spanning the period 1500 to 1800.

This is the first of four volumes that will comprise A History of the University in Europe, covering the development of the university in Europe (East and West) from its origins to the present day. No other up-to-date, comprehensive history of this type exists: its originality lies in focusing on a number of major themes viewed from a European perspective, and in its interdisciplinary, collaborative and transnational character. Volume I, covering the Middle Ages, places the medieval European universities in their social and political context. After explaining the number and types of universities from their origins in the twelfth century to around 1500, it examines the inner workings as an institution and paints a general picture of medieval student life.

This, the first in the series, is also the first volume on the medieval University as a whole to be published in over a century. It provides a synthesis of the intellectual, social, political and religious life of the early University, and gives serious attention to the development of classroom studies and how they changed with the coming of the Renaissance and the Reformation. Following the first stirrings of the University in the thirteenth century, the evolution of the University is traced from the original Corporation of masters and Scholars through the early development of the colleges. The second half of the book focuses on the century from the 1440s to 1540s, which saw the flowering of the University under Tudor patronage. In the decades preceding the Reformation many colleges were founded, the teaching structures reorganised and the curriculum made more humanistic. The place of Cambridge at the forefront of northern European universities was eventually assured when Henry VIII founded Trinity College in 1546, in the face of changes and difficulties experienced during the course of the Reformation.

This is the second volume of a four-part history of the university in Europe, written by an international team of authors, which covers the development of the university in Europe (east and west) from its origins up until more recent years. It focuses not only on the history of individual institutions, nor on the universities in any individual country, but on a number of major themes viewed from a European perspective. The chief originality of this work lies in its comparative, interdisciplinary, collaborative and transnational nature. Volume II looks at the university in Early Modern Europe, and attempts to situate the universities in their social and political context throughout the three centuries spanning the period 1500 to 1800.