This chapter focuses on the law students in Bologna and the masters of arts in Paris (late twelfth to late thirteenth centuries) to show how these foreigners adapted the guild model (universitas) to secure legal protections and privileges from alien cities. By organizing themselves into 'universities' modified for their purposes, they became corporations empowered to make autonomous decisions, write statutes, choose members, and act as one under an elected rector, with privileges legally recognized by secular and religious authorities, both local and supreme. After decades of struggling for legal recognition, the first universities used their new-found power to administer education itself. The universities of law students in Bologna took charge of even their professors' obligations and salaries, whereas the masters of arts in Paris secured control of their membership, curricula, and students.

This volume calls for champagne, for it completes the massive Nicolaus CopernicusGesamtausgabe (NCG). Begun half a century ago, the nine-volume project has now reedited all of Copernicus’s Latin writings and published many related documents, together with German translations and introductions. By merely scratching the surface of this large fourth volume, this review can scarcely do justice to the whole of this impressive undertaking. Ordinally, NCG 4 is the first of two volumes devoted to Copernicus’s opera minora. It collects his shorter “mathematical-scientific” works; the “humanist, economic, and medical” writings are published in NCG 5 (1999). According to the editors, the primary focus here is the Latin texts; the German translations are meant to help readers bridge a half-millennium of conceptual and lexical gaps.

This chapter argues that the masters of arts in the new universities institutionalized approaches akin to methodological naturalism in the populous medieval faculties of arts. Explanations of natural phenomena were to be justified or refuted by reason and sense perception, without appealing to the supernatural. This arts faculty naturalism diffused widely as the universities spread, and deeply shaped the intellectual landscape (e.g. Galileo). The masters of arts’ vision of their methodological autonomy also characterized theologians, many of whom were masters of arts. The Parisian condemnations of 1277 illustrate this outlook’s strength, not its weakness. Leading intellectuals of the era illustrate these naturalistic trends by using natural causes to explain occurrences that their predecessors and contemporaries treated as marvels.

This chapter presents a review of Paul W. Knoll’s ‘A Pearl of Powerful Learning:’ The University of Cracow in the Fifteenth Century. The book covers topics such as the foundation, the urban context, institutional issues, all the faculties, intellectual trends, and libraries. Not the least of this book’s accomplishments is its digestion and synthesis, in English, of a large body of important Polish scholarship. In addition to its specific foci, Knoll’s scholarship contributes an invaluable case study to a growing literature that undercuts the stereotype of the late-medieval university as an institution in decline. Indeed, the University of Cracow was not alone in its vitality and socio-political engagement.

In the mid-15th c., the conflict between Cardinal Bessarion, former Greek orthodox metropolitan, and the Cretan-born George of Trebizond is best known for its philosophical dimensions. Crucially, however, it also involved serious tensions surrounding Ptolemy's Almagest that shaped the history of astronomy through the writings and career of Regiomontanus. These conflicts eventually mixed powerfully with geopolitics and religion. In two letters to Mehmed II, George of Trebizond used his commentary on and translation of the Almagest to entice the Conqueror to convert to Christianity, take Rome, become the World Emperor, and thus hasten the end of time. The reactions of Bessarion and his circle to the letters in turn extended the controversy over the Almagest. This chapter concludes by arguing that the condemnation of George of Trebizond's views and letters is the context of the scene on the left side of Piero della Francesca's "Flagellation of Christ."