The Papacy and the Rise of the Universities (Education and Society in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, 54)

One of the leading historians of medieval universities in the last generation, Gaines Post published less than a quarter of his 1931 dissertation on the role of the papacy in the rise of universities. The entire work merits publication, both because of the remaining content and because it reveals more on how Gaines Post, a product of Charles Homer Haskins' seminar at Harvard in the late 1920s, approached his subject. The volume covers the interaction of the papacy with multiple universities from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and opens up a much broader range of topics, considering papal intervention and influence in the areas of licensing to teach, financial support for masters and students, dispensations for study, regulation of housing rents, and the founding of colleges.

See inside the book.

Gaines Post, Ph.D, 1931, Harvard, under the supervision of Charles Homer Haskins, was Professor of Medieval History at the University of Wisconsin (1935-1960) and then at Princeton University (1960-1970). He was a major historian on medieval universities and representative institutions. He was a fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and corresponding fellow of the Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften. In 1966 he was awarded the Haskins Medal by the Medieval Academy for his Studies in Medieval Legal Thought, Public Law and the State, 1100-1322 (Princeton, 1964).