Stranieri

This volume examines the university as a meeting point for people of different ages and from a wide range of geographical backgrounds. This is particularly true of the University of Padua, which owes its very origins to a migration of scholars. A circumscribed event, yet one that fits into the broader and more widespread phenomenon of academic mobility that characterized the Middle Ages and the early modern period.

Throughout the Middle Ages — with a marked acceleration from the twelfth century onward — masters and students were prompted to move toward centers of learning — monasteries, schools, cathedrals, convents, and universities — in search of the most intellectually stimulating environments and of conditions that best ensured learning, such as the presence of rich libraries or the lectures of the most renowned teachers. These were the so-called clerici vagantes, an extremely heterogeneous group from both a geographical and social point of view, coming from across the European continent: predominantly young men from wealthy families and clerics supported by ecclesiastical benefices, though there were also less affluent students, the so-called pauperes.