The Mass has Ended: Colleges, Charity, and Students in the Autumn of the Middle Ages

Since its origins the university was a very privileged institution. The foundation of colleges on the other hand became an important political instrument for penetrating its exclusivity and making learning accessible to students and scholars coming from the lower classes. In the autumn of the Middle Ages, namely the period between the fourteenth and the fifteenth century, influential figures like Bishops, Popes and lay patrons started to invest their time and capital in building colleges with the aim of educating and sheltering poor students and those with limited means. Colleges constituted both a housing project, a pedagogical one, but offered also a protective environment for students and fellows, within and against the cities and universities that hosted them. After the first foundations in Paris, followed soon by the important developments of Oxford and Cambridge, and in other cities of Europe, these institutions maintained during the Middle Ages their original charitable ethos, to gradually start and lose it when the Renaissance culture was dominating Europe. This ‘autumnal’ period can thus be considered as a context that arguably saw both the rise and the fall of colleges as structures of care and pure learning. Through a selection of case studies from the main university cities of the time, this presentation will discuss about the mechanisms, dynamics, the protagonists, and the architectural decisions behind the main medieval colleges of Europe, from Paris, Oxford to Bologna. Alongside these contexts, the presentation will also offer a close reading of specific architectural examples and compare them with other more paradigmatic situations, from the simple medieval typologies to more complex Renaissance models.