The Rise of Universities (PDF)

The origin and nature of the earliest universities are the subjects of this famous and witty set of lectures by the man whom eminent scholars have called 'without exaggeration... the soul of the renascence of medieval studies in the United States.' Great as the differences are between the earliest universities and those of today, the fact remains, says Professor Haskins, the 'the university of the twentieth century is the lineal descendant of medieval Paris and Bologna.' In demonstrating this fact, he brings to life the institutions, instruction, professors, and students of the Middle Ages.

Charles Homer Haskins was born in Meadville, Pennsylvania, in 1870. He received his doctorate from The Johns Hopkins University. He taught at Johns Hopkins, the University of Wisconsin, and from 1902 until his retirement in 1931, at Harvard University, where he also served as Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. At the end of the First World War, he served with distinction on the American Peace Delegation in Paris as chairman of the Division of Western Europe. His books include Norman Institutions (1918), The Rise of Universities (1923), Studies in the History of Science (1924), The Normans in European History (1925), The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (1927), and Studies in Mediaeval Culture (1929). He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1937.