“Urban and University Space from the Middle Ages to the Sixteenth Century in the Kingdom of France”
Lyse Roy

Cities and universities in Late Middle Ages and Early Modern France were intimately linked.  Universities and their populations, whose birth followed closely that of cities, had mostly entertained a strained relationship with their host city and its own population in what is generally referred to by historians as a “Town and Gown” conflict.  However, what has been largely neglected by historians is an analysis of the representation of urban and university space.

In my paper, I propose to investigate and analyze how from the Middle Ages to the Sixteenth Century, French royal and Pontifical powers justified economically, socially, politically and culturally the selection of particular cities to host universities and whether that choice was influenced by political events, scholarly heritage or direct intervention on the part of urban officers.  I will also examine how urban space was defined and understood and how it corresponded to the scholars’ needs.  This study is based on different sources, notably university foundation charters, bulls confirming their foundation that were edited by M. Fournier (1898) and French royal ordonnances.  The representation of urban space that emerges from these various documents is, for two centuries, stereotyped, representing an ideal space for academic endeavors that usually did not agree with geographic, social and economic realities of the cities in question.  To better understand the establishment of that urban representation, it’s important to follow the development of the dominant discourse, in particular how urban descriptions influenced each other and see if a difference exists between universities in the North and South of France.  This study will lead us to a double analysis of representation: that of university space within the larger context of urban space.