English University Life in the Middle Ages

Alan B. Cobban

English University Life in the Middle Ages by Alan Cobban is a comprehensive study of the medieval academic community encompassing all sections including nobility, undergraduates, postgraduates, fellows, commoners, monks, and servants. This composite view reveals medieval English university in all its rich diversity by concentrating on the real lives of individuals.

Chapters on undergraduate and postgraduate experience give a detailed insight into the social and economic conditions of student life. The author surveys the activities of teaching masters and college fellows, analyzing the tolerated and prohibited recreations and entertainments of the scholars, and the heavy involvement of the teaching masters in the governmental and administrative processes of the universities. This study also incorporates neglected groupings on the academic periphery such as college founders, benefactors, and women.

English University Life in the Middle Ages reveals the development of complex methods of teaching and learning in the period and the range of subjects taught. It also looks at universities in their wider context, examining the cooperation, as well as the violent conflict, which arose between universities and their towns.

Alan Cobban is Reader in History at the University of Liverpool. He has written several books and many articles within the field of the medieval universities including The King’s Hall within the University of Cambridge in the Later Middle Ages, The Medieval Universities: Their Development and Organization, and The Medieval English Universities: Oxford and Cambridge to c. 1500.