The Wake of Erasmus. Saints, Scholars and Studia in Mediaeval Norden

In the archives of Lund University library sit three venerable volumes each bearing the inscription Liber Fratrum Minorum Convenus Lundensis: scanty evidence indeed of the stadium generale which was initiated in that town by Franciscan friars in 1438. Over half a millennium afterwards Lund University celebrated its memory. What was a stadium generale? Who were the Franciscans? And wherefore this celebration?

The Wake of Erasmum explores these questions. It sketches the historical contexts in which university life unfolded in mediaeval Europe, its sensitivities to the changing patterns of trade, war, schism and pestilence and vicissitudes of ecclesiastical and imperial politics, before finally reaching Scandinavian shores. A central focus rests on the role of Mendicant Orders, Dominican and Franciscan, in shaping the curricula and geographical diffusion of studia generalia from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries, providing links too between students from Norden and their peers throughout the rest of Europe.

The book’s title has a deliberately ambivalent ring. It evokes, on the one hand, the famous Renaissance humanist Erasmus whose ideas were so harshly denounced by leaders of Church Reformation. On the other hand it points to the challenge afforded by today’s programme ERASMUS for a re-membering of Europe’s scholarly community, North and South, East and West.