II.1 Where, and what, was the university?

Visitors to Oxford often ask where the university is. The question is rooted in the assumption that a university is a building or a ‘campus’ consisting of several buildings. Yet this assumption is even more inappropriate of a late medieval or early modern university university than it is of Oxford today. 

In the early modern period, universities were housed in all kinds of buildings. Some were active churches, secularized monasteries, or repurposed residences. When universities built for themselves, their buildings assumed a huge variety of forms. 

And yet, the curriculum taught within these universities was remarkably uniform from the beginning of our period to the end, and from one end of Europe to the other. Something similar holds for the basic legal framework which held the university together and distinguishes it from institutions of higher education in other cultures around the globe.