The Earliest Universities
My second child graduates from college this year. I’m sort of stunned that we’re here already 🙂 But millions of kids have gone before him, dating all the way back to 1088. “The word university is derived from the Latin: universitas magistrorum et scholarium, roughly meaning “community of teachers and scholars”. The term was coined by the Italian University of Bologna, which, with a traditional founding date of 1088, is considered the first university. The origin of many medieval universities can be traced to the Christian cathedral schools or monastic schoolswhich appear as early as the 6th century AD and were run for hundreds of years as such before their formal establishment as university in the high medieval period.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_universities_in_continuous_operation The next three oldest schools are the The University of Salamanca in 1134 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Salamanca), The University of Paris in 1150, and University of Oxford. The dates of all these vary depending upon Read more…
Danish Bones Found in Oxford
There’s a new article in The Oxford Student which describes a recent find of bones, determined to have belonged to Danes and the result of a massacre ordered by King Ethelbert in 1003 AD. It sheds some light on an early period in British history and points to something that is easy to forget as you work your way through the Early Middle Ages: that the “Saxons” from literature and mythology were not monolithic, but comprised of different ethnic groups and nationalities. What this find reveals is that the Saxons, who now controlled most of England, murdered their Danish neighbors. From a Welsh perspective, these groups might seem one and the same, but they weren’t. In the Oxford article, it states: “Vikings’ skeletons found underneath one of St John’s quads are the remains of a violent “ethnic cleansing” over 1,000 years ago. Read more…
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