The influx of students eager for learning, together with dedicated and imaginative teachers, created the atmosphere in which universities grew. (See “The Past Living Now: University Life.”) By the end of the fifteenth century there were at least eighty universities in Europe. Some universities also offered younger students training in what were termed the seven liberal arts — grammar, rhetoric, logic, mathematics, geometry, music, and astronomy — that could serve as a foundation for more specialized study in all areas.

University students were generally considered to be lower-level members of the clergy — this was termed being in “minor orders” — so any students accused of legal infractions were tried in church, rather than in city, courts. This clerical status, along with widely held ideas about women’s lesser intellectual capabilities, meant that university education was restricted to men. Even more than feudal armies — which were often accompanied by women who did laundry, found provisions, cooked meals, and engaged in sex for money — universities were all-male communities. (Most European universities did not admit women until after World War I.)

Though university classes were not especially expensive, the many years that a university education required meant that the sons of peasants or artisans could rarely attend, unless they could find wealthy patrons who would pay their expenses. Most students were the sons of urban merchants or lower-level nobles, especially the younger sons who would not inherit family lands. University degrees were initially designed as licenses to teach at the university, but most students staffed the expanding diocesan, royal, and papal administrations as lawyers and officials.

Students did not spend all their time preparing for their degrees. Much information about medieval students concerns what we might call “extracurricular” activities: university regulations forbidding them to throw rocks at professors; sermons about breaking and entering, raping local women, attacking town residents, and disturbing church services; and court records discussing their drunken brawls, riots, and fights and duels. Students also delayed finishing their studies because life as a student could be pleasant, without the responsibilities that came with becoming fully adult. Student life was described by students in poems, usually anonymous, that celebrated the joys of Venus (the goddess of love) and other gods: