The influx of students eager for learning, together with dedicated and imaginative teachers, created the atmosphere in which universities grew. 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, 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.

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. 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.