Scholarly Self-Fashioning and Community in the Early Modern University

A greater fluidity in social relations and hierarchies was experienced across Europe in the early modern period, a consequence of the major political and religious upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. During this time university scholars demonstrated a great energy when characterizing themselves socially as learned men. This book investigates the significance and implications of academic self-fashioning throughout Europe in the early modern period. It describes a general and growing deliberation in the fashioning of individual, communal and categorical academic identity in this period. It explores the reasons for this growing self-consciousness among scholars, and the effects of its expression - social and political, desired and real.