Papacy and the Rise of the Universities

This previously unpublished 1931 dissertation by Gaines Post covers the interaction of the papacy with multiple universities from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and makes his research and observations available on a range of topics, such as papal intervention and influence in the areas of licensing to teach, scholarly privileges, financial support, and dispensations for study.

''This volume represents a still-valuable work of scholarship and an appropriate tribute to a major scholar of the previous century.'' Paul Knoll, in Reinassance Quarterly , LXXII, NO.1 (2018). "This book originated as the dissertation of Professor Gaines Post (d.1987), written under the direction of Charles Homer Haskins at Harvard University and approved in 1931. [...] We have Professor William J. Courtenay to thank for bringing this book to print. Courtenay's editorial interventions in the text appear light; he offers the book both as an original contribution to research into the rise of the universities but also as a window into the research conducted by Charles Homer Haskins and his students at Harvard'. [...] Post's careful and patient narrative of the emerging legal relationships complements these later analyses with the timely reminder that legal, juridical, and material conditions played significant roles in the formation of the university cultures". Robert J. Porwool, in Sixteenth Century Journal vol. 1, n.2, 2019.

Gaines Post, Ph.D, 1931, Harvard, under the supervision of Charles Homer Haskins, was Professor of Medieval History at the University of Wisconsin (1935-1960) and then at Princeton University (1960-1970). He was a major historian on medieval universities and representative institutions. He was a fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and corresponding fellow of the Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften. In 1966 he was awarded the Haskins Medal by the Medieval Academy for his Studies in Medieval Legal Thought, Public Law and the State, 1100-1322 (Princeton, 1964).