Wien 1365 - creating a university

THE UNIVERSITY OF VIENNA celebrates its 650th anniversary in 2015. “1356 – Eine Universität entsteht” (“Vienna 1365 – The Beginning of a University”) examines the history of the founding of Austria’s foremost centre of higher education. The exploration of its past opens unique insights into an institution that since the late Middle Ages has been one of the pillars of European civilization. The ambitious undertaking of founding a university with all the risks and opportunities of a young “start-up”, the critical litmus test of innovative initiatives in the venerable imperial capital, the tactics and eccentricities of the young university founder Duke Rudolph IV, and science in the age of manuscripts and messengers are among the topics investigated here by a group of international experts. At the time of the university’s founding and beyond, Vienna was a guiding light in the field of science. It was here, for example, that the mathematical foundation was created for Copernicus’s model of a heliocentric universe. Sceptres, signets, enrolment registers and other remarkable and extremely rare testimonies to the ritualized scholarly life of this age have been preserved and are depicted in this volume. Numerous photographs and an innovative layout illustrate the cultural, scientific and media-related history of the early European universities, based on the example of Vienna.