The university is invented
A self-governing corporation of scholars, with degrees, examinations and legal privileges.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 112 years
- Known to
- ± 20 years
- Era
- Post-Classical, Holocene
Bologna organises around 1088 as a guild of students hiring professors; Paris forms as a guild of masters; Oxford follows. What is new is not teaching but the institution — a legally recognised corporation that can set its own curriculum, examine candidates and grant a licence to teach valid anywhere. It survives essentially intact for nine hundred years and is one of very few medieval institutions still operating in recognisable form.