ABSTRACT
In 1559, after 150 years of preparation, Barcelona obtained its own Estudi General, similar to those established in Valencia in 1502 and in Zaragoza in 1583. King Martin I had made a similar attempt to found a fully developed university in the Catalan capital in 1401 and his initiative was later developed by Alfonso V in 1450. The latter attempt to supplement the existing studies of arts and medicine with faculties of grammar, rhetoric, civil and canonical law, and theology was approved by Pope Nicholas V shortly after. 1 However, well into the 1500s, only a small two-faculty institution, Estudi General de Medicina e de les Arts liberals, had been realised. 2 A deeply rooted university tradition existed elsewhere in the Crown of Aragon, where prominent universities had been established in both Montpellier and Lleida by the late thirteenth century. These universities were granted permission to dissect condemned criminals in 1340 and 1391, and during the fifteenth century similar privileges were awarded to schools of medicine and surgery in Barcelona, Valencia and Zaragoza in 1401, 1478 and 1488, respectively. 3 Yet, by the turn of the 1400s, none of these minor institutions had obtained university status, which would only come with the unprecedented proliferation of new Iberian universities during the sixteenth century. This development was in many ways analogous to the ‘educational revolution’ in contemporary Castile traced by Richard Kagan. The appearance of 26 new universities within the three Iberian kingdoms between 1475 and 1625 was unmatched elsewhere in contemporary Europe. 4
