ABSTRACT
The idea of corporate action, corporate judgment, and corporate power implies some sacrifice of individual independence. At the time of their greatest independence the universities lived in the interstices of medieval society, taking advantage of its decentralization and the balance of its conflicting powers to further their own corporate interests. Thus while the southern institutions were at first greatest as centers for the pragmatic studies of law and medicine and were intimately linked through their personnel with local aristocracies, many northern institutions took their cue chiefly from the University of Paris, which was the center of a pan-European intellectual influence resting above all upon its faculties of theology and arts. In the development of humanistic learning the Italian universities took the leadership, as they had earlier done with medicine and law and were later to do with physical science.
