ABSTRACT
The fundamental combination of new wealth, new power, and assertion of individuality we see in the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, we see also in the successive attacks mounted upon other medieval institutions: guild, village community and landed aristocracy. In a very real sense modern history, right down to and including the present, has been one long series of intermittent Reformations. The university is, in a manner of speaking, the last of the great institutions formed during the Middle Ages: the last, that is, to suffer in full sweep the kind of changes and buffets that earlier were the lot of monastery, fief, guild, and parish. The evidence of comparative history leaves no doubt whatever that the university, much as we may cherish it, is anything but universal. Modern history, Lord Acton once declared, is essentially the story of what has happened to medieval institutions and values.
