Spanish Medical Students’ peregrinatio to Italian Universities in the Renaissance

As Walter Rüegg has pointed out, ‘[t]he social role of the medieval university consisted primarily of training for more rational forms of the exercise of authority in church, government, and society’, although what led to the foundation of universities was not ‘the demand for socially applicable knowledge … so much as the existence of certain disciplines which had shown themselves to be of value for dealing with certain social tasks’.2