Abstract
The chapter begins with a discussion about the importance of the Roman Catholic Church and the Kingdom of Sweden in connecting Finland to the Western European cultural sphere. The story continues by the foundation of Turku Cathedral School, the first school in Finland, at the turn of the fourteenth century.
The author also examines the first Finnish university students and their study paths at European universities between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries. From the early-fourteenth to the late-fifteenth century, Finnish students mainly studied at the University of Paris, which was the best-known university at that time. In the mid-fourteenth century, new universities were founded in German-speaking countries. These universities were geographically closer to Finland than was Paris, which made it easier for Finns to start studying at universities. Finnish students studied at the universities of Prague, Leipzig, Rostock, Greifswald, and, finally, at Uppsala (established in 1477), in this order.
The author analyses Finnish students studying at European universities between 1313 and 1523. We know that Finnish students came mainly from the upper layers of society, even though historical sources are fragmented. Those Finnish students who completed a university degree usually obtained a baccalarius degree in the artes faculty, after which they probably returned to Finland to serve as priests.
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- 1.
The first preliminary cathedral schools of Europe emerged as early as the eight to tenth centuries, when schoolmasters (scolasticuses) were hired to teach at the cathedrals of the Frankish Empire. This policy was accepted more or less as such by the third Lateran Council in 1179, which decreed that each cathedral church have a master who was to teach, for free, the younger churchmen of the cathedral and poor students (Hanska and Salonen 2004) .
- 2.
For example, between 1449 and 1523, a total of 22 applications for papal exemption (dispensation) were made in the Diocese of Turku by priestly candidates who had been born out of wedlock and were therefore not qualified to be priests. Of these, 19 were illegitimate sons of priests or those in religious orders (Hanska and Salonen 2004) . Usually, the dispensation was granted.
- 3.
It seems that these students were not particularly successful, since only Nicolaus Svärd obtained the degree of baccalaureus at the University of Louvain in 1441. Magnus Petri Galne moved to the University of Erfurt in 1445, but nothing else is known about him. Kanutus Benekini , for his part, was a priest in Turku around 1442, but it seems that he did not have a degree. No information is available of the other students (Nuorteva 1997, pp. 112–114).
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Välimaa, J. (2019). Finnish Students at Medieval Universities. In: A History of Finnish Higher Education from the Middle Ages to the 21st Century. Higher Education Dynamics, vol 52. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20808-0_3
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