Peregrinatio academica

Geographical Mobility of Students and Scholars in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period

Today, student exchange in the European university network is encouraged through large mobility programs such as Erasmus+. Universities like to emphasize their members’ internationality and measure their activities by the categories of “incoming” and “outgoing”. One of the main requirements for university members is their willingness to be mobile. The peregrinatio academica is an integrative part of university life and has a long tradition that can be traced back as far as Frederick Barbarossa’s so-called scholars’ privilege of 1155, which offered the emperor’s protection and separate legal status to the wandering students.

Peregrinatio academica means the education-related mobility of university students in particular, but also scholarly migration in a more general sense. The early long-range migrations to the few European universities in Bologna, Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge became shorter in the 14th century, when the first universities were founded in Central Europe (Prague, Vienna, and Cracow) and the university system was established in the German-speaking world. The trans-regional appeal of the old university strongholds persisted until the Early Modern Period, however.