MEDLUNI
Vernacular Literature and Medieval Universities
The Birth of a New Transnational Literary Identity (France and Italy, 1220-1399)

Universities on stage

The parallel emergence of vernacular literature and the medieval university is crucial to our understanding of what may be called urban literature. In many medieval cities, intellectual life and university culture were profoundly interconnected.

Universities projected themselves into civic space through public performances. “Lecturae” and “disputationes” exposed the practices of scholastic learning, offering the wider population a glimpse of forms of knowledge otherwise unfamiliar to most townspeople.

This dynamic left a significant mark on literature. The “débat”, a form rooted in academic pedagogy, resurfaces in the poetry of the “Puy d’Arras”, a medieval community of “trouvères” devoted to poetic competitions. Large audiences gathered to hear poets debate questions such as whether love was ultimately beneficial or harmful.

The theme of the disputatio – a debate between opposing views – plays a key role in the works of Guillaume de Machaut (c.1300-1377) and Eustache Deschamps (1340-1404), both connected to the University of Orléans. In Deschamps, for example, the debate serves to create a reversal within the poem, thus staging a clash of arguments. 

But on what other threads does the connection between urban literature and the university depend? One crucial meeting ground lay in the “scriptoria” – shared spaces of cultural production that served both literary and academic communities.

A Parisian network

Within this context, the so-called Master of the Meliacin emerges as a central figure. As documented by Richard and Mary Rouse (vol. I, pp. 104-116), this workshop produced eight surviving codices: three containing “Meliacin” by Girart d’Amiens, and five others featuring works by Adenet le Roi, Gossuin of Metz, and translations by Jean de Meun. The same hand also illustrated Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS 3142, dedicated to Marie of Brabant, wife of Philip III of France. This manuscript combines authors well rooted in academic circles – such as Adenet le Roi, Gossuin of Metz, and Jean de Douai – with philosophical and moral compilations, including the “Proverbs of Seneca” and “The Moralities of the Philosophers” by Alart de Cambrai.

Taken together, this evidence reveals the existence of a Parisian circuit of production in the later thirteenth century, where leading literary authors, professional scribes, and illuminators collaborated across both university and literary “milieux”.

The emergence of European universities during the Middle Ages triggered one of the most profound cultural transformations in European history. By reshaping the ways of learning, teaching, and transmitting knowledge, universities contributed not only to the creation of intellectual networks but also to the development of new literary traditions. Yet, the impact of this academic revolution on European Romance literatures has remained largely unexplored. MEDLUNI addresses this scientific gap by investigating how the rise of universities influenced vernacular literary production and by demonstrating the decisive role of academic culture in shaping a common European literary identity.

Between 1220 and 1399, the academic mindset deeply affected the thematic, stylistic, and material features of vernacular texts. Authors who were simultaneously university scholars and literary writers embodied this osmotic process, while manuscripts and texts circulated from one university centre to another, creating unprecedented literary networks. France and Italy, because of their privileged linguistic and cultural ties and their well-documented academic traditions, represent the privileged observatory for analysing these processes.

The project’s ambition is threefold. First, it aims to demonstrate the emergence of a distinctive European literary identity linked to the new academic culture. Second, it seeks to challenge the binary scheme – courtly or ecclesiastic tradition – that has dominated the study of medieval literature, by establishing universities as a third, transnational and transversal pole of literary creation. Finally, MEDLUNI combinins philology, prosopography, codicology, and stylistics to analyse textual mutations, manuscript circulation, and the networks of knowledge created by human mobility.

MEDLUNI will enable future research on other European literary traditions linked to universities. Moreover, the project contributes to broader debates on the cultural history and cultural migrations, thus highlighting the enduring relevance of the Middle Ages for understanding European universities’ heritage.