William J. Courtenay

The computus of 1329 is a remarkable document--against all the odds, it has survived as a record of the names of most of the students and faculty members of the University of Paris at that time, one of only two such lists to survive from the Middle Ages. It records the payments made by the university community in order to defend a student who had been convicted in a rape case (remarkable in and of itself, especially as the case had been taken by Symonette, a jongleuse or wandering entertainer from a small town in Champagne), and here William Courtenay reconstructs and transcribes the document in order to provide a comprehensive picture of the social and geographical nature of those associated with the University. It's an impressively thorough book, and I think one which will be the basis for a lot of interesting future scholarship.… (més)