Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
In a Paper Published in 1977 I introduced a carton of documents called Dispute di Scolari (1462-1527), preserved in the Archivio di Stato in Bologna, Italy. These documents constitute the most important surviving witness to student disputations held in the Bolognese Studio (in our terms, university), which enabled poor, young, foreign senior degree-candidates upon successful completion to be eligible for one-year lectureships in their respective subjects. After explaining the nature, structure, and legal requirements of the disputation notices and their relevance to student academic performance, the primary purpose of the paper was to illustrate them by examining a few notices in which Alessandro Achillini (1463-1512), professor of philosophy and medicine appeared, either as a disputing master or as a respondent.
An earlier version of this paper was written in 1980 for the Fifteenth International Congress of the Historical Sciences held in Bucharest, Romania. A brief synopsis was published in the Rapports of the Congress, vol. 3 (1980), 341, no. 14.