even if he tiptoed around the question of state control, for his prominent
position in Munich was largely the result of royal patronage.^27
THE ADDRESS:‘UNIVERSITIES, THEN AND NOW’Döllinger opens his address of 1866, as any historian might, by indicating that
before taking stock of the present university and its future prospects, he will
offer atour d’horizonof the history of universities from their foundations in
Bologna, Paris, Vienna, and Prague up until the post-Napoleonic period. But
already in his opening paragraphs, he gives evidence that he is on the look out
for the development of a particular type of institution: what he calls a university
‘in the full, modern German sense’(im vollen, im jeßtigen deutschen Sinne).^28
Not surprisingly, therefore, as he surveys the medieval and early modern eras,
he focuses preponderantly on the development of universities in the Holy
Roman Empire. Noting the influence of Paris for central European universities,
he comments on the founding of the earliest German universities at Prague and
Vienna, before moving to the eve of the Reformation.‘A competition for
founding universities arose...in Germany after the end of the fourteenth cen-
tury’, he notes, but he regrets that most of these foundations did not meet‘the
most moderate requirements of science, even according to the measure of that
age’. As had been true at Paris, the earliest German universities possessed all
four faculties (arts, theology, law, medicine). But in them, the arts (or philo-
sophical) faculty was held‘in bondage to scholastic forms...[and] was generally
in a position of tutelage to that of theology’.^29 Because of the fragmentation of
the Holy Roman Empire,‘every town of the second or third degree, every strip
of territory, smaller perhaps than an English county, must have its own petty
university, a kind of...pocket edition of a university for private use’(Tasche-
nausgabe einer Hochschule...zum Privatgebrauche). He questioned tiny German
universities such as Erfurt or Duisburg, comparing them unfavourably to the
likes of Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge.^30
With the Reformation radiating out from little Wittenberg (1502),‘a new
order of things arose’, according to Döllinger.‘The German universities could
not but be affected, shaken, and ultimately transformed by this movement.’
On the positive side of the ledger, Döllinger appreciated the humanist currents
in education present before and during the Reformation; they helped‘break
(^27) Brandt, Eine katholische Universität in Deutschland, 329–46.
(^28) Ignaz von Döllinger,Die Universitäten, sonst und jetzt (Munich, 1867), 6; trans.
C. E. C. B. Appleton asUniversities, Past and Present(Oxford, 1867), 3.
(^29) Universitäten, 10;Universities, 7 (translation modified).
(^30) Universitäten,10–12;Universities,7–9.
Ignaz von Döllinger and the University 229