Valentina Lepri, knowledge transfer and the early modern university: Statecraft and philosophy at the Akademia Zamojska (1595-1627) Scientific and Learned: Cultures and their institutions, vol. 26. (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2019), pp. xiv + 192

This chapter reviews Valentina Lepri’s Knowledge Transfer and the Early Modern University. Statecraft and Philosophy at the Akademia Zamojska (1595–1627) (2019). This book demonstrates how the history of the Zamość Academy raises interesting questions about the purpose and the nature of institutions of higher education in the two centuries following the coming of printing and the breaking apart of the Roman Catholic church. The history of the Academy is inextricably bound to the vision of its founder, Jan Zamoyski, who, through talent and ruthlessness, rose from the ranks of the middling nobility in southeastern Poland to dominate Polish politics as grand chancellor and grand hetman. He founded the Academy without a faculty of theology; this shows that the Zamość Academy was by no means a standard European university. Zamoyski, who had played a considerable role in the constitutional revolution between 1572 and 1576, conceived his academy as a scola civilis, whose main purpose was to train young men for an active political life. The major strength of Lepri’s account is her detailed reconstruction and analysis of the nature of the Academy’s curriculum, the scholars who taught it, and the literature on which it was based. However, her presentation of the Polish-Lithuanian political system is not always as precise or as sound as might be wished.