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The conflicts of these years were religious and intellectual as well as political. New ideas generated in the universities challenged religious orthodoxy. The rise of the secular state led to conflicts with the churches over the control of higher education and degree qualifications. In Germany, regionalism allowed the coexistence of Protestant and Catholic universities. In Catholic Belgium, after independence in 1830, conflict led both to the revival of Leuven as a Catholic confessional university — a significant innovation — and to the foundation of the secular ‘free’ university of Brussels. Confessional disputes were also significant in England and in Ireland, where the rejection of the state's non-denominational policies led to the foundation of a Catholic university at Dublin with J. H. Newman as rector. In France, the ‘monopoly’ of Napoleon's University was maintained until 1875, when several Catholic universities were set up, though their powers were severely restricted once the Third Republic was securely established.

The theologians at the University of Leuven were not only the censors of Erasmus’ edition of Augustine, but also responsible for the third major edition project in the sixteenth century (Antwerp 1576–7). This edition claimed to offer the authoritative, Catholic, Augustine. Yet an analysis of the textual presentation shows that the edition in fact offered a more neutral presentation than the Erasmian editions. Against the background of this result, the chapter explores the interaction between censorship and scholarly development in the age of confessionalism.

At the end of the sixteenth century parallel debates arose in both Catholic and Reformed areas of Europe on the role of divine grace and human free will. Augustine's works against the Pelagians played a prominent part in this discussion. The debates shaped the development of orthodox thought in each of the confessional settings. This chapter focuses on two of the key places for these debates, Catholic Leuven (the Baianist controversy) and Protestant Leiden (the Arminian controversy), to compare and assess the dynamics between public opinion, expressed in different media of communication (such as sermons, songs, pamphlets and plays) and academic scholarship (esp. the contributions by Michel Baius, Robert Bellarmine and Gerardus Joannes Vossius on heresiology and the history of the early Church).

This chapter situates works on time by the Leuven professor of theology, Peter de Rivo, alongside the readers and copiers of his work at the Priory of Bethleem at Herent, a monastic house with strong links to the Windesheim Congregation and the devotio moderna. How did de Rivo construct his unique view of time, and how was this received by his largely monastic readers? The chapter argues that De Rivo’s work is best understood alongside the construction of a reformed ‘liturgical self’, a master and measurer of the temporalities of the liturgy. It commences by examining Peter’s monumental manuscript Monotessaron, a radical and innovative harmonization of the four Gospels. It then considers de Rivo’s work on calendar reform, starting with his polemical work against the theologian and astronomer Paul of Middelburg, and moving to the first examination of a newly-discovered work by de Rivo, the Reformatio kalendarii (‘The Reform of the Calendar’). The chapter concludes by analysing a set of startling devotional woodcuts included in Peter’s polemical work, the Opus responsivum, that ties together precise reflection on the chronology of Christ’s life with devotional practices of image production and seeing.

This chapter reflects on the practice of writing histories of time, arguing for a transdisciplinary approach to the history of temporality alert to the diverse and plural ways that time is configured in different genres and settings by historical agents. This history should not recapitulate the tired polarities of an earlier scholarship which set imprecise and ahistorical medieval time against the precisely measured and historical time of modernity. This discussion is set alongside theories of time from Augustine to Ricoeur, and develops in counterpoint with a case study of temporalities in and around fifteenth-century Leuven. Commencing with a new clock installed at the Abbey of Park in 1478, which played a chant from the medieval liturgy in honor of the Virgin Mary, this study shows how understanding time requires a history that takes into account objects, music, images, texts and ritual.

This chapter is a survey of the multiple ways of organising and experiencing time in the city of Leuven in the fifteenth century. It considers how time was understood in relation to the newly-founded University of Leuven, its social and economic life, including the life of its guilds and markets, its religious institutions and practices, and its visual and sonic cultures, especially the bells of the city. It examines how the language of the old and new was deployed to frame the dramatic transformations in the town’s physical and intellectual life in the fifteenth century. The temporalities of the city were experienced as varied and layered, including complex interactions between the times of the liturgy and other domains of social life.

This chapter examines a collection of texts and images from Leuven’s new university and St Peter’s church. It first analyses the temporalities of the commission and composition of Dieric Bouts’s altarpiece made for the confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament and depicting the institution of the Eucharist. It then places the altarpiece in the context of the liturgy and in dialogue with fraught contemporary academic debates over the possible truthfulness of statements about future contingents waged between the Leuven professors Peter de Rivo and Henri de Zomeron. This analysis illuminates a dominant conception of time in the fifteenth-century Low Countries – a contrast between limited human discursive temporality and God’s intuitive glance from eternity – as well as showing how eternity could be situated in relation to a fullness of time.

The cycle of radicalization of important segments within European Catholicism, spawned by Vatican II, preceded the hot phase of European student movements by several all-important years. As a result, when European students began to mobilize, Catholic students often agitated in front-line positions and performed important pioneering roles. In fact, with an amazing regularity, some of the very first European universities to engage in militant actions were, indeed, Catholic universities. In this chapter, detailed assessments of the interaction between Catholic and secular student activism focus on highlights in the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, and Spain. A section on the radicalization of the international umbrella organization of Catholic student organizations, the JECI, closes the chapter.