Conferences

Between School, University and Private Education: The Gotha Gymnasium Illustre in the Context of Early Modern Cultures of Scholarly Knowledge

Thursday, 10 October to Friday, 11 October 2024

Conference of the Gotha Research Library and the Gotha Research Centre of the University of Erfurt
Venue: Gotha Research Centre, Am Schloßberg 2, 99867 Gotha

On 21 December 1524, a Latin school was founded in the Augustinian monastery in the Ernestine residence town of Gotha in the wake of the Reformation. It quickly emerged as an institution of regional and supra-regional significance and became a vital part of the Central German educational landscape. Thanks to substantial financial support, the school soon took on a university-like character. With the founding of the duchy of Saxe-Gotha in 1640, the gymnasium illustre was placed under the direct control of the consistory and took on a pioneering role in education in the empire through reforms under the rector Andreas Reyher. The ducal collections at Friedenstein Palace were also used for practice-orientated education. As at universities, private instruction formed an essential part of education in connection with the school. The historical development of Gotha's gymnasium is extremely well documented and shows that in the early modern period there was often no strict distinction between school and university. The opportunities for higher education were also very diverse and sometimes outside an institutional framework.

Whereas a conference organised at the Gotha Research Library in 2014 approached took early modern education systems from a inter-confessional perspective, the upcoming conference on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of the Gotha gymnasium will focus on the plurality of early modern cultures of scholarly knowledge, curricular overlaps and peculiarities of different educational institutions and opportunities, the tension between their complementarity and competition, and the process of establishing new academic disciplines and innovative methods.

Registration for the conference is possible at veranstaltungen.fb@uni-erfurt.de until 1 October 2024.

Information about the conference