This extremely interesting collection of essays draws on a wide range of theories about the idea of self-fashioning (from Clifford Geertz to Stephen Greenblatt) to explore how it functioned in both an individual and a collective sense in the early modern university. It is the careful use of theory, illuminating without being pretentious, and the wide range of sources sensitively used — from student manuals (Jonathan Davies), to letters (Kenneth Austin), to clothing and ceremonial (Marian Füssel) — that make the volume methodologically convincing and useful for future research. And what renders it particularly stimulating is the range of contradictions and tensions in notions of self-fashioning that the various contributors highlight: a perceptive introduction underlines the particularities of the early modern period, the new social confidence of the academic profession, and the diversity of types of scholars and intellectuals that sharpened such tensions.

For example, the tensions between noble and monkish habits are highlighted by Jonathan Davies in his study of manuals of student behavior — this is a useful way of setting student behavior in a particular historical moment and situating student preoccupations within clashing aspirational models. If it was not clear to what students were aspiring, fissures are also revealed between the scholarly ideals promoted by university rhetoric and what students themselves would have liked to be, revealing a far wider range of possible models. Of course, the early modern period immediately evokes the question of the Reformation, and Kenneth Austin’s article provides useful insights into the fault lines between Protestant and Catholic models. The English protectorate provides another fertile context for thinking through the implications of wider political and religious change for institutional identity (Gráinne McLaughlin). It is also very telling to see how self-fashioning and the models to which students aspired could cause tensions with other groups in society who were not so keen on the assumption of particular characteristics. The noble response to student aspirations to a noble sword-wearing identity is shown to be distinctly wary and defensive in a perceptive article by Marian Füssel.

Perhaps the most interesting area of tensions (and most inaccessible to the historian) within the process of self-fashioning lies actually within the self. It is part of human nature to be slightly conflicted about who one wants to be, and students seem to have been particularly susceptible to such difficulties — unsurprisingly, since they were at a transitional stage in their lives, at a transitional historical moment in terms of the stated purposes of a university education, and explicitly involved in an education that was justified aspirationally. Ingo Trüter’s article on Johannes Eck shows him disingenuously manipulating in retrospect what others were saying about him. Likewise, these articles present us with students within their institutions both accepting and denying what others were saying about them.

The articles are extremely suggestive, and there are many ways in which this line of research can, and surely will, be taken further. For example, it would be useful to think further about the relationship between actual behavior and the types of self-fashioning that took place in written discourse, and to explore the extent of the reciprocity between the two. In doing so, it would be methodologically helpful to devote more attention to the presumed audiences for these displays, and, with an eye to reception theory, to thinking about the role of these audiences, whether readers or spectators, in the process of self-fashioning. It is at this point that tensions between what people said about students and what students said about themselves emerge with particular clarity — the article by Jason Harris on Parisian attitudes to Irish scholars, and the latter’s defense, is instructive.

This book is of enormous relevance to all who are interested in the history of universities, and also has far-reaching implications for such study in other periods. Corcoran’s stimulating article on academic charisma, for example, implicitly provokes comparison with the role of university theologians during the trial of Joan of Arc. It is to be hoped that this volume will serve as a stimulus to conversations across period boundaries, which will help to pinpoint what is specific about each historical moment.