From our library Saunterings of the recent spring months we discovered that starting in the middle ages, universities exercised behavior control on their students. Hear Hastings Rashdall:
College statutes are not unnaturally full of prohibitions directed against musical or other noises calculated to disturb the studies of others. Some few German statutes condescend so far to human infirmity as to permit at seasonable hours musical instruments, ‘provided they are musical’. As to the keeping of dogs, hawks, ferrets, ‘unclean beasts or birds’, the practice was viewed by the college disciplinarian with a traditional horror which (as regards dogs) still lingers in the breasts of the deans and porters of Oxford and Cambridge. As the grim sixteenth century is reached, the prohibitions against all ‘profane games, immodest runnings, and horrid shoutings’, become increasingly sweeping. (Quoted from page 421 of Volume III of The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, by Hastings Rashdall. 1936.)
For a brief biography of Hastings Rashdall, click here.
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