Studenti, copisti, cuochi, panettieri. I tedeschi nel collegio studentesco della Domus Sapientiae di Perugia (sec. XV)

This article seeks to reconstruct the role of the university college of the Sapienza Vecchia in 15th-century Perugia through an analysis of published and unpublished documents. Special attention is devoted to the German component and to the 1470s and 1480s, which represented a turning point in the city’s cultural life with the introduction of printing. The Domus Sapientiae, founded in 1362 by Cardinal Niccolò Capocci, was a fundamental reference point for the foreign students, above all from Germany, who chose Perugia as their preferred destination; indeed, it is possible that the presence of a student college with a proportion of places reserved for foreigners played an important role in the inclusion of Perugia among the stages of the peregrinatio around the Italian Studia; the wealth of documentation preserved at the Archivio di Stato di Perugia also offers a new perspective on the familia of the Casa, which crossed the boundaries of the university world given its restricted and, so to speak, elite nature; specifically, the theory that students were accompanied by personal servants, who then became workers at the Casa, sheds new light on an experience which may have been less solitary than generally thought. Finally, the college was a centre of manuscript production, as shown by the alternation of various copyists, and played an important role in introducing printing to the city. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to suggest that the college of the Sapienza Vecchia represented the place of transition from the old scribal art to the more modern typographical craft, as demonstrated by a more detailed examination of the biographies of some students/printers/copyists.