This article studies and contextualizes the attempts to reform the University of Bologna in the decades around 1583. On the basis of little-known documents, it shows how Rome exploited a directive of university reform from the Council of Trent to gain increasing power over the running of the studio and also the city of Bologna. The request for a report by the Congregation of the...

This article, using information from over one thosand marriage contracts from mid-sixteenth-century Nîmes, examines marriage choice in early modern France. It concludes that among the poorer half of the population, children largely chose their own spouses. Legal requirements for consent were frequently ignored, and parents were frequently dead. Many poor young people immigrated to Nîmes from...