Crime and the Application of Knowledge: The Pardon Letters issued to the Students and Members of the University of Louvain in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

Abstract

This paper examines the pardon letters granted to students and members of the University of Louvain in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A privileged place of teaching and knowledge, but also of agitation, late medieval and early modern universities were occasionally the theatre of scenes of violence. Student delinquency has been particularly well-documented in fifteenth-century France, particularly due to the popularity of the Parisian poet François Villon, known as much for his literary work as for his criminal activities, for which he received several pardon letters from the king. In the Burgundian and Habsburg Low Countries, members of the University of Louvain were also the subject of judicial inquiries, and in these cases they could (and did) petition the monarch for a pardon letter to remit their crimes and avoid punishment. These letters highlight a diverse range of crimes and altercations (including homicide, assault and theft) and reveal the recurrent tensions that arose between “town and gown”. These records also illustrate the legal efforts undertaken by students to escape the rigors of justice. Analyzing these pardon letters, our paper addresses the nuanced and varied ways in which petitioners from the University of Louvain wielded their legal knowledge to navigate the conditions of mercy. Did students of law and the ars rhetorica use a more complex argumentation to justify their crimes? In a context of legal pluralism, did they try to exploit jurisdictional tensions between ordinary justices and the Court of the Rector of the University of Louvain? These themes also raise the question of the presence of Louvain graduates in the Burgundian and Habsburg bureaucracy, who played a direct role in the legal discussions surrounding the granting of pardons. Ultimately, these pardon letters represent unique documentary sources through which we can observe, from below, the judicial and criminal conflicts that characterized the University of Louvain’s early history. This paper is written under the umbrella of the PARDONS project (‘Topographies of Pardon Tales: Contextual Mapping of Pardon Letters in the Southern Low Countries, 15th-17th c.’), a four-year research project funded by the BRAIN-be 2.0 program, which aims to digitize, transcribe and make publicly accessible the vast collections of pardon letters granted by the Burgundian and Habsburg rulers and available at the National Archives in Belgium