The University of Padua was one of Europe's great centres of learning in the pre-modern period. Founded in 1222, it became known over the following century as a "universitas scholarium", that is, a self-governing, legal corporation of scholars, and attracted many important intellectual figures including a numer of humanists, the pioneers of the Renaissance revival. Ever since its foundation the university has attracted scholars from all over Europe, and during the Tudor period those included dozens of Englishmen: statesmen, soldiers, and ambassadors such as Francis Walsingham, Robert Bertie, and Henry Wotton; churchmen such as Cuthbert Tunstall and Reginald Pole; humanists such as Richard Pace; and physicians such as Thomas Linacre, John Caius, and William Harvey. This work addresses not only the question of why English students went to Padua and what they did there, but the more complex issues of cultural transmission and reception and of how their experiences impacted on Tudor life and thought. The study contains a biographical register confirming the breadth of the foreign community in Padua and revealing the Paduan "stadium" as something of a microcosm of European life.
Woolfson thus addresses the historical question of how European a culture England's was and became in the early modern period, and challenges some entrenched Anglo-Saxon assumptions about the Italian Renaissance. He finds that through developments in medicine, humanist studies, law and political thought, Padua influenced Tudor England in profound, enduring, and sometimes surprising ways.