The physical confines of the Collegium are now mostly devoted to museum display, though a few of its halls still function at times of high academic ritual. The premises are restored, and few restorations restore so authentically, incorporate the surviving foundations and walls and court details from the medieval period like this one. The corner stones are thought to be original. I took the tour this week, a little self-conscious that I have “lectured” here—well, out in a suburban campus classroom—and have been asked to do so again, to Dr. Banaś’s colleagues, about university culture in the United States. Having lived and worked and done almost all of my thinking and reading in American universities for the last thirty-five years, I can claim some authority on the subject, but when visiting a place like the Collegium Maius, it is phenomenally easy to consider oneself a fraud, or at least a lightweight. Phenomenally. I take comfort in knowing that I’m probably not the only offender, nor likely the biggest, to have slipped obscurely through the passages of the Jagiełłonian over those 600 years.
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| Original Buttress |
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| Old Stones |
Into the courtyard, then up the steps, we enter the Library through the Golden Gate
under the clock.
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| Cloister staircase |
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| Golden Gate to the Library |
The tour of the interior did not permit flash photography, so you will have to imagine the sumptuousness. The Romanesque vaults are brick, plastered over, the ceilings painted as if there were a sky overhead, with clouds; the walls are white, abundantly peopled with portrait paintings and busts of university worthies, medieval and recent. And of course, books, two walls of them, under glass, in cases ten feet high, in French. A large table with twenty-five armchairs, which served as the Faculty Senate meeting room until 1964. Imagine sumptuousness here.
Into the
Common Room ca 1450, where the professors dined under a low, hugely timbered
ceiling at a massive U-shaped board, listening to readings from Pismo Święte. An absolutely gorgeous,
carved spiral staircase from the Baroque era rises through a hole in the
ceiling to where, I’m not quite sure (we didn’t tour the upper level), but my
reference book tells me that the staircase was more or less hijacked from a
manor house in Gdańsk, after its destruction in 1945.
The First and Second Treasury
rooms were next on the itinerary. The presence of two treasuries concerns me a bit. I was going to use a quote from a
former Jagiełłonian rector, Tomasz Strzępino, as the starting point of a
high-minded worry that universities had recently and radically shifted to the
practices of market-based institutions (“duh”), as opposed to intellectual
value-based institutions. He had observed, in 1432, that “'the purpose of this
institution is not to amass wealth'” (The
History of the University in Europe, I, 135), and yet, over a rather long
period of time, the Jagiełłonian University seems to have done pretty well for
itself. Nie ma nic nowego pod słoncem,
I suppose, but that would seem to make a vanity of my worries and of lecturing
(preaching) in general. I am somewhat relieved to learn that the items in these
treasuries, though antiques, silver and gold and narwhal tooth, derive much of
their value from their association with Jagiełłonian alumni and the history of
the life of the mind: ceremonial chains, a Persian rug with threads of gold and
silver, the only surviving drawing by Wit Stwosz, Wisława Szymborska’s Nobel
Medal. That is to say, that sumptuousness which accrues naturally and
accidentally as a result of learning and academic virtue is not inconsistent with the
principle articulated by Rector Strzępino. But if money, always a fact of university life, becomes instead
a goal, a primary value, a dominating discourse, then university as I imagine it
comes undone.
The most
interesting rooms, and the most humbling ones for me, are, like the Copernicus
Room, filled with period astronomical and astrological instruments, dazzling in
the complexity of their craftsmanship, purpose, and operation. Astrolabes,
sextants, sundials, mechanical clocks, telescopes, globes and globes of the
skies, and Napier’s bones (a calculating instrument by the inventor of
logarithms, ca 1617). I confess, I have not numbers nor equations, only words, imprecise, not universal,
easily misunderstood—as opposed to simply not
understood, like calculus. So much to know that I haven’t even the language for,
or the hope of it. But I am asked to speak by a friend and a colleague, and it
would be impolite to say “no.”
From the Copernicus room, I passed into the
great Hall under the “inscription Plus
ratio quam vis—let reason rule.”(39) Formerly this now magnificent space was
the theologians’ lecture hall, the highest faculty in the medieval university,
seating 104 in choirlike rows, with 102 portraits of kings, rectors, bishops,
and professors now looking on from the walls. But the theologians are gone. Perhaps
the humanists are next. My ideal image of the University, Old School, this hall
serves as a museum and ceremonial space.
(Almost all the information in this post is drawn from Collegium Maius of the Jagiellonian University: History and guide to the Museum collections, Podlecki and Waltos, Cracow: Karpaty, 2005.)
