Paul Knoll, an eminent historian of medieval Poland, began his career with an important book that examined the rise of the Polish monarchy in the fourteenth century. In this foundational study of state building in late medieval Europe, Knoll considered the efforts of the final two Piast kings who helped reunify the fragmented Polish state. Now as a fitting bookend to a distinguished career, Knoll has produced a prize-winning monograph that examines one of the greatest achievements of the last of those Piast kings, Casimir the Great (1333–70). In 1364 Casimir founded in Cracow the second oldest university in Central Europe. Though Knoll's work has ranged across the Polish medieval landscape, the Studium Generale of Cracow, what Casimir dubbed “a pearl of powerful learning,” has never been far from the center of his scholarly interests.

At one level Knoll's Pearl is a very traditional institutional history. Though Casimir established the university toward the end of his reign, it quickly fell into decline. It was the princes of the new Jagiellonian dynasty who put the school on a firmer foundation and secured its future. Knoll follows these developments closely. He traces the growth of the university, its relationship to the city of Cracow, its expanding personnel and bureaucracy, and the development of its faculties. He closes the story chronologically with his assessment of humanism's impact on the institution. At this point, one might wonder why this book is even being reviewed by the Austrian History Yearbook, but Knoll's study is far more than a simple institutional history. Though centered on Cracow, it is in certain respects an intellectual history of Central Europe's long fifteenth century. Many of the region's great universities were founded in the middle decades of the fourteenth century: Prague (1347), Cracow (1364), Vienna (1365), Pécs (1367), and Heidelberg (1386). And as Knoll ably reminds us, a peripatetic body of students and masters linked these schools together. A figure such as Matthew of Cracow (1335–1410) had a substantial impact on three of these institutions. He studied in Prague and remained a professor for some years at the university. In Cracow he reorganized the theology faculty, and to the west along the Neckar, he reached the height of his influence as rector at Heidelberg.

Indeed, it is the transnational aspect of the book that makes it such valuable reading for scholars of premodern Europe. Knoll's contributions in this respect are many. Let me highlight two. Knoll introduces an important school of political philosophy little known outside of Poland though it played a significant role in the debates surrounding conciliarism. The kingdom's long-standing conflict with the Teutonic Knights and the Christianization of Lithuania in the fourteenth century generated a lively political dialog as Poland's defenders sought to justify its positions before an international audience. The first rector of the university, Stanisław of Skarbimierz, wrote a series of treatises that considered questions of just war and the rights of pagans, two critical issues for the kingdom locked in its struggle with the Teutonic Knights and its alliance with Lithuania. The younger Paul Vladimiri, a member of the Polish delegation to the Council of Constance, pushed even harder on these issues. He emphasized the limits of papal authority and highlighted a law of nations that protected rights of non-Christians. In those tumultuous years of the early fifteenth century, the university stood squarely behind the conciliarists. Though Knoll focuses on the careers of those central to the university, he also provides a useful demographic analysis of the institution in the fifteenth century. Who comprised the university? To what extent did the school's reach extend beyond the Polish lands? He points to important traveling scholars who made extended stays in Cracow. In 1489 the arch-humanist of Germany, Conrad Celtis, matriculated as an arts student and remained for two years. Somewhat earlier the fascinating Italian scholar Callimachus, who had fled Italy after a failed conspiracy against Paul II, had a significant impact on the university though formally employed by the royal court. Indeed, students and masters came from as far afield as Wales, as in the case of Leonard Coxe who became Poland's most effective promoter of Erasmus. But Knoll also gets into the hard numbers as he works carefully through matriculation lists. He demonstrates that over the course of the century Cracow attracted an ever-growing contingent of students from outside the Polish lands. While Bohemians came in larger numbers in the early fifteenth century, a reflection of the disruptive Hussite wars, it was the Hungarians and Silesians who accounted for the largest percentage of the “foreign” student population overall. In short, Knoll demonstrates that Cracow was a thriving hub of intellectual exchange in the late middle ages as he elucidates those often-overlooked connections that tied the region together.