Old University of Leuven

The Old University of Leuven was the studium generale founded in Leuven, in the Duchy of Brabant, then part of the Burgundian Netherlands, in 1425 and closed in 1797, a week after the Austrian Netherlands were ceded to the French Republic by the Treaty of Campo Formio. A papal bull of Pope Martin V dated 9 December 1426 founded it as a Studium Generale that stood institutionally independent of the local church hierarchy, and Latin was its only language of instruction throughout its existence. Historians add the word old to tell it from the Catholic University of Leuven set up in 1835. In this atlas it appears as an institution where scholars of calculation and logic studied, among them the Spanish polymath Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz, who took his doctorate of theology there in 1638.