Abstract

The "Onomasticon" database is mainly designed to provide information on teachers and students of the University of Perugia since its foundation (1308) and to present the data on the institution's history in a well-ordered and sufficiently analytical manner. The essay aims to evaluate to what extent the collected data can also be used to describe the evolution of the teaching of the different disciplines in the "Studium Perusinum" during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. After a brief introduction presenting the documentary resources used in the database (and their limitations) and clarifying the meaning of some keywords (faculty, discipline, course), each of the two authors examine one disciplinary area: arts / medicine and law; a mention is reserved for theology. As regards medicine, it emerges the growing interest in practical applications of the discipline both in the academic milieu and by the public government, which uses the budget of the Studium to remunerate the doctores not only for their teaching, but also for their professional activity at the service of the city. For the arts, the importance attributed to grammar as a propaedeutic teaching is very evident; the university also finances and organizes the basic grammatical instruction given in the schools distributed in the five administrative divisions of the city, in which sometimes teachers who are simultaneously reading in the Studium are engaged. Finally, as regards the teaching of law, the application of Information Technology can reconstruct the «external» history of law teaching, but obviously not so much his contents and methodology. Increasing the level of intersection between historiography and informatics can be a new goal of Onomasticon database.