About the Journal

A relational database of scholars and literati active in European academia from the inception of the first universities to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution is a necessary tool for addressing the role of academia in the “Rise of the West” using the methods of economics and statistics. 

The construction of this database started in 2017. It now contains more than 93,000 persons active in 370 universities and academies. The project was first funded by the Special Research Funds of UCLouvain, then by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, under grant agreement No. 883033, “Did elite human capital trigger the rise of the West? Insights from a new database of European scholars”. It is now also funded by the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique-FNRS under grant n° A2.11903.007-F, “Human capital and the rise of the West: the key role of scientific academies”. 

The data collection consists of manually harvesting secondary sources on the history of universities and academies. Starting in 2021, once the data collection for a given institution is completed, we produce an issue of the <em>Repertorium Eruditorum Totius Europae</em>, providing a short description of the institution and the sources used, together with descriptive statistics. When complete, the series will serve as an encyclopedia on data about the pre-industrial institutions of higher education in Europe. In 2026, we are increasingly relying on AI to help identify sources and process them.

For more detailed information about the individuals, please visit the database available https://shiny-lidam.sipr.ucl.ac.be/scholars2/

Two warnings are in order. First, in writing these notes, we did not try to list the most up-to-date articles on each institution and its context. We focused primarily on sources containing data on professors and academicians. 

 Second, RETE is a large pan-European database built from heterogeneous sources. Some entries come from recent digital or prosopographical resources, while others necessarily rely on older institutional histories, especially for regions where no modern repertory is available. For broad quantitative analyses, this heterogeneity is usually manageable, provided that results are interpreted at the appropriate aggregate level and subjected to robustness checks. It becomes more important when users work on small, highly filtered subgroups or individual trajectories. In such cases, the underlying biographical information should be checked one by one against historiographical scholarship. 

Link to data:  https://shiny-lidam.sipr.ucl.ac.be/scholars/