The learned societies of Renaissance Europe adopted the term ‘academy’ in imitation of the Academy established by Plato, whose school was named after Academus, the mythical hero who was sacred to the grove on the outskirts of Athens where Plato taught. The first Renaissance academies were established in Florence and Naples.

In the mid-fifteenth century a group of scholars began to meet in the garden of the Medici Villa in Careggi; these meetings, which were a conscious imitation of the meetings in Plato’s Symposium, were organized by Ficino under the patronage of Cosimo de’ Medici. Though not formally constituted as an academy, the scholars who met came to be known as the Accademia Platonica. At various times in the Academy’s history, meetings were attended by Poliziano, Landino, Pico Della Mirandola, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Alberti, Pulci, and Michelangelo. The study of Plato and the reconciliation of Platonism with Christianity were the main interests of the Academy, but Dante and the Italian language also fell within its scholarly purview. The Accademia Platonica declined after the death of Lorenzo de’Medici in 1492, but was revived for a short period early in the sixteenth century under the patronage of Bernardo Rucellai; humanists who met in the Orti Oricellari included Machiavelli.

In Naples, the Academy originated in the 1440s under the leadership of Antonio Beccadelli and the patronage of King Alfonso V. In the late fifteenth century its most eminent member was Giovanni Pontano, and so it came to be known as the Accademia Pontaniana.

The Roman Academy, which was founded by Julius Pomponius Laetus, was a learned antiquarian society which sought to revive ancient Rome by performing classical plays, celebrating ancient festivals, and studying the literature of antiquity; members of the Academy, which met on the Quirinal (the northernmost hill of Rome) to discuss the ancient world, adopted Greek and Latin names; Laetus was styled pontifex maximus. In 1468 the Academy was suppressed by Pope Paul II, who suspected its members of paganism and heresy; Laetus was arrested and tortured, but was eventually acquitted of the charges of heresy and immorality. Thereafter it became an offence even to mention the name of the Academy. Sixtus IV allowed the Academy to reopen, and it became prominent during the pontificates of Julius II and Leo X; it finally closed with the Sack of Rome in 1527.

In the course of the sixteenth century some 700 academies were established in Italy. Some were no more than gentlemen’s clubs, but others had serious scholarly, literary, and artistic purposes. In Venice, the Neakademia promoted the study of Greek language and literature. The Accademia della Crusca (Latin Furfuratorum), founded in 1582 in Florence, took a scholarly interest in the Italian language; its dictionary of Italian (Vocabulario della Crusca, 1612), which adhered to the view of Bembo that trecento Tuscan should be regarded as the basis of the literary vernacular, was influential both in terms of the growth of lexicography (many other academies subsequently produced dictionaries) and in the establishment of Tuscan as the standard form of literary Italian.

Academies of the fine arts have their origins in the school of Bertoldo di Giovanni in Florence and the circle of Leonardo da Vinci in Milan, but the first formally constituted fine art academy was the Accademia del Disegno founded on the initiative of Giorgio Vasari in Florence in 1562 and jointly led by Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici and Michelangelo; the first fine art academy in Rome was the Accademia di San Luca, which was established in 1593.

The first scientific academy was the Academia Secretorum Naturae (Italian Accademia dei Segreti), which was founded by Giambattista della Porta in Naples in 1560; the interests of the Academy, which lay at the meeting point of magic and experimental science, attracted the attention of the Inquisition, which ordered the Academy to close in 1580. The Accademia dei Lincei, founded in Rome in 1603 by Federico Cesi, was another early example of a scientific academy, in this case with an emphasis on biological and medical sciences; its members included Galileo Galilei.

In France, an unconstituted academy assembled by a guild of troubadours in Toulouse in May 1324 brought together poets to give public recitations of their works at a festival of Floral Games. The games became an annual event and in about 1500 were endowed by a wealthy Toulouse matron; in 1694, the Académie des Jeux Floraux was formally constituted by King Louis XIV. The Floral Games was a poetry festival rather than a forum for philological debate, but nonetheless became the arena in which the literary claims of Occitan were advanced; the royal letters patent of 1694 formally imposed the French language. The first French academy to be officially instituted by royal decree was the Académie de la Poésie et de Musique, which was founded in 1570 by Jean-Antoine de Baïf, who assembled poets and musicians in his house until the death of King Charles IX in 1574; this academy was revived two years later as the Académie du Palais, which met in the Louvre for more cerebral discussions of philosophy and rhetoric than had occurred in Baïf’s house; it was permanently suspended in 1584 because of financial problems and the disruptions of the Wars of Religion. The Académie Française, which is now the principal learned society of France, began as a group of writers brought together by Valentin Conrart in about 1629; in 1634 the group was taken over by Cardinal Richelieu and its letters patent were approved by the Parlement of Paris in 1637.

In the Netherlands, the Renaissance institutions comparable to the academies of southern Europe were the chambers of rhetoric. In 1617, Samuel Coster, a member of a chamber of rhetoric called de Egelantier, declared himself exasperated with the frivolity of the chambers of rhetoric, and so instituted an academy modelled on those of fifteenth-century Italy. His Duijtsche Academie, which held its meetings in Dutch rather than Latin, held meetings on mathematics, philosophy, and philology, and also mounted performances of plays of an anti-Calvinist stripe. Persecuted by the authorities (largely because of the plays), the Academy merged with De Egelantier in 1635.

In the Holy Roman Empire, the forerunners of the academies were the various learned sodalities founded by Konrad Celtis on the model of the Roman Academy of Julius Pomponius Laetus: these included the Sodalitas Vistulana in Kraków, the Sodalitas Literaria Hungarorum, the Sodalitas Rhenana in Mainz, and, most influential of all, the Sodalitas Danubiana in Vienna. The first literary academy in Germany was Die Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft (‘The Fruitful Society’, also known as the Palmenorden), which was established by Prince Ludwig von Anhalt-Köthen in Weimar in 1617, in imitation of the Accademia della Crusca (of which Ludwig was a member); members aspired to encourage the literary use of the German language (instead of French), but the Academy had little perceptible effect on the development of literary German, and closed in 1680. German academies often produced publications, many of which failed to record the city of origin on the title pages;

In England, academies were either fictional (as in Edmund Spenser’s Areopagus) or unrealized. In 1617 the antiquary Edmund Bolton formulated a scheme for a royal academy of letters and science; Bolton drafted a constitution, drew up a list of founding members (including George Chapman, Sir Kenelm Digby, Michael Drayton, Ben Jonson, John Selden, and Sir Henry Wotton), and secured the support of King James (who was himself a scholar), but the plan was never implemented; the project was renewed in 1635, this time for an aristocratic academy to be called ‘Minerva’s Museum’, but again the plan was not realized.

The Geneva Academy founded by Calvin in 1559 was an educational institution designed to produce godly preachers and governors; its first rector was Beza, and the academic staff (and some of the students) were recruited en bloc from Lausanne. The Academy was run on strict disciplinarian lines, and on occasion students were sentenced to death for apostacy or libelling their teachers. The Academy grew rapidly, and by the time Calvin died in 1564, the Academy had 300 students and the preparatory college (the schola privata) had 1,000 pupils; this Academy was the antecedent institution of the University of Geneva, which was founded in 1873.

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