University of Osuna

Historia

The University of Osuna, officially the Colegio-Universidad de la Purísima Concepción en Osuna was a university in Osuna, Kingdom of Seville, Spain from 1548 until 1824. Spain granted the university building the status of a monument in 2004. Since 1995, the building has again been a site for university-level studies.The old universityThe University of Osuna was founded based on a bull of Pope Paul III, and it was a peer university to the likes of the universities of Alcalá de Henares, Bologna, or Salamanca. That bull was granted due to the efforts of Don Juan Téllez Girón, Fourth Count of Ureña and First Duke of Osuna, who also gave it an endowment sufficient to its needs. Authorization for the university came directly from the pope without any specific involvement of the Spanish monarchy.The University of Osuna had a system of scholarships, a residential hall for its students, and even its own burial ground. There were fifteen major professorial chairs in the university and eight lesser chairs in the associated college; these were grouped into faculties of Medicine, Law, Canon Law, Theology, and Arts. Of these, Theology was the most attended. Medical instruction was entirely theoretical: there was no operating theater. Philip II later added a chair in Mathematics.