In which University did Dr. Mordenheim study?

[Mephisto of the FoS]

I am building the background of a character and I was wonderin g if there is any info where Mordenheim studied? I thought it was in Neufurchtenburg but Gazetteer II doeesn't mention any University in Lamordia in fact there is no state edjucation (which is a bit wierd in my opinion for a domain filled with constructs). Does the novel Mordenheim mentions anything?

[Speedwagon]

I believe it mentions a place called Leidenheim, which is shown on the MCS maps. Then again, Mistipedia says it is only a former residence of Mordenheim's, so I might be wrong here.

[tomokaicho]

It's been a while since I read the novel. Perhaps I'll put the file into Gemini and dig up the information.

[Mephisto of the FoS]

I believe it mentions a place called Leidenheim, which is shown on the MCS maps. Then again, Mistipedia says it is only a former residence of Mordenheim's, so I might be wrong here.

Thanks

The town of Leidenheim (Mordenheim p.63) is where he went to live with Elise after getting married, I read the parts of the novel and the book doesn't mention where the university is. With Elise they would go hiking up the mountains (could be the Sleeping Beast Mountains. Van Richtens Guide to Ghosts mentions Leidenheim as a small village along the coast of Lamordia and the Mordent Cartographic Society places it where the shores the Sea of Sorrows meet the southern part of the Essenbach Somp river delta, so the university where Elise's father taught could also be in Lamordia. Elise's cousins are referred in the book to live in Neufurchtenburg so the university could be there.

VRGtRavenloft places the university in Ludendorf.

Ensconced in the city’s heart, Ludendorf University supports many local industries. Funded by corrupt entrepreneurs and wealthy but immoral benefactors, the university's vast curriculum boasts esoteric programs such as alchemical combustion, chemical sentience, and speculative anatomy. The sciences reign here, and students and faculty alike push to discover technologies that will net lucrative contracts from the city’s wealthy overlords. The university continually needs new subjects for experiments and hires volunteers or pays individuals for “flesh rights”—ownership of their cadavers once they die. A secret society within Ludendorf University idolizes Dr. Mordenheim and follows the reckless paths laid by her lesser-known early works.

Since in the novel Mordenheim he moved with Elise in the secluded Schloss Helmreich to be away from privy eyes I guess the university wouldn't be so close to home. Also the 2e maps show Ludendorf and Schloss Mordenheim being closer than in 3e Ravenloft maps.

In Mordenheim Dr. Mordenheim was secretly experimenting with bodies and he was forced to leave the medical facility he was working in, when he was discovered working on a fresh cadaver and doing wierd stuff that made his senior doctor almost puke his guts out in disgust. It must have been really awful to make an experienced surgeon's stomach almost empty itself.

Finally the Mordent Cartographic Society has the following info:

Leidenheim, appeared in the novel "Mordenheim" as the town where Victor Mordenheim started his carreer.
While it was the epitome of science, and supported a lot of highstanding scientists, it's university and hospital now lie almost abandoned - thus depriving doctor Mordenheim from the peers whose respect he would so gladly gain, while still reminding him from his past.
Leidenheim is surrounded by the marsh of the Musarde Delta, which originated when Lamordia was drawn into Ravenloft. Most of it's inhabitants suffer from fever attracted from these marshes. There is a cure for this illness, but since no medical expertise (or money for training) is available to procure it, all that can be done is to care for the sick.
Leidenheim is also mentioned in the updated version of the Guide to Ghosts in van Richten's Monster Hunter Compendium II.

The Syndicate of Enlighted Citizens could have helped in the decline of the University of Leidenheim. (I think I will stick to this)

[alhoon]

Honestly, Lamordia as it is, is extremely small to support a university, by orders of magnitude. Even with stretching to accomodate modern tech-driven societies where food production is performed by 2% of the population instead of 40-60% as it would be in the 19th century or 90% as it would be in renaissance, you can't have a uni at 3300 people. You can not even have an elementary school. You cannot have more than a single inn and a couple of taverns, in fact.

[Mephisto of the FoS]

Honestly, Lamordia as it is, is extremely small to support a university, by orders of magnitude. Even with stretching to accomodate modern tech-driven societies where food production is performed by 2% of the population instead of 40-60% as it would be in the 19th century or 90% as it would be in renaissance, you can't have a uni at 3300 people. You can not even have an elementary school. You cannot have more than a single inn and a couple of taverns, in fact.

I had forgotten that Lamordia's population is only 3280 but still according to your assumption it still could have around 65 graduates. If we assume that students around the age of 14 studied there for 7-10 years then the number of students is really small but then again you have also those students who come from abroad so they can be more.

I made a small research

This applies to Cambridge

• Male - no women were admitted as students and dons were not permitted to marry.

• Young - most students were 14 or fifteen when they came up.

• You have to keep term - that is spend a minimum or 60 nights living within 3 miles of Great St Mary’s usually in college itself.

• In the first 80 years students had to find their own rooms, but eventually colleges formed to offer accommodation and food. You would be expected to dine in Hall

• You were required to wear your gown and hood and hence be marked out as a student - and there were town v gown riots.

• There were courses in Divinity, Law, Medicine and Liberal Arts. If you want honours you had to take Mathematics the first course with an exam.

• In the 1450s King’s College Cambridge had 70 students and fellows.

• It was the fifth college founded.

• Paris was the most important university. It was run by the church. In Bologna, the students hired and paid the teachers directly. Oxford and Cambridge were run by the crown to produce civil servants.

The universities were enormously large by comparison with Greek, Roman, or early medieval schools, but they fell far short of the mammoth public universities of the present. There were wide variations, of course, but a typical medieval university was comparable in size to a small American liberal arts college—with a student population falling somewhere between about 200 and 800. The major universities were considerably larger: Oxford probably had between 1,000 and 1,500 students in the fourteenth century; Bologna was of similar size; and Paris may have peaked at 2,500 to 2,700 students. It is evident from these figures that university-educated people were but a minuscule fraction of the European population, but their cumulative influence over time should not be underestimated; that German culture, for example, was profoundly shaped by the more than 200,000 students who passed through the German universities between 1377 and 1520 seems indisputable.

It would depend on the period, as only 6 colleges existed before 1400, study was 7-10 years, and included what we would think of today as Middle, High and College; it was probably somewhere between 30 and 50 year. 800 years later those 6 colleges graduate only 500 male students a year combined.

In Philosophia, William of Conches, a philosopher and teacher of the early twelfth century, argued for a universe governed by natural laws, which he believed operated independently of divine intervention in the mundane workings of the cosmos. This was a bold stance at a time when theological explanations were often unchallenged in academic discourse. He proposed that understanding these laws did not diminish the divine but illuminated the creator’s plan in a way that was accessible to human reason. This approach allowed for a naturalistic study of phenomena such as rainbows and eclipses without resorting to supernatural explanations.

Parallel to William of Conches, Adelard of Bath’s career was marked by a profound engagement with the natural world and an insatiable curiosity that drove him beyond the confines of his native land into the intellectual circles of the Islamic world. His travels to places like Antioch and perhaps even to the legendary schools of Baghdad opened his mind to a wealth of knowledge that had accumulated outside the narrower perspectives prevalent in Western Europe.

The centrality of natural philosophy during the Twelfth-Century Renaissance profoundly impacted the entirety of medieval thought, marking a pivotal shift from a predominantly theologically oriented worldview to one that incorporated rational and empirical inquiry into the natural world.

[Mephisto of the FoS]

From Ravenloft Gazetteer II

Lamordian commoners believe in simple "peasant-sense", a practicality that is suspicious of over analyzation and muddled acdemic jargon. Civic leaders, physicians, scientists, and other educated men snort at such simpleton's wisdom. They believe that the search for scientific truth represents the pinnacle of civilization and bear no patience for commoners who dismiss what they cannot comprehend.
_
Lamordians deny the significance - or even existence - of the gods, not out of despair or cynicism, but simply because they see no need for them. Academics refer figuratively to classical gods in their writings, but merely as a scholarly contrivance.

So there are academia exists in Lamordia it is just a really small percentage of the population as Alhoon said which is OK by me.

[Mistmaster]

In the Mistworld you have the city of Mordenheim which is a university city.