The present volume, number VII in the series Groningen Studies in Cultural Change, offers a selection of papers presented at the International Conference 'Knowledge and Learning' held in November 2001 in Groningen. The first volume (number V in the series) is entitled Learned Antiquity: Scholarship and Society in the Near east, the Greco-Roman World, and the Early Medieval West, and has been edited by Alasdair A. Mac Donald, Michael W. Twomey and Gerrit J. Reinink. The second (volume VI) bears the title Schooling and Scholarship: The Ordering and Reordering of Knowledge in the Western Middle Ages, and has been edited by Alasdair A. Mac Donald and Michael W. Twomey. The papers in the present volume, Scholarly Environments: Centres of Learning and Institutional Contexts 1560-1960, written by scholars in such disciplines as science, education and cultural history, treat various matters concerning scholarship in the period from the Renaissance until the mid twentieth century.