In the seventeenth and eightenth centuries, the Ludoviciana was a small Protestant university with the four faculties typical of the time: Theology, Jurisprudence, Medicine, and Philosophy (the latter covering the disciplines nowadays taught within the natural sciences and humanities). Some twenty professors taught several hundred students, most of them from Hesse.

The University in this period chiefly served local German concerns, with only the Law faculty maintaining links of international significance. In the eighteenth century, under the influence of the Enlightenment ideals of Halle and Göttingen as well as the Landgrave’s court, there was a valiant push to modernize, in the face of considerable economic disadvantages. One notable achievement was the creation between 1777 and 1785 of a Faculty of Political Economy, which included new, practically oriented disciplines –  veterinary medicine, agricultural science, and forestry – that were to prove of groundbreaking significance, as well as technical disciplines (drawing, crafts, design), the latter being transferred south to Darmstadt in 1874.

University privileges and statutes, granted to Giessen University by Ludwig V of Hesse-Darmstadt