Pride, professors, pedants, and plagiarists. A Review of: Sari Kivistö, The Vices of Learning. Morality and knowledge at early modern universities (2014), in: Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis (original) (raw)
This paper traces how the virtues of impartiality, love of truth and industriousness function inside and outside the scholarly world in the second half of the nineteenth century in the Netherlands by way of their perception in written necrologies about Robert Fruin and Johannes Gerardus Rijk Acquoy. What ideal images of Fruin and Acquoy their virtues, epistemic, moral, political and otherwise, can be found in the necrologies written by their colleagues and apprentices shortly after they passed away, and what does this say about the way we perceive the function of virtues, epistemic and otherwise, within the scholarly world of the humanities in the second half of the nineteenth century? This paper tries to make a small contribution to the history of the humanities by stating that the virtues of impartiality, industriousness and love of truth functioned outside the scholarly world as well as inside and were in fact intensely intertwined.
In the German lands, an unbroken tradition of student advice literature known as Hodegetik existed from the late 17th to the late 19th century. It offered encyclopedic surveys of the fields of knowledge, while also teaching first-year students how to develop studious habits. Given the popularity of hodegetical courses, especially in the 18th and early 19th centuries, and the wide circulation of hodegetical textbooks, many 19th-century scholars in Europe must have been at least moderately familiar with the hodegetical tradition. Drawing on a selection of key titles, including H. A. Mertens’s Hodegetischer Entwurf (1779) and K. H. Scheidler’s Grundlinien der Hodegetik (1832), this sub-project examines how hodegetical textbooks relied on each other in warning their readers against vicious habits, how much continuity their catalogs of vice displayed, and to what extent vices that persisted throughout the 18th and 19th centuries were associated with easy-to-remember commonplaces (“the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”), anecdotes (absent-minded professors), or stereotypical images (dogmatic scholasticism). More information: https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/vacancies/2019/q2/19-147-phd-position-hodegetics-language
Mediterranea. International journal on the transfer of knowledge, 2022
This article argues that the notebooks produced by students during their stay abroad can become precious documentary evidence of early modern knowledge creation and organization. From the second half of the fifteenth century an unprecedented availability of paper led students to take notes freely on anything they considered useful or interesting for their education and, more generally, for their future. The case study of the notebooks belonging to a student from Danzig who stayed in Wittenberg in the 1560s, will show how the multi-text documents produced by students contribute to a better understanding of both their educational needs and their original reworking of academic knowledge.
Hermeneia, 2020
This article introduces the first edition of an anonymous graduation discourse from the Faculty of Liberal Arts of the University of Prague, dating from the beginning of the 15 th century and preserved in the manuscript Praha, Národní knihovna České republiky, VIII.E.5, ff. 80r-81r. This short text is an example for the practices and the motivations of the masters and students in philosophy in a less investigated environment, and reveals a combination of scholastic formalism, classical references and picturesque details. An exposition of the university sermons genre and its usage in central European universities at the end of the Middle Ages sets forth a detailed analysis of the structure of the text, and a comparison with similar texts exposes some details about its unknown author and his fellows.
Virtue Ethics and Education from Late Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century
Virtue Ethics and Education from Late Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century
This series focuses on innovative scholarship in the areas of intellectual history and the history of ideas, particularly as they relate to the communication of knowledge within and among diverse scholarly, literary, religious, and social communities across Western Europe. Interdisciplinary in nature, the series especially encourages new methodological outlooks that draw on the disciplines of philosophy, theology, musicology, anthropology, paleography, and codicology. Knowledge Communities addresses the myriad ways in which knowledge was expressed and inculcated, not only focusing upon scholarly texts from the period but also emphasizing the importance of emotions, ritual, performance, images, and gestures as modalities that communicate and acculturate ideas. The series publishes cutting-edge work that explores the nexus between ideas, communities and individuals in medieval and early modern Europe.
"Academic Writing" - an Ironical Expression in the History of Culture
„Acta Universitas Danubius. Communicatio”, Vol. 14, No. 2, 2020, p. 80-84
In this article I aim at analyzing the evolution of the terms "academy" and "academic", starting with their etymology, in order to emphasize a bizarre cultural fact. Taking into account both their Greek origin and a sense of linguistic consciousness specific to some speakers, one could characterize the expression "academic writing" (referring to a certain discipline/course taught in our universities) as an ironical formula in the history of culture, since, originally, Plato's Akademia and 'writing' in itself had nothing in common. On the contrary, Plato was against writing in general, as proved by some quotations excerpted from his works.
University and History. The Lesson of the Middle Ages. (An Introduction)
„Studia UBB. Historia”, 64/1, p. 1-9., 2019
The following text has two main objectives: on the one hand, it intends to introduce the reader in a very cursory manner to some of the most important contributions made by the medieval university not only to the general development of higher education, distinguishable up until today, but also to the history of pre-modern European society. On the other hand, acknowledging the importance of university for the transformation (and “Europeanization”) of Transylvania from the second half of the 14th century until the 1550s, the author reflects briefly upon significant investigations concerning university, academic life and intellectuals in the Middle Ages conducted by scholars and research groups (especially during the last two decades) of the Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca.
The Ethics of Authorship: Some Tensions in the 11th Century
The acts of taking up the pen and circulating a text under one’s own name were fraught with ethical tensions in Byzantium. Assuming authorship of texts contravened the Christian ideals of humility and self-effacement, and could incur the accusations of ambition and self-importance, all the more so if language and style were skilful and sophisticated. Nevertheless, it is exactly skilful writing that displayed the intellectual abilities of the author and could bring social advancement and material profits. This tension between social ambitions and ethical implications is particularly outspoken in the eleventh century, when a new elite of self-conscious intellectuals sought to gather social capital on the basis of their intellectual precedence. At the same time, other cultural and ideological groups made their voice heard. This paper attempts to lay bare the various sets of representations (‘discourses’) that take issue with the ethical implications of authorship in the eleventh century. This can be done through an analysis of the ambiguous terms with which ‘skilful language’ (to use a neutral term) is denominated. The well-known habit to reject erudition and learnedness in prologues is also taken into consideration. On the one hand, the different discourses can be situated along the ideological and cultural fault lines that run through our period. But these tensions are also to be found in one and the same person. I discuss here the examples of Michael Psellos and John Mauropous: these polyvalent intellectuals developed different strategies to cope with the ethical issues that ambitious authorship provoked.