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)
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The essay aims to provide a short survey of the production and distribution of manuscripts for academic purposes at European universities in the late Middle Ages. It discusses access to and use of manuscripts, including hybrid situations in which students used private copies, consulted books in a library, or borrowed manuscripts for study. The essay then moves on to illustrate key teaching methods, above all dictation, and raises the question of what parameters we should take into account when reconstructing contexts of learning and teaching from manuscripts, especially when it comes to issues of layout and glossing. The formation of universities in Europe in the High Middle Ages was a successful model for the organisation of advanced studies. One of the most demanding tasks of the new universities was to support their teaching staff and students by providing them with texts for learning purposes: manuscripts and, since the second half of the fifteenth century, printed books. Access to written texts has been essential throughout the medieval period, because 'education'-even at university levelmeant 'exercising tradition'. 1 And this tradition was essentially laid down in authoritative texts, 2 which had to be read, commented on and discussed in detail in the trivium, in the quadrivium of the artes liberales and in medicine, law and theology. In historical portrayals of universities, the aspects of producing, distributing and using manuscripts are generally addressed very briefly, if at all. Plenty of relevant information has been published in essays, however. Nonetheless, a differentiated overview is still missing, which is not surprising, as many questions still have not been resolved by researchers yet. This essay attempts to 6 Cf. e.g. the statement of Haubrichs 1995, 70, with respect to books, monks and education in Carolingian times: 'Schreiben ist sakraler Dienst in der "Werkstatt der Tugenden". […] Schreiben hieß, dem Teufel Wunden zufügen'. ('Writing is sacred service in the "workshop of virtues". […] Writing meant to injure the devil'), or the little anecdote reported in the first half of the twelfth century by Ordericus Vitalis in his Historia ecclesiastica: 'ein recht sündiger Mensch hätte seine Seele retten können, weil Gott jede Sünde mit einem geschriebenen Buchstaben aufrechne und in diesem Fall gerade ein Buchstabe übrig geblieben sei' ('a sinful man saved his soul, because god charged his sins with every single letter written by him and in this case just a single letter remained') (Goetz 2002, 78). The close connection between devotion and studium in the monastic culture up to the twelfth century has been pointed out emphatically by Illich 1991, 15-66, who