Overview of illustrated lecture notebooks from the Old University of Louvain

de Mûelenaere, Gwendoline
(2020) Conference Engaging Margins. Framing imagery as embodiment of cognitive processes”, organized by UCLouvain and UGent — Location: UCLouvain, Louvain-la-Neuve (8.October.2020)

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Abstract
In the early modern Southern Netherlands, a common practice in university teaching was to dictate lessons. Students wrote down the lectures, hence producing an important amount of handwritten notebooks. At the Old University of Louvain, hand-drawn illustrations already appeared in fifteenth-century notebooks. In the early seventeenth century, engraved plates began replacing the sketches and ink drawings made by the students themselves. They were inserted between or pasted onto the pages. Two kinds of images coexist in a single space: a scientific imagery made of abstract forms and aiming at fostering understanding of the subject (geometrical patterns, diagrams, tree structures), and an iconography inspired by non-scientific figurative languages of allegorical, emblematic, religious, mythological, or moral nature. These documents are held in various Belgian institutions, including the Archives of the UCLouvain. Through a selection of ten manuscripts from this institution, I give an overview of the different visual languages used and of their role in the transmission of knowledge within the framework of higher education in the Southern Netherlands.
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de Mûelenaere, G. (2020). Overview of illustrated lecture notebooks from the Old University of Louvain. Conference Engaging Margins. Framing imagery as embodiment of cognitive processes”, organized by UCLouvain and UGent, UCLouvain, Louvain-la-Neuve. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/104026