Visual Culture of University Knowledge. The Lecture Notebooks from Louvain and Douai (17th-18th centuries)

de Mûelenaere, Gwendoline
(2018) Conference “The Epistemic Functions of Vision in Science” — Location: Università degli Studi di Bergamo, Italy (10.October.2018)

Files

VisualcultureofuniversityknowledgeTXToctobre.pdf
  • Closed Access
  • Adobe PDF
  • 207.24 KB
Request a copy

Details

Authors
Abstract
In the universities of the early modern Southern Netherlands (Louvain and Douai), images were abundantly used for didactic, but also social, political and symbolic purposes. The surviving handwritten lecture notes range from the fifteenth to the end of the eighteenth century. They result from the education provided by the Faculty of Arts, in which students were taught logic, physics, metaphysics, and ethics. In the notebooks, the text is often accompanied by title pages, drawings and engravings. Two kinds of images coexist in a single space: a scientific imagery made of abstract forms and aiming at fostering the understanding of the subject (geometrical patterns, diagrams, tree structures, legends), and an iconography inspired by non-scientific figurative languages, of allegorical, emblematic, descriptive, religious, historical, mythological, moral or satirical nature. Erudition is not only depicted, but also staged and celebrated. My paper focuses on the role of the image in the transmission of knowledge within the framework of higher education institutions in the Southern Low Countries. This study of a selection of illustrated notebooks will be articulated around two main issues. Firstly, what are the rhetorical and visual strategies used in such representations to convey new scientific ideas, or on the contrary, old ways of thinking? How were Western traditions of allegory, emblematics and symbolics employed, adapted to the academic message? And secondly, what can we discover about the learning mechanisms used by the students (for instance the mnemonic function of representations that visually structured the notebook)?
Affiliations

Citations

  • APA
  • Chicago
  • FWB

de Mûelenaere, G. (2018). Visual Culture of University Knowledge. The Lecture Notebooks from Louvain and Douai (17th-18th centuries). Conference “The Epistemic Functions of Vision in Science”, Università degli Studi di Bergamo, Italy. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/104267