The Art of Learning. Illustrated Dictata at the Old University of Louvain
(2019) Conference “Scientiae. Early Modern Knowledge” — Location: Queen’s University, Belfast (12.June.2019)
Files
TheArtofLearningIllustrateddictataattheOldUniversityofLouvain.pdf
Closed Access - Adobe PDF
- 127.27 KB
Details
- Authors
- Abstract
- In the handwritten lecture notebooks produced in the universities of the early modern Southern Netherlands, the text is often accompanied by title pages, ink drawings, engraved plates inserted between or pasted onto the pages. At the University of Louvain, visual materials appeared in fifteenth-century dictata and the practice continued until the end of the eighteenth century. The surviving notebooks result from the education provided by the Faculty of Arts, in which students were taught scholastic logic, physics, metaphysics, and ethics. These fields were completed by the study of mathematical disciplines such as geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, cosmography, optics, statics, military architecture, etc. Illustrated notebooks are situated at the crossroads between multiple scopes of investigation: emblematic literature, printed production, visualization of science, history of education. This well-preserved corpus is representative of the combinatorial art that developed in the early modern visual culture in Europe. My paper intends to analyze the nature and the functioning of such syncretic images in order to assess their role in the transmission of knowledge within the framework of higher education institutions in the Southern Netherlands: what can we discover about the way the scientific content was approached in teaching establishments, about learning mechanisms (e.g. the mnemonic function of illustrations), and about a possible visual mode of thinking conceived for epistemological purposes? It will therefore explore the different figurative registers—images, symbols, and signs—as well as the manner in which they were elaborated (reuse of existent forms, bricolage, adaptation and interpretation of visual patterns).
- Affiliations
Ghent University Vakgroep voor Kunst-, Muziek- en Theaterwetenschappen
Citations
de Mûelenaere, G. (2019). The Art of Learning. Illustrated Dictata at the Old University of Louvain. Conference “Scientiae. Early Modern Knowledge”, Queen’s University, Belfast. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/104291