Student Notebooks in Words and Images: Contributions of an Iconological Analysis

de Mûelenaere, Gwendoline
(2021) Conference “How to investigate student notes from the Renaissance (ca. 1300-1600)?” — Location: KU Leuven, Leuven (27.May.2021)

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Abstract
(en) At the Old University of Leuven, the practice of dictating lessons, leading to the production of an important amount of handwritten notebooks, gave rise to the incorporation of visual materials in these volumes. The text was often accompanied by title pages, ink drawings and engraved plates. Illustrated dictata, dating mostly from the 16th to the mid-18th century, are situated at the crossroads between multiple scopes of investigation: emblematic literature, printed production, visualization of science, history of education. This well-preserved corpus (held at the KBr, KULeuven, UCLouvain and ULg) is representative of the combinatorial art that developed in the early modern visual culture in Europe. My presentation intends to provide an quick overview of the nature and the functioning of such syncretic images in order to assess their role in the transmission of knowledge: what can be discovered about the way the scientific content was approached, about learning mechanisms (e.g. the mnemonic function of illustrations which visually structured the notebook), and about a possible visual mode of thinking conceived for epistemological purposes? Furthermore, are there socio-symbolic values attached to these representations? Could they have been used to celebrate the time students spent at university in a festive and didactic way? To that end, I will explore the different figurative registers used in college notebooks as well as the manner in which they were elaborated: reuse of existing forms, bricolage, adaptation, customization and interpretation of visual patterns.
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de Mûelenaere, G. (2021). Student Notebooks in Words and Images: Contributions of an Iconological Analysis. Conference “How to investigate student notes from the Renaissance (ca. 1300-1600)?”, KU Leuven, Leuven. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/104792