The Art of Learning: Illustrated Lecture Notebooks at the Old University of Louvain
(2023) Scientific Visual Representations in History — ISBN: [978-3-031-11316-1], 3-31, published
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- Abstract
- The various roles fulfilled by the old University of Louvain, the main institution of higher education in the Southern Netherlands, can be investigated through a collection of dictation notes, or dictata, that crosses four centuries. In these handwritten lecture notebooks, the text is often accompanied by title pages, ink drawings, engraved plates inserted between or pasted onto the pages. The well-preserved corpus is representative of the combinatorial art that developed in the early modern visual culture in Europe. My contribution is articulated around two issues. Firstly, it focuses on the rhetorical and visual strategies used to convey scientific contents, and on the learning mechanisms those images implied. Secondly, the essay aims to draw attention to a particular mode of representation employed, the Western tradition of emblematics, which were taken from moral or religious publications and adapted to an academic message. Emblematic devices were favored for the representation of sciences during the early modern period due to their persuasive effectiveness. The framing, pedagogical, and mnemonic functions of such syncretic images inserted in college notebooks are further developed in order to estimate their role in the transmission of traditional university knowledge as well as new ideas.
- Affiliations
Ghent University Vakgroep voor Kunst-, Muziek- en Theaterwetenschappen
Citations
de Mûelenaere, G. (2023). The Art of Learning: Illustrated Lecture Notebooks at the Old University of Louvain. In Matteo Valleriani, Giulia Giannini, Enrico Giannetto (eds.) (ed.), Scientific Visual Representations in History (pp. 3-31). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11317-8