Drawing Practices as Learning and Recreational Processes in Louvain Student Notebooks (Seventeenth-Eighteenth Centuries)

de Mûelenaere, Gwendoline
(2026) Students, Scholars and Their Books at the University of Louvain (1425–1797) — ISBN: [978-2-503-61819-7], 243-280, published

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At the Faculty of Arts of the Old University of Louvain, the practice of dictating lessons gave rise to the incorporation of pen drawings and prints in lecture notebooks, often called dictata in Latin. Representations in lecture notebooks, an integral part of student note-taking from the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth century, constitute an important source of information about the content and methods of early modern university teaching and the organization of knowledge. The drawings could be either original compositions created by the student, or copies after prints on sale at Louvain printers and booksellers. Such ‘student images’ therefore oscillated between creation, imitation, and adaptation. In this contribution, I formulate the hypothesis of the value of drawing practices for the student codices, focusing on notebooks in logic. I present the diversity of their functions, from structuring and mnemonic to relaxation purposes, and I show how these functions participated in the learning process. Two claims open new perspectives. Firstly, the chapter draws attention to the freedom the students took in creating their drawings. More than mere variations of existing compositions, they are the fruit of a subtle game of montage and bricolage using a variety of visual sources. The second claim of this contribution concerns relaxation and hilaritas in relation to the transfer of knowledge. I argue that the visual aesthetics personally developed by students in their codices played a role in the study of logic.
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de Mûelenaere, G. (2026). Drawing Practices as Learning and Recreational Processes in Louvain Student Notebooks (Seventeenth-Eighteenth Centuries). In Violet Soen, Wouter Druwé, Wim François et Ralph Dekoninck (ed.), Students, Scholars and Their Books at the University of Louvain (1425–1797) (pp. 243-280). Brepols. https://doi.org/10.1484/M.LECTIO-EB.5.152250