History of Education

During the Renaissance the Arts curriculum in universities was based almost exclusively on the teaching of Aristotle. With the revival of Plato however professors of philosophy started to deviate from the official syllabus and teach Plato’s dialogues. This collection of essays offers the first comprehensive overview of Platonic teaching in Italian Renaissance universities from the establishment of a Platonic professorship at the university of Florence-Pisa in the late 15th century to the introduction of Platonic teaching in the schools and universities of Bologna Padua Venice Pavia and Milan in the 16th and 17th centuries. The essays draw from new evidence found in manuscripts and archival material to explore how university professors adapted the format of Plato’s dialogues to suit their audience and defended the idea that Plato could be accommodated to university teaching. They provide significant and fundamental insight into how Platonism spread during the 16th and 17th centuries and how a new interpretation of Plato emerged distinct from the Neoplatonic tradition revived by Marsilio Ficino.

In 1517 the Brabant city of Louvain witnessed the foundation of the Collegium Trilingue (Three Language College). Funded by means of the legacy of the humanist and diplomat Jerome of Busleyden (d. 1517) and steered by guiding spirit Erasmus of Rotterdam this institute offered courses in the three so-called sacred languages Hebrew Greek and Latin which students could attend for free. However this kind of initiative was not unique to Louvain in the early 16th century. In a time span of barely twenty years Greek and Hebrew were also offered in Alcalá de Henares (near Madrid) Wittenberg and Paris among other places. It would not take long before these ‘sacred’ languages were also on the educational agenda at universities throughout the whole of Europe.

The present volume examines the general context in which such polyglot institutes emerged and thrived as well as the learning and teaching practices observed in these institutes and universities. Devoting special attention to the study of the continuity or rather the discontinuity between the 16th-century establishment of language chairs and the late medieval interest in these languages it brings together fifteen selected papers exploring various aspects of these multilingual undertakings focusing on their pedagogical and scholarly dimensions. Most of the contributions were presented at the 2017 LECTIO conference The Impact of Learning Greek Hebrew and ‘Oriental’ Languages on Scholarship Science and Society in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance which was organized at the occasion of the 500th anniversary of the foundation of the Louvain Collegium Trilingue.

Henry of Rheinfelden a Dominican from Basel spent the last decade of the fourteenth century at the University of Vienna studying theology. During this time he took notes on the academic activities of the first rectors of the university and deans of the Faculties of Arts and Theology. This volume explores Rheinfelden’s contribution to our understanding of the doctrinal curricular administrative and prosopographical history of the early University of Vienna. Deciphering Rheinfelden’s surviving notebooks in the Universitätsbibliothek Basel sheds new light on the rise of an academic elite in Vienna. His manuscripts reveal a network of scholars sharing a passion for knowledge and supply a gallery of intellectual profiles starting with the mentors of the group Henry of Langenstein and Henry Totting of Oyta and continuing with the lesser-known figures Stephen of Enzersdorf Gerhard Vischpekch of Osnabrück Paul (Fabri) of Geldern Andreas of Langenstein Rutger Dole of Roermond Nicholas of Hönhartzkirchen Nicholas of Dinkelsbühl John Berwart of Villingen John Stadel of Russbach Peter de Treysa Michael Suchenschatz of Hausleiten Peter Schad of Walse Thomas of Cleves and Leonhard of Dorffen. The papers gathered in this volume highlight the intricate relationship between a commitment to administrative duty and an appetite for the creation of a doctrinal tradition via debating forging arguments defending and attacking positions commenting on authorities and adopting and adapting academic practices imported from Paris since the majority of the authors in our gallery were educated in Paris and built their careers in Vienna. Through Rheinfelden’s notebooks this volume provides access to unique and previously unknown texts that together offer a new image of the medieval University of Vienna.

Since the early nineteenth century European pedagogical theory has stimulated a didactic turn towards the visual as an alternative to textual mediations of knowledge through books and lectures. Pedagogues and policymakers who strove for a more child-centred approach to teaching were soon joined by media producers and marketers in their aim to transform the classroom into a multimodal space for learning. From the turn of the twentieth century onwards teachers were increasingly pressured to incorporate high-profile media technologies such as stereoscopes lantern and film projectors into their lessons.

This collection of essays focuses on European educational light projection from its first appearance at the end of the nineteenth century through the 1990s when digital image projection started to gradually replace analogue film slide and overhead projectors. It explores the classroom use of these technologies. In doing so it challenges top-down approaches to the introduction of new visual technology and questions discourses that characterize the relation of visual media technology to teachers as one of consumption. The studies in this volume demonstrate how everyday demands and preferences transformed the 'ideal' instructional culture as put forward by policymakers producers and pedagogues into distinctive didactic practices that worked around or went beyond the pre-imposed ways of usage of visual media products. The volume moves beyond the view of instructional technology as a one-way route to modernization and teaching efficiency. By laying bare the power relations interests and ideologies at play the contributions also lend insight into the intertwinement between politics media material culture and classroom practices.

This book surveys teaching and learning in the mathematical and occult sciences medicine and natural philosophy in various Islamicate societies between 800 and 1700. It focuses in particular on Egypt and Syria between 1200 and 1600 but looks also at developments in Iran India Anatolia and Iraq. It discusses institutions of teaching and learning such as house and court teachers madrasas hospitals in-family teaching and travelling in search of knowledge as well as the content of the various sciences taught by or at them. Methods of teaching and learning teaching bestsellers and their geographical and temporal dissemination as well as encyclopaedias and literature on the classification of the sciences are treated in further chapters.

This is the first book to look closely at the contested reception of Peter Lombard’s Sentences and its eventual triumph at the Fourth Lateran Council. By placing Peter Lombard’s career and works within the broader frame of twelfth-century ideas practice and institutions the author explores and contextualizes the controversies that attended the publication of the Sentences. At the same time she also traces the growing popularity of the Sentences and its increasing prestige and importance among the literary elites of Northern Europe.

The book argues that the allegations of error made against Lombard’s Christology and Trinitarian theology in the period between 1156 and 1215 must be understood in the longer history of intellectual controversy in the Schools of Northern Europe. In the trials of Berengar of Tours Abelard and Gilbert of Poitiers the author uncovers a consistent tradition of critique within the schools which she then shows inform subsequent criticisms of Peter Lombard’s intellectual legacy. Concomitantly she explores how responses made in support of the Sentences against men such as Gerhoh of Reichersberg and Joachim of Fiore consolidated the emerging canonical status of the work as a textbook in theology which would be finally endorsed at Lateran IV.

As such this study challenges our understanding of the making of orthodoxy in the twelfth century.

The importance of training and education is on the increase. While the production of ‘human capital’ is seen as a motor for a competitive economy skills and expertise proof to be necessary for social mobility. Remarkably in conceiving modern forms of ‘apprenticeship’ several mechanisms from the acien régime seem to return. The difference between public and private initiative is disappearing education and training is being confused and in order to acquire generic skills as flexibility communicability self-rule creativity and so on youngsters have to learn ‘in context’. Even for maths scholars now talk of ‘situated learning’.

Before the advent of a formal schooling system training took place on the shop floor under the roof of a master. The apprentice not only worked but also lived in his master’s house and was thus trained and educated at the same time. In cities this system was formally complemented by an official apprenticeship system prescribing a minimum term to serve and an obligatory masterpiece for those who wanted to become masters themselves. Traditionally historians see this as an archaic and backward way of training yet this book’s aim is to show that is was instead a very flexible and dynamic system perfectly in tune with the demands of an early modern economy.

In order to understand it fully however we should differentiate the informal training system organised via a ‘free market’ of indentures on the one hand and the institutionalised system of craft guilds on the other. In Antwerp early modern guilds had a project of ‘emancipating’ their members. They didn’t simply produce certain skills but through a system of quality marks defended the honour of craftsmen. This is the difference with current practices. By representing hands-on skills as superior guilds supplied a sort of symbolic capital for workers.

Bert De Munck is lecturer at the University of Antwerp and member of the Centre for Urban History. His research focuses on the history of the guilds vocational training and social capital.

The essays in this collection focus not on texts but on people specifically on teachers and their students beginning with the late Carolingian era and continuing through the creation of monastic and secular schools in the centuries before the first universities. Central to the articles in this volume are the schools and communities of Northern France and England including Reims Bec Soissons and Canterbury whose patterns of thought and learning gave shape to intellectual endeavours throughout medieval Europe. In addition to some of the most prominent personalities of the day (among them Gerbert of Reims Lanfranc and Anselm of Bec Ivo of Chatres and John of Salisbury) the contributors examine those teachers and students who worked in the shadows: figures like the biblical exegete Richard of Préaux and the musical innovator Theinred of Dover. The focus throughout the volume is on personalities and personal relationships thus recreating the human connections that lay behind medieval humanism and the Twelfth-Century Renaissance. Taken together the essays here create a coherent and compelling picture of the tumultuous time before the universities came to organize and take control of teaching and learning a seminal period when teaching methods and curricula grew out of the particular experience of specific teachers and their interactions with their students.

Suite naturelle du volume sur L'enseignement des disciplines à la Faculté des arts (Paris et Oxford XIII e-XV e siècles) récemment paru dans cette collection le présent ouvrage veut faire le point sur l'enseignement de la philosophie au XIII e siècle en offrant une série d'études et de textes gravitant autour du célèbre «Guide de l'étudiant» du ms. Ripoll 109 qui bien que découvert par M. Grabmann en 1927 fait ici pour la première fois l'objet d'une exégèse - en l'occurrence collective - s'appuyant sur une connaissance directe du document dans son intégralité.

La première partie de ce livre bipartite est le résultat d'un colloque international qui a réuni à la Faculté de philosophie de l'Université Laval (Québec) de nombreux spécialistes des disciplines ou matières couvertes par le «Guide». Leurs contributions sont ordonnées selon le plan même de l'ouvrage à l'étude (prologue philosophie naturelle philosophie morale philosophie rationnelle) et suivies d'un compte rendu des exposés de synthèse.

Sa seconde partie qui est le fait de l'éditeur de ce volume regroupe - en réponse aux besoins et aux questions de la première tout en étant enchassée dans une enquête cherchant à préciser la date le lieu et le milieu de composition du «Guide de l'étudiant» ainsi que sa nature et l'identité de son auteur-compilateur - une série de neuf études ou éditions complémentaires qui s'inscrivent dans un programme de recherche sur «Les textes didascaliques de la Faculté des arts de l'Université de Paris au XIII e siècle» du Laboratoire de philosophie ancienne et médiévale (Faculté de philosophie Université Laval).

Cette Somme didascalique est complétée par une abondante bibliographie permettant d'approfondir le sujet et de suivre ses ramifications ainsi que par une série de trois index facilitant sa consultation rapide et féconde.