Textbooks and Methods of Note-Taking in Early Modern Europe

Abstract

The practice of taking notes from oral pedagogical experiences has a long history, which can be traced back at least to 4th-century Athens and which extends down the present where it persists in both paper and new media. Student notes have played a significant role in the transmission and publication of pedagogical texts from the lectures of Aristotle to those of Ferdinand de Saussure, among many others. Note-taking during oral events has been studied in most detail for medieval sermons, where reportationes taken by listeners often formed the principal basis for the written versions that circulated (with the speaker's revisions and authorization, or not). Similarly, in medieval and early modern classrooms notes were taken during lectures and disputations and could be circulated or printed afterward more or less legitimately. Textbooks printed from student notes and student manuscripts, which survive in great numbers from the early modern period, offer special insight to one kind of "textbook"--the text generated during the classroom experience. Different pedagogical contexts generated different kinds of student manuscripts, ranging from the more or less spotty notes taken from regular rates of speech to full-text manuscripts taken under dictation in many early modern classrooms. The latter exercises especially were based on the widespread pedagogical principle that writing aided retention. In this brief entry into a large topic, I will consider some early modern examples of full-text manuscripts taken under dictation and sometimes published as textbooks, textbooks which circulated in manuscript by student copying and students who used team-work to record and circulate courses given at lecture rather than dictation speed