Producing, Distributing and Using Manuscripts for Teaching Purposes at French, English and German Universities in the Late Middle Ages

Abstract

The essay aims to provide a short survey of the production and distribution of manuscripts for academic purposes at European universities in the late Middle Ages. It discusses access to and use of manuscripts, including hybrid situations in which students used private copies, consulted books in a library, or borrowed manuscripts for study. The essay then moves on to illustrate key teaching methods, above all dictation, and raises the question of what parameters we should take into account when reconstructing contexts of learning and teaching from manuscripts, especially when it comes to issues of layout and glossing. The formation of universities in Europe in the High Middle Ages was a successful model for the organisation of advanced studies. One of the most demanding tasks of the new universities was to support their teaching staff and students by providing them with texts for learning purposes: manuscripts and, since the second half of the fifteenth century, printed books. Access to written texts has been essential throughout the medieval period, because ‘education’ – even at university level – meant ‘exercising tradition’. And this tradition was essentially laid down in authoritative texts, which had to be read, commented on and discussed in detail in the trivium, in the quadrivium of the artes liberales and in medicine, law and theology. In historical portrayals of universities, the aspects of producing, distributing and using manuscripts are generally addressed very briefly, if at all. Plenty of relevant information has been published in essays, however. Nonetheless, a differentiated overview is still missing, which is not surprising, as many questions still have not been resolved by researchers yet. This essay attempts to || 1 Grubmüller 1989, 47: ‘Unterricht ist im Mittelalter Einübung in Tradition’. 2 Miethke 1990, 18: ‘Grundlage des Unterrichts der scholastischen Universität sind [...] autoritative, schriftlich niedergelegte Texte oder Textcorpora [...]’. 72 | Michael Baldzuhn draw some baselines against this backdrop. It does not offer any new insights as such, but aims to provide a short survey on the production, distribution and use of manuscripts for academic purposes in the heart of Europe. 1 The use and availability of manuscripts at