Medieval Lectures
A description from 1912
In 1229 the Faculty of Arts at Paris made a statute on the methods of lecturing. It explains that there are two ways of reading books in the liberal arts.
The masters of philosophy may deliver their expositions from their chairs so rapidly that, although the minds of their audience may grasp their meaning, their hands cannot write it down. This, they say, was the custom in other faculties. The other way is to speak so slowly that their hearers can take down what they say. On mature reflection, the Faculty has decided that the former is the better way, and henceforth in any lecture, ordinary or cursory, or in any disputation or other manner of teaching, the master is to speak as in delivering a speech, and as if no one were writing in his presence. A lecturer who breaks the new rule is to be suspended for a year, and if the students showed their dislike to it, by shouting, hissing, groaning, or throwing stones, they were to be sent down for a year.
More than two hundred years later, in 1452, the statute was rescinded by Cardinal (William de) Estoutville, but it was probably never operative. Estoutville permitted either method of lecturing, and contented himself with forbidding lecturers to use questions and lectures which were not of their own composition, or to deliver their lectures (however good) to be read by one of their scholars as a deputy. He instructs the masters to lecture regularly according to the statutes and to explain the text of Aristotle, de puncto in punctum (‘point by point’) and, holding that fear and reverence are the life-blood of scholastic discipline, he repeats an injunction which we find in 1336, that the students in Arts are to sit not on benches or raised seats, but on the floor, ut occasio superbiae a juvenibus secludatur (‘so that the young may not have occasion to be proud’).
The name of the street in which lectures were given, Vicus Stramineus, is said to have been derived from the straw on which the students sat.
The question whether lectures should be committed to writing or not, troubled the masters of other universities besides Paris, and the statutes of the College de Verdale at Toulouse accept, in 1337, the view taken at Paris a hundred years earlier. Since study is a vehement application of the mind, and requires the whole man, the scholars are forbidden to fatigue themselves with too many lectures - not more than two or three a day - and in lecture they are not to take down the lecturer’s words, nor, trusting in writings of this kind, to blunt their proprium intellectum (‘own understanding’) In the Schools, they must not use incausta (copies of notes taken by others) or pencils except for correcting a book, etc. And what they have been able to retain in their memory they must meditate on without delay.
The insistence on meditation was a useful educational method, but as teaching became more organised, the student was not left without guidance in his meditations. The help which he received outside lectures was given in Repetitions or Resumptions.
The procedure at Repetitions may be illustrated from the statutes of the College of Dainville at Paris:
We ordain that all bursars in grammar and philosophy speak the Latin tongue, and that those who hear the same book ordinarily and cursorily shall attend one and the same master (namely, one whom the master [of the College] assigns to them), and after the lecture they shall return home and meet in one place to repeat the lecture. One after another shall repeat the whole lecture, so that each of them may know it well, and the less advanced shall be bound daily. to repeat the lectures to the more proficient.
A later code of the same College provides that
All who study humane letters shall, on every day of the schools read in the morning a composition, that is a speech in Latin, Greek or the vernacular, to their master, being prepared to expound the writer or historian who is being read in daily lecture in their schools. At the end of the week, that is on Friday or Saturday, they shall show up to their master a résumé of all the lectures they have learned that week, and every day before they go to the schools they shall be bound to make repetitions to one of the philosophers or of the theologians whom the [College] master shall choose for this work.
At Louvain, the time between five am and the first lecture (about seven) was spent in studying the lesson that the students might better understand the lecture; after hearing it, they returned to their own rooms to revise it and commit it to memory. After dinner, their books were placed on a table, and all the scholars of one Faculty repeated their lesson and answered questions. A similar performance took place in the two hours before supper. After supper, the tutor treated them for half an hour to a jocum honestum (‘a bit of wholesome fun’), and before sending them to bed gave them a light and pleasant disputation. The disputation was a preparation for the disputations which formed part of what we should now term the degree examinations. A thesis was propounded, attacked, and defended (‘impugned and propugned’) with the proper forms of syllogistic reasoning.
Source
Robert S. Rait Life in the Medieval University (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912) pages 142-146 (Internet Archive)
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