Volume 49, Issue 3 - Themenheft: „Kommunikationsgeschichte der Vorlesung“

The analysis of historical lecture practice in the context of a history of academic communication requires a multi-perspective approach. Different manifestations of communication from a historical lecture hall must be brought together and examined on the basis of a broad selection of source materials. The linguistic analysis of texts/languages, images, objects, spaces and bodies promises new insights into a long-lived communicative genre whose significance in the history of language and culture has so far only been explored in rudimentary form.

The history of German-language lectures has been unfolding since the 18th century. However, it is not well researched with regard to many aspects of language use and text use, although lectures have played and continue to play a central role in the history of academic education. This paper focuses on four perspectives: the role of language and text use for knowledge organisation in lectures (in their respective multimodal and performative contexts); the interplay of lectures with forms of preparation and reception, which together constitute a systematically organised „communicative ecology“; the question of the specific tasks and conditioning factors of language use in the lectures of different disciplines and subject zones; and finally, the question of historical developments, which can be determined, among other things, by media developments and by changes in scientific principles. The discussion of examples from the history of German-language lectures, varied according to time and subjects, will illustrate the research programme.

The article starts with the etymology of the words Vorlesung („lecture“) and Hörsaal (“lecture hall”). On the one hand, it turns out that the two expressions are deeply anchored in the history of the old Latin scientific language. They transmit Latin structures and perspectives in German neologisms. On the other hand, the two words arose exactly at the time when the sciences were moving from Latin to German, thus distancing themselves from the traditional forms of Latin scholarship. In this light, they exemplify an epochal change in the history of the German language, but at the same time they represent a great European continuity. Against this background, the two words can be interpreted as symptomatic words associated with the Enlightenment’s confident outlook on the future relationship between science and society. Further corpus linguistic surveys also show how productively the two words appear in word formation processes. In particular, these surveys show by way of example that and how German standard language has benefited from the emergence of German academic language.

Visual material plays a central role in lectures to illustrate the spoken word or to show objects of knowledge. Historically, the question arises as to when which methods were used and what their functions were and still are today. In a further diagrammatic perspective on the setting of the lecture, however, other aspects of pictoriality must be included: For example, there is a tradition of storing, commenting on, processing and editing lectures by the audience, which leads, for example, to transcripts that transform the lecture medially. Yet these techniques are embedded in an ensemble of diagrammatic practices of lecture organisation, which can be understood as „instructions for use“ for both lecturers and listeners. From a diagrammatic perspective, it becomes clear that the diagrammatic orders applied in and by lectures are not simply ornaments of the lecture, but have a knowledge-constitutive effect.

This paper investigates the role of scientific objects in early modern academic teaching. From the 17 th century onwards, objects have been important both for scientific practices and for instruction. This paper has two parts. It begins with a systematic investigation of the historical development of the use of objects in academic teaching. Practice-oriented academic disciplines like medicine, physics, and biology were the first to integrate a wide range of material objects into their teaching (e. g., taxidermy animals and measuring instruments). The architecture of lecture halls, as they are illustrated in historical etchings, reflects the increasing importance of objects for academic teaching. In these etchings, objects are placed prominently within the lecture area. The use of objects during lectures also had consequences on how teachers organized their lectures and how students arranged their notes. The second part of this paper illustrates this by looking at the use of objects within Rudolf Virchow’s exemplary lectures on pathology from both the teacher’s as well as the students’ perspectives.

The present paper is concerned with the lecture hall as the natural home of lecturing. We will focus on constructed, designed and equipped space as a material and communicative manifestation of science which fundamentally contributes to the multimodal practice of lecturing. Taking an interactionist point of view, we start off with introducing our concept of architecture-for-interaction which aims at spatial built-in features as a resource for social interaction, namely for situational anchoring among those present. In a second step, we identify key architectural elements of the lecture hall as material sediments of communicative problems connected with the social practice of lecturing. In doing so, we will also give a high-level overview of the historical development of the lecture hall (and its precursors) since the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age. Turning to current data from lecturing in times of the pandemic, we will then deal with so called „ghost lectures“ behind closed doors. This current development brings out a refiguration process due to which the lecture hall undergoes a change from the classical auditorium with copresent participants to a multi-media hub allowing for tele-present participants.