Renaissance Mind
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Edited by:
Valentina Lepri
The Renaissance Mind series explores the transformation processes of philosophical, political, and religious doctrines, depending on the different cultural environments in which they circulated in the early modern age. The volumes stimulate a general rethinking of the notions of manipulation and contamination of currents of thought. These changes are perceived as fruitful developments of new views and ideas – developments which also provide the perspectives necessary to arrive at a comprehensive picture of the time.
The authors of this volume bring new insights to the intellectual history of knowledge and belief in sciences, and they do so by focusing on the presence of debates and multiple truths in university context. It has been observed that “in the past two decades, scholars have come to value uncertainty as an important key to seventeenth-century Catholicism”, and this statement could be easily extended to Protestant intellectual traditions, as well. After that earlier research had focused on skepticism and doubt in the early modern era for a long time, recent scholarship has come to understand the importance of multiple truths, and the practices of choosing between more or less probable options. Probabilism, choosing the more probable option seems to have been a wide-reaching and pervasive intellectual behavior that has been often overlooked. Multiple, diverse truths did not necessarily imply a skeptic attitude to scientific or theological questions: instead, they taught the reader, the student, to argue for or against, and to understand the importance of choosing between the options. Moreover, they maintained a space for another notion of central importance in early modern intellectual traditions: belief.
From Paris to Prague, from Tartu to Padua, these papers revolve around problems that raised uncertainties in the early modern mind. In some cases, these were born out of new experiences and insights that shaped existing sets of knowledge, while in other cases, they were based on theoretical concerns. But they all clearly show that uncertainty was a central – and productive – element of early modern scholarship, which was transmitted to the students already during their years of study.
The topic of this volume is the teaching and learning practices in the major and minor academic centers of renaissance Europe and their relevance for early modern intellectual history. Academic knowledge is here regarded not as a finished product but as a process, induced by multiple factors and several conditions: the personalities and intellectual profiles of teachers and learners, the dialectic between their respective interests and roles, the institutional context, from the immediate one given by the particular school or university, with their courses and curricula, to the more remote one given by governing political power or surveilling religious authority, or the interplay between the two. Last but not least, one should consider the several impulses of an epoch that seem to impart to the historical course a sudden acceleration, inducing decisive, sometimes disruptive, changes to intellectual development: the spread of humanistic culture, the religious reformation and its consequences, the encounter with new epistemologies, the access to education of new social subjects, and – behind all these and as their common catalyst – the progressive establishment of the press as a means of learning consolidation and dissemination.
How can we portray the history of Renaissance knowledge production through the eyes of the students? Their university notebooks contained a variety of works, fragments of them, sentences, or simple words. To date, studies on these materials have only concentrated on a few individual works within the collections, neglecting the strategy by which texts and textual fragments were selected and the logic through which the notebooks were organized.
The eight chapters that make up this volume explore students' note-taking practices behind the creation of their notebooks from three different angles. The first considers annotation activities in relation to their study area to answer the question of how university disciplines were able to influence both the content and structure of their notebooks. The volume's second area of research focuses on the student's curiosity and choices by considering them expressions of a self-learning practice not necessarily linked to a discipline of study or instructions from teaching. The last part of the volume moves away from the student’s desk to consider instructions on note-taking methods that students could receive from manuals of various kinds.
