Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance

447

Scholarly Knowledge

Textbooks in early modern Europe

Edited by Emidio Campi, Simone De Angelis, Anja-Silvia Goeing and Anthony T. Grafton

LIBRAIRIE DROZ S.A.

11, rue Massot

GENÈVE

2008

Mentions légales

Résumé

Entre le XV

e

et le XVII

e

siècles prennent leur essor les hautes écoles, le gymnase protestant allemand et le collège jésuite, qui participent tous à la formation des élites de l'Europe moderne. Par ailleurs, les programmes universitaires agrègent les méthodes anciennes et nouvelles, humanistes et scolastiques. Il en résulte une explosion des outils de travail dont la production imprimée, et le manuel scolaire en particulier, témoignent par leur profusion et leur diversité. Scholarly Knowledge réunit, sous la direction d’Emidio Campi, Simone De Angelis, Anja-Silvia Goeing et Anthony T. Grafton, des études modèles pour l’histoire du livre académique à l’époque moderne.

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**

Abstract

Any attempt to understand the roles that textbooks played for early modern teachers and pupils must begin with the sobering realization that the field includes many books that the German word Lehrbuch and its English counterpart do not call to mind. The early modern classroom was shaken by the same knowledge explosion that took place in individual scholars’ libraries and museums, and transformed by the same printers, patrons and vast cultural movements that altered the larger world it served. In the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, the urban grammar school, the German Protestant Gymnasium and the Jesuit College, all of which did so much to form the elites of early modern Europe, took shape; the curricula of old and new universities fused humanistic with scholastic methods in radically novel ways. By doing so, they claimed a new status for both the overt and the tacit knowledge that made their work possible. This collected volume presents case studies by renowned experts, among them Ann Blair, Jill Kraye, Jürgen Leonhardt, Barbara Mahlmann-Bauer and Nancy Siraisi.

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Published with the support of the Swiss National Fond for the Scientifical Research

www.droz.org

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Références papier

ISBN-10 : 2-600-01186-2

EAN : 9782600011860

ISSN : 0082-6081

Copyright (2008) by Librairie Droz S.A., 11, rue Massot, Genève.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or translated in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, microfiche or any other means without written permission.

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**

Références numériques

EAN ePUB : 9782600311861

EAN PDF : 9782600111867

ISSN : 0082-6081

Copyright (2021) by Librairie Droz S.A., 11, rue Massot, Genève.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or translated in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, microfiche or any other means without written permission.

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**

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site de la Librairie Droz

.

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**

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

9

INTRODUCTION

Anthony T. Grafton

Textbooks and the disciplines

11

ACADEMIC TEXTBOOKS IN EARLY MODERN TIMES: GENESIS AND INTENTION

Ann Blair

Student manuscripts and the textbook

39

Daniel Tröhler

The knowledge of science and the knowledge of the classroom: Using the Heidelberg Catechism (1563) to examine overlooked connections

75

LIBERAL ARTS AND PHILOSOPHY

Jürgen Leonhardt

Classics as textbooks: A study of the humanist lectures on Cicero at the University of Leipzig,

ca

. 1515

89

Peter Stotz

Heinrich Bullinger (1504-1575) and the ancient languages

113

Volkhard Wels

Melanchthon’s textbooks on dialectic and rhetoric as complementary parts of a theory of argumentation

139

Anja-Silvia Goeing

Establishing modes of learning: Old and new Hebrew grammars in the

16

th

century

157

David A. Lines

Teaching physics in Louvain and Bologna: Frans Titelmans and Ulisse Aldrovandi

183

Simone De Angelis

From text to the body: Commentaries on

De Anima,

anatomical practice and authority around 1600

205

Urs B. Leu

Textbooks and their uses – an insight into the teaching of geography in

16

th

century Zurich

229

Jill Kraye

Teaching stoic moral philosophy: Kaspar Schoppe’s Elementa philosophiae

Stoicae moralis

(1606)

249

MEDICINE, JURISPRUDENCE AND THEOLOGY

Nancy G. Siraisi

Medicina Practica

: Girolamo Mercuriale as teacher and textbook author

287

Hildegard Elisabeth Keller and Hubert Steinke

Jakob Ruf’s

Trostbüchlein

and

De Conceptu

(Zurich 1554): A textbook for midwives and physicians

307

Donald R. Kelley

Learning the law

333

Barbara Mahlmann-Bauer

Catholic and protestant textbooks in elementary Latin conversation: Manuals of religious combat or guide to avoiding conflict?

341

Emidio Campi

Peter Martyr Vermigli as a teacher at the Schola Tigurina

391

APPROACHING MODERNITY: A PERSPECTIVE FROM THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION

Jürgen Oelkers

Elementary textbooks in the

18

th century and their theory of the learning child

409

Picture Credits

433

Authors

437

Index

439

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book owes its origin to a conference held at Zurich in December 2005, organized by the editors and colleagues in the Institute of Education and the Institute of Swiss Reformation Studies at the University of Zurich. The aim of the conference was primarily to gather experts from all disciplines to discuss European Renaissance textbooks used in academia, their content and their making. We are very grateful to all members of the team for their advice. Special thanks go to Gregory B. Lyon, Dr. Rita Casale, Prof. Dr. Jürgen Oelkers, Esther Schweizer and Prof. Dr. Daniel Tröhler who supported this project from the beginning with their advice and guidance. The outcome of this conference appears here in an elaborated form and we are very thankful that the publisher, Droz, placed it in the series «Travaux d’Humanisme et de la Renaissance». The book developed due to many helping hands: to the watchful eyes of good friends, the assistence and guide of colleagues and translators beyond the pure institutional means and the financial support of three Swiss scientific organizations: The Swiss National Science Foundation, the University of Zurich and the Zurich Central Library.

In order to publish all articles in English, we are indebted, apart from other and here unnamed English speaking colleagues, to the following translators:

Adam Blauhut (Berlin) – (for Daniel Tröhler).

Dr. Alexandra Kess-Hall (Zürich) – (for Simone De Angelis).

Gregory B. Lyon (Asheville) – (for Urs B. Leu).

Dr. Ann Robertson (Berlin) – (for Anja-Silvia Goeing).

Philipp Roelli (Zürich) – (for Peter Stotz).

Dr. John Stewart (Heidelberg) – (for Hildegard E. Keller and Hubert Steinke).

Elizabeth Wiget-Cheddie (Zürich) – (for Simone De Angelis).

Dr. Mirko Wittwar (Morsbach) – (for Jürgen Oelkers).

Hal Wyner (Fribourg/Zürich) – (for Jürgen Leonhardt, Peter Stotz, Barbara Mahlmann-Bauer, Emidio Campi).

Finally, as editors we offer heartfelt thanks to our contributors for their enthusiastic response to this project.

TEXTBOOKS AND THE DISCIPLINES

Anthony T. Grafton

One of the most enthusiastic, if not most successful, textbook authors of the sixteenth century, was the Antwerp scholar and teacher Joachim Fortius Ringelbergius (Joachim Sterck van Ringelbergh, c. 1499-1556). Amateurs of the curious remember him for many reasons: the madcap energy with which he sewed small lead plates into his underwear, so that he could exercise whenever he walked, without losing time for work; the naive enthusiasm that inspired him to plan to write a thousand textbooks and collect them under the title

Chilias

, even though he admitted that he only wrote when the printer actually demanded copy, so that he had produced only 19 of the proposed thousand books; and the wonderful anecdotes with which he spiced the notes to his textbooks.

1

Nineteenth-century scholars asked desperately for more information about Ringelbergius’s anonymous friends, who drank so heartily that they filled their “fat and porous bodies” to overflowing, and realized that they should stop drinking because, when they put their hands on the table, drops of the liquid emerged from each fingertip.

2

In the same wise book, his oftenreprinted manual

De ratione studii,

Ringelbergius noted that “nothing is harder than to listen to a professor for a full hour. When I used to go to other people’s lectures, I thought that every hour would last a whole day. For it is very tedious to force one’s free thoughts to follow the voice of one speaking.” Happily, as Ringelbergius also pointed out, “when we teach or write, our practice immediately wipes away all the tedium.”

3

With these digressions and remarks, Ringelbergius introduces us to one of the many qualities of Renaissance textbooks that have become unusual – not to say unknown – in their modern counterparts: they could be very witty.

Recent scholarship in a number of fields has laid a new emphasis on textbooks. Historians of science, for example, have set out, as Daniel Kaiser notes at the start of an important volume of studies, to move “pedagogy from the periphery to the center.” Textbooks play a central role in this enterprise – now that historians have learned to see them not as “the last stage of scientific creativity, the final desiccation of scientific discovery into routine, banal, takenfor-granted knowledge,” but as active agents in their own right, textual and material actors that help to shape the practices and identities of the young scientists who mastered them.

4

This approach, very welcome in the study of modern science, applies even more naturally to the early modern period. In the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, after all, the urban grammar school, the German Protestant Gymnasium and the Jesuit college, all of which did so much to form the elites of early modern Europe, took shape; new colleges and universities popped up across Europe, from Ferrara to Leiden; the curricula of old and new universities fused humanistic with scholastic methods in radically novel ways; and, as William Eamon, Pamela Long, and Pamela Smith have shown, practitioners of crafts from shipbuilding to silk weaving produced systematic, written accounts of their techniques. By doing do, as they knew, they claimed a new status for both the overt and the tacit knowledge that made their work possible.

5

Yet the

translatio studii

from uncontroversial propositions to specific analyses is not easy. In general, we know where textbooks should fit in the analysis of educational practices. A well-established theory of the curriculum, formulated by Freidrich Maier, holds that it is determined by three large groups of factors: Gesellschaft, Fachwissenschaft, and Schüler. Taken together, they form the “didaktisches Dreieck.” Textbooks, evidently, help to form one side of this triangle, since they compress and express the elements of Fachwissenschaft for students.

6

But this handy formulation begs questions that the early modernist must ask and answer. To begin with an elementary one: what was a textbook? In the modern world, the question hardly needs posing. Jules Ferry knew what a textbook was – and which one was in use at every hour in every French classroom. Government records answer our question, in overwhelming detail. But what of early modern times? Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we define a textbook, as a Renaissance humanist might have, as a specimen of the ancient genre of the isagogic treatise. “An εἰσαγωγή,” writes Jonathan Barnes, “is a bringing in, an importing, an introducing – literally of goods, and by transfer, of notions.”

7

Thus Porphyry wrote an εἰσαγωγή to logic, and, since logic served as the basis of philosophy, to philosophy itself. Both in theory and in practice, as Barnes shows, learned men held that such works had clear identifying marks. “What is an isagoga?,” asked the Greek physician Soranus (1

st

/2

nd

century CE). “An isagoga,” he replied, answering his own question in the manner of the experienced teacher, “is an introduction of the subject together with an exposition of the first theories” (

Quaest. med.

21) – a clear, elementary and propaideutic work, presumably composed for beginners.

Many works circulated under titles that offered something like this mixture of contents, and at least some learned readers felt that they provided exactly what they claimed. The Roman scholar Aulus Gellius – a man whose heart was not soon made glad by the work of his colleagues – recalled that “when I wanted to be initiated into the logical disciplines, it was necessary to approach and master what the logicians call εἰσαγωγαί” (

Noctes Atticae

16.8.1). Many authors of Renaissance isagogical texts echoed these ancient claims and experiences when they promised their readers that, as Ringelbergius put it in his 1529

Dialectic

, “We will omit nothing here that is necessary for the practitioner of dialectic… We also try to achieve the same in our textbook of rhetoric.”

8

We could, then, simply concern ourselves with those works actually composed for teaching purposes in our period – works entitled

Isagoge

, as many were,

Elementa, Rudimenta, Institutiones

and the like. The Renaissance, as Charles Schmitt showed long ago, witnessed a boom in the production of systematic textbooks, which certainly deserve study in and of themselves.

9

Yet as soon as one asks which books early modern authors prescribed and early modern teachers assigned to those who wanted to master a new discipline, this simple solution loses all plausibility. Ringelbergius, in his treatise

De ratione studii

, offers a single paragraph’s worth of recommendations:

Now as to the authors that are to be read in these fields. In grammar, Diomedes, Perotti, Valla; in Dialectic, Aristotle; in Rhetoric, Cicero and Quintilian are preeminent. In Astronomy one should read Proclus and Aratus, for few of the Latins have treated it in a learned fashion. If you wish to look higher, you can add Ptolemy. In Astrology Firmicus Maternus, who gave a more elegant and accurate account of the art than the rest. But he will do you no good, unless you first draw up an image of the houses of the horoscope from the Ephemerides, and learn the basics from the barbarian writers, of whom Alcabitius is the best. In Cosmography, I think you should learn Ptolemy; in Geography, Pomponius Mela; in Geometry Euclid.

10

In these ten lines Ringelbergius lists, as the best works with which to study one of the liberal arts or one of their component studies, not isagogai but what he significantly calls “auctores.” They include:

works by ancient authors that were originally designed to serve as a basis for formal instruction (e.g., Quintilian’s

Institutio oratoria

);

works by ancient authors that were probably not originally designed to serve as a basis for formal instruction (e.g., Ptolemy’s

Geography

);

works by Hellenistic and late antique authors, pagan and Christian;

a work on astrology by a medieval Muslim author, al-Qabisi (tenth century), that offered better practical instruction than the ancients;

works by contemporary authors, Lorenzo Valla and Niccolò Perotti – the former a massive reference book, the

Elegantiae

, and the latter an elementary grammar.

Of all these “auctores,” only Perotti’s work on grammar is the sort of relatively brief modern textbook that Ringelbergius himself wrote. Yet he clearly regards them as the best bases for learning and instruction in central fields of study.

Humanists were not the only ones who chose assigned texts so eclectically. The introductory woodcut to the encyclopedic collection of textbooks by Gregor Reisch, the

Margarita philosophorum

(1503), shows grammar using the key of

congruitas

to gain entrance to the philosophers’ banquet hall. In the basement of this structure, the late antique grammarians Donatus and Priscian equip boys for the difficult climb through Aristotle’s Logic, Cicero’s Rhetoric, Boethius’s Arithmetic, Pythagoras’s Music, Euclid’s Geometry, Ptolemy’s Astronomy – not to mention what look like afterthoughts, the Physics of Aristotle and the Moral Philosophy of Seneca – to arrive at last at the summit, where Peter Lombard teaches theology. Here too, formal textbooks mingle with works written for adults, and ancient writers with later ones.

Reisch’s book was as eclectic in its verbal content as in this visual presentation. The last edition that he supervised, which appeared in 1517, included ancient, medieval, and radically modern elements, some of which conflicted sharply with one another. For example, Reisch provided two world maps. One was Ptolemaic, though it had a note stating that the Indian Ocean was not closed to the south, as Ptolemy had thought. The other one was modern, and included not only the Cape, but also the Americas. Any attempt to define “textbook” in period terms, using the

Margarita

as its basis, is doomed to be highly eclectic. To examine school statues or the notebook of any director of studies, the Jesuit

Ratio studiorum

or the books that the young John Milton studied and excerpted at Christ’s Hospital and Cambridge, is to encounter the same situation: one in which some of the books actually used to study the core fields of trivium and quadrivium are ancient and others modern; some chosen, from our standpoint, arbitrarily, and others composed deliberately and systematically as aids to teaching.

Any attempt to understand the roles that textbooks played for early modern teachers and pupils must begin, then, with the sobering realization that the field to be studied includes many books that the German word

Lehrbuch

and its English counterpart do not call to mind. And this is only reasonable. For the early modern classroom was no

hortus conclusus

. It was shaken by the same knowledge explosion that took place in individual scholars’ libraries and museums, and transformed by the same greedy and idealistic printers, learned and incurious patrons and vast cultural movements that transformed the larger world it served. Any schoolboy who attended a Gymnasium, anyone who took a BA – to say nothing of those who ascended into the higher faculties – found himself on a magical mystery tour through texts written over a period of some 2000 years, in locales from Athens and Alexandria to Baghdad, Paris and Oxford. Just as Lehrbuch seems an anachronistic and unhelpful designation for this vast and miscellaneous heap of books of every kind, so Fachwissenschaft seems far too limited a term to refer to the information contained in sets of books not written to order and by bureaucratic prescription, as textbooks are in the age of the modern state and educational system, but pulled like Spreewald pickles from the whole vast barrel of ancient and modern, western and Islamic manuals that teachers assigned and students read between1450 and 1650.

11

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