• Lecture

Traces of University Teaching in Renaissance Books: Examples and Problems

David Lines, University of Warwick & the 2023-2024 Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies and the Italian Studies Fellow in Italian Manuscript Studies

This event has already occurred

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Wednesday, March 13, 5:15 - 6:30 pm EST
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Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center, Class of 1955 Conference Room, Room 241, 2nd Floor
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Open to the Public

Hosted by: SIMS and Kislak Center

page from UPenn LJS, an Italian school miscellany. Page shows passage from Cicero's De officiis.

Both teachers and students have left remarkable traces of university lectures in surviving manuscripts and printed books. Professors often wrote out their lectures by hand. Their students kept a record of the lectures, either in manuscript notebooks or in the margins of printed books that were used as the basis for lectures (e.g., works by Virgil, Aristotle, or Galen). These printed books were sometimes prepared and published by university professors, who had their students buy them. Manuscripts and printed works therefore had a complex relationship. Drawing on materials in the Lawrence J. Schoenberg Collection and elsewhere, this lecture will explore several of the dimensions and problems of this relationship in Renaissance Europe and in Italy in particular.

Featured image: Section of Book 1 of Cicero's De officiis, from UPenn LJS 385, a miscellany of school texts produced in Italy, ca. 1500 (fol. 5v).