Periodic Reporting for period 4 - DEBATE (Debate: Innovation as Performance in Late-Medieval Universities)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2023-02-01 al 2024-07-31
Principia is a mandatory exercise in the medieval universities that requires that at the beginning of each academic year, the bachelors enrolled to obtain the title of doctor in theology had to engage in a public debate with their colleagues. The main aim of the proposal was to understand how and why this new academic practice featuring the direct interaction between bachelors of theology at Paris became in the course of the fourteenth century one of the most important events in the academic calendar of universities all across Europe. Now, after five years of intense research, we have come to the conclusion that the success of this exercise resulted from the freedom to choose the topics of debate, the requirement to confront publicly the theses of the other speakers, the opportunity to earn a reputation before a wide audience, and the entertainment value of the event as a way of opening the academic year in an exciting way. We have now demonstrated that by the second half of the fourteenth century, when many new universities were founded, Principia had become a fixed feature of the curriculum not only in Paris, but also in Oxford, and its adoption elsewhere is understandable. Nevertheless, the enthusiasm with which the genre was perpetuated in Prague, Vienna, Krakow, and elsewhere is also due to the fact that an oral competition lasting several days before a crowd of students and professors, allies and opponents, in which false courtesy, sarcasm, and irony joined argument and auctority to create an intellectual tournament, a joust with ideas instead of lances.
Principial reports are therefore like Russian-dolls texts, encompasing within them ideas and even words from the other participants in the debate. Among the general findings, two can be named here: the protestatio and the gratiarum actio. The protestatio is an oath that bachelors took near the start of the debate, wherein they publicly proclaimed, in front of the audience, that they would respect the institutions (university, Church, royal court, etc.), they would exercise self-control in avoiding known errors or any heresy, and that they would show courtesy toward their fellow combatants. At the end of the debate, the gratiarum actio is the instant when each protagonist of an academic act thanked his public for attending and sometimes for supporting his performance. In this he could display his gratitude to the Church and its saints, the university and its doctors, his mentor, his colleagues, and even his family for accompanying him while he carried out his official acts. We find in this custom the roots of our modern acknowledgements that open PhD theses and books. Incidentally, it was surprising to identify how many actions in our present academic are linked in some way to these medieval Principia: evaluation by peer reviewers, the pleasure and emotion of public performance in presenting research results, academic jealousy, persistence and sometimes obstinance in defending ideas, and the joy of thanking the people and institutions whose support led to success.
Principial reports are therefore like Russian-dolls texts, encompasing within them ideas and even words from the other participants in the debate. Among the general findings, two can be named here: the protestatio and the gratiarum actio. The protestatio is an oath that bachelors took near the start of the debate, wherein they publicly proclaimed, in front of the audience, that they would respect the institutions (university, Church, royal court, etc.), they would exercise self-control in avoiding known errors or any heresy, and that they would show courtesy toward their fellow combatants. At the end of the debate, the gratiarum actio is the instant when each protagonist of an academic act thanked his public for attending and sometimes for supporting his performance. In this he could display his gratitude to the Church and its saints, the university and its doctors, his mentor, his colleagues, and even his family for accompanying him while he carried out his official acts. We find in this custom the roots of our modern acknowledgements that open PhD theses and books. Incidentally, it was surprising to identify how many actions in our present academic are linked in some way to these medieval Principia: evaluation by peer reviewers, the pleasure and emotion of public performance in presenting research results, academic jealousy, persistence and sometimes obstinance in defending ideas, and the joy of thanking the people and institutions whose support led to success.
Debate’s method of work was inherently transdisciplinary and required an array of skills. In order to facilitate access to surviving principial debates, besides intellectual history, philosophy, theology, and literature, we have to master first Latin and then Latin paleography, which is the art of deciphering different letter shapes and abbreviations in unpunctuated medieval manuscripts. Medieval scribes of academic texts wrote almost every Latin word in an abbreviated form, a bit like an extremely cryptic SMS today. When an entire treatise is abbreviated in this fashion, it requires years to learn not only the general abbreviations employed in many genres of writing, but also the technical vocabulary and abbreviations specific to certain genres and even single doctrinal contexts. Finally, codicology, or the art of decoding the materiality of a book, is crucial to tell us the story of when, why, how, and sometimes by whom a text was copied. In the text of principial debates, codicology mainly helps us to date a manuscript and, together with palaeography, also to discern if we are dealing with an autograph of one of the participants to the debate, or again to determine whether a manuscript was copied in Oxford, circulated in Paris, and ended up in Vienna. Once we have gathered the material details of the production of the text and transcribed the text while expanding the abbreviations, in order to be readable by modern scholars we need to punctuate and edit the text based on the different reading of the various manuscripts, since copying by hand resulted in many errors. This provides us with the principial material for our publications, with which we bring to light textual evidence of unknown or lost authors. Two volumes published in open access with different case studies has been published, a monograph, a collection of 25 academic papers, 30 public talks and a databased are the main results of the project.
Principia as an academic genre was neglected for at least two reasons: first, Principia as debates did not exist in the thirteenth century, when modern Catholic authorities such as St Bonaventure and above all St Thomas Aquinas lectured on the Sentences, so modern scholars have paid less attention to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in general and to a genre that did not exist in the age of their heroes in particular. A second reason for this neglect is that when a Principium was placed at the beginning of the codices, intellectual historians frequently mis-identified them as prologues or prohemia to the main text rather than specimens of an entirely different genre. Once we paid more attention to these texts, we compiled a list of technical elements and vocabulary specific to the genre (a double structure with a sermon and a debate; a biblical thema or phrase opening the sermon that usually is a pun of the name, origin, or affiliation of the bachelor; a protestatio or oath to stay within the bounds of orthodoxy; traces of orality mirroring the initial dialogue between the bachelors; and so on) that allowed us to identify texts as Principia or vestiges of Principia. Since performance in this exercise was evaluated, the bachelor was under pressure to convince the professors that he possessed the sufficient level of knowledge and talent, but choosing an interesting topic to debate was also a sign of his academic creativity. The project succeeded to bring to light an exciting variety of topics: Is God capable to creating a better world? Should anyone choose to live for 100 hours of intense pleasure rather than endure 10 years of excruciating pain? (It is hard to say whether suicide or euthanasia was at play, but we can see that the issue is still current today.) Is merit an individual achievement earned by doing the right things all the time, or is it something simply predetermined before birth? Is human physical beauty an expression of internal beauty? The project succeeded in uncovering and clearly delineating the characteristics of this philosophical genre of oral performance and of the medieval textual heritage.
The project introduce to the field of medieval studies something as fundamental as a philosophical genre, the principial debate, and succeeded to excavate so many unknown writings and authors providing new materials for further researches.
The project introduce to the field of medieval studies something as fundamental as a philosophical genre, the principial debate, and succeeded to excavate so many unknown writings and authors providing new materials for further researches.