Page 184 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

Another aspect of university teaching was the expectation by lecturers that students would be able to follow the text by silently reading their own books. This would, of course, have created a market for comparatively inex- pensive copies of widely studied texts.
In 1259 the Dominican house of the University of Paris required that students bring to class a copy of the text covered in public lectures, if possible. . . Similar regulations existed in Paris at the College of Harcourt and at the universities of Vienna and In- golstadt. In 1309 Pierre Dubois, French publicist in the reign of Philip IV of France, observed that students who did not have a copy of the text before them could profit little from university lectures. Students too poor to purchase their own copies could borrow them from libraries like that of the Cathedral of Notre Dame of Paris, or they could copy out texts for their person- al use. The statutes of the Sorbonne stipulated lending books against security deposits (Saenger, Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading [1997] 259).
Other changes in manuscript format and organization evolved in the thir- teenth and fourteenth centuries, partly because of the needs of silent reading. It is understood that oral reading had traditionally consisted of a continu- ous reading of a text, or a substantial section of it, from beginning to end. For this reason, many Carolingian codices, like ancient papyrus rolls, had not been divided into sections shorter than the chapter. From the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries subdivisions were introduced in classical and early medieval texts; some works that had already been subdivided into chapters in later antiquity were more rationally subdivided by university scholars. Thirteenth-century scribes and illuminators also developed and extended the use of running titles—a feature of some of the most ancient surviving codices. They also introduced the analytic table of contents. As early as the sixth century chapter headings were a feature of codices; in the thirteenth century these headings were brought together in one place and arranged in
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