Universities are one of the few medieval institutions in the West to still be extant and flourishing. They emerged in the late twelfth century, and have had a continuous, if jagged, history from then till the present day.
To be sure, most of our universities were founded far later than the Middle Ages, and the nature of what universities do and how they do it has changed immensely over the centuries. Still, even today, most university students attend “lectures”—both this word and what it represents are medieval. “Lecture” anglicizes the medieval Latin word “lectura”, derived from the verb “legere”, meaning “read”. A lecture is a reading. This remains an apt name today: the lecturer often “reads”, either in that she reads to a class from a text she has written, or in that she guides her class out loud through the reading of some text which is the object of study.
The lecture is clearly a product of the world before print.
The lecture in both these senses, but particularly the former, is clearly a product of the world before print, when books were far scarcer and more expensive. Medieval universities worked marvels in accelerating the production of manuscript books, but even the fastest hand-copying is orders of magnitude slower than printing.
Thus, even though the medieval university syllabus was intensely focussed on texts, individual students could own few books. There were libraries, but these too were minuscule compared to the great libraries which printing made possible. So, for the medieval student, as for many other kinds of pre-modern reader, reading largely meant being read to. To own or borrow books was above all the prerogative of the teacher, and his job was then to read from and interpret these books to his students. He might in due course publish his interpretations, just as scholars now may publish versions of their lectures. But, once again, the primary audience for these interpretations was other teachers, who were to use them in preparing their own lectures on the same or related material. Today, to gain the title of “lecturer” or “reader” is merely a mark of relatively moderate academic achievement. But it once contained the more concrete significance of privileged access to the books which formed the basis of university study.
It was now the student who was to be a “reader”.
Naturally, as printing flooded the world with books, students became reliably able to own or borrow their own copies of the texts they were to study and of ancillary scholarship. It was now the student who was to be a “reader”, and the target for textbooks changed from teachers to students. The teacher’s role was now to illustrate and supplement reading which students had done in their own time. In due course, the “seminar” emerged, as a new model for how to use time in the classroom. Students who had already read their way into a subject could be usefully invited to discuss it publicly with their teachers. The seminar teacher is still assumed to have done more relevant reading than her students: that is why she leads the class. Yet she is not thought of as having done that reading for the students, who cannot do it themselves, but merely as having done it before them, so that she can point them to it. A seminar teacher is a purveyor of bibliographies.
Of course, this vision of the student as a diligent reader and capable in-class discussant is highly idealized. Students no longer want for books, but it does not follow that they actually read them, or that, even if they do, they can make much sense of them on their own. No university teacher today can conduct her class on the assumption that most of the students in front of her have read and understood all that they were set to study, so that her work is only now to elaborate on that foundation. The teacher knows perfectly well that much of the foundation will still have to be built in the classroom.
Hence, in the age of print, and even in the age of the boundlessly available digital text, the university lecture has survived and thrived, in much of its medieval splendour. Students will sit quietly for an hour or so, while a teacher reads to them from her notes, or expounds a text, much as if they had no other way of learning the thoughts of scholars, or accessing an explanation of the text. The material ability to read on one’s own has by no means eliminated the need to be read to.
Medieval universities had no concept of “research”, even though medieval scholars’ work could be astoundingly creative and sophisticated. The modern university, in contrast, declares research to be its most elevated activity, and even the humblest undergraduate is to be taught by researchers, and to be introduced to this great enterprise of research. Yet, much of the time, even the best students need far less to be presented with the cutting edge of progress—real or purported—in their chosen discipline, than to be shown how to grasp the foundations of that discipline. If that could be done merely by providing a reading list, we would have no further need of lectures or lecturers, and this medieval institution of the university would not have survived.
