Emblems in College Dictata of the Old University of Louvain

In the handwritten lecture notebooks produced at the Old University of Louvain (17th-18th centuries), the text is often accompanied by title pages, ink drawings, engraved plates inserted between or pasted onto the pages. Visual materials incorporated in those dictata of logic, physics and metaphysics included diagrams, tree structures and tables, but also figurative compositions such as coats of arms, allegories, personifications, symbols and emblems, related to the scientific topics or not. This well-preserved corpus consists of approximately 440 illustrated volumes held in various institutions of Belgium. It is representative of the combinatorial art associating cleverly text and image that developed in the early modern visual culture in Europe and that proved particularly popular in academic spheres of the Southern Netherlands: affixiones from the Jesuit college of Brussels, Jesuit or university thesis prints, alba amicorum, emblematic booklets circulating in Louvain. My paper intends to analyze to what extent the presence of emblems pertained to learning mechanisms by fulfilling a mnemonic, epistemological or symbolical function. I will therefore investigate the manner in which emblematic devices were elaborated (reuse, adaptation and interpretation of existing forms, drawings copied from engravings), as well as the different roles they could have played in those academic documents. Ultimately, the exploration of this corpus is aimed at discovering why the traditional emblematic and allegorical languages were used concurrently with new representations related to the Cartesian doctrine