Academic Print Practices in the Southern Netherlands: Allegory and Emblematics as Epistemic Tools

This chapter demonstrates that student life constituted an important source for the creation and circulation of printed images by considering a visual domain that flourished in the Southern Netherlands in the seventeenth century: illustrated college notebooks. The well-preserved corpus presents an ambivalent relationship between knowledge and imagination. This essay focuses on the symbolic language applied to lecture notebooks, the usage of which was encouraged in similar academic practices such as Jesuit affixiones and thesis prints. It also addresses the materiality of prints and their manipulation by students. My hypothesis is that the sphere of learning was, via the printing world, bathed with Jesuit culture and visual language that perpetuated in higher education