Symbolic Images in Logic College Notebooks and Thesis Prints of the Southern Netherlands

My contribution aims to examine the manifold roles of images in lecture notebooks produced in the Southern Low Countries. Such representations were used as didactic and mnemonic tools but also, on a more general note, as a way to stage and celebrate knowledge, learning and time spent in community at university. I focus in particular on representations of logic. These drawings and engravings are on the one hand, direct references to the course subject and on the other hand, compositions taken from various sources, and adapted to the philosophical content taught. Emphasis is be placed on this second type of visual device, religious, allegorical, emblematic or satirical in nature. Such images are sometimes called ‘non-pedagogical’ in the scientific literature, yet they were adapted to match the logic contents of the course, dealing for instance with the scholastic method of reasoning. The images and their recuperation process shed light on the study curriculum at the Artes Faculty, on the links established between traditional symbolic motifs and contents of scholastic philosophy, and on the efforts made by students to customize their manuscripts. The essay gives a quick overview of the teaching of logic at the old University of Louvain and looks at different types of images used in handwritten notebooks. It also focuses on the iconography of thesis prints in logic created at the college of Anchin in Douai in order to highlight the use of allegorical language in similar academic productions