Description

KU Leuven Libraries Special Collections MS 237 contains lecture notes on logic by the student Joannes Lombaert van Oosterwyck, dating from the years 1513–1514. In 1516 he was the fifth, and the first student of his pedagogy The Castle (‘De Burcht’), to receive his degree at the Faculty of Arts in Leuven, where he had been taught by the professors Joannes (de) Loen and Anthonius de Huysden. This codex, which is recognised as a ‘masterpiece’ of the Flemish Community, is one of the rare witnesses to the sixteenth-century lecture notes of the Faculty of Arts of the Old University of Leuven (1425–1797). Although the manuscript is ‘doubly incomplete’, because several quires are missing and the codex only contains the quaestiones, but not the lectiones, it is possible to reconstruct the calendar of classes in The Castle for the academic year 1513–1514 on the basis of the information in the manuscript. The codex thus provides valuable information about the teaching of logic in early sixteenth-century Leuven. The elements relating to the content are also confirmed by the material analysis of the manuscript (the layout, the addition of notes and some illustrations, the watermarks, etc.).

The analysis of the manuscript is completed by a survey of all known Leuven lecture notes of the fifteenth (21) and sixteenth centuries (16). For the fifteenth century, it concerns eleven manuscripts of the Faculty of Arts and ten manuscripts of the Faculty of Law (civil law and canon law). However, the situation completely changed in the sixteenth century, with only three manuscripts from the Faculty of Arts, compared to nine from the Faculty of Law and four from the Faculty of Theology; lecture notes from the Faculty of Medicine are not known for these centuries. The appearance of printed textbooks could be one of the reasons for the decrease in lecture notes of the Faculty of Arts in the sixteenth century, but further research is needed to give a definitive answer.