I would like to contribute to this lecture series by reflecting on reading both as a
philosophical practice and as an object of historiographical inquiry.
My aim is to ask to what extent the act of reading can be regarded as an exercise of
philosophy and whether and how it might be integrated into our narratives of the history
of philosophy.
The choice of this topic grows out of a project that I am currently developing at the University
of Zeigen, the Manikula Project, which Anna mentioned.
Together with my team, I am exploring the philosophical library of Nicholas of Cusa or
Cusano's, one of the most remarkable fears of the 15th century.
You can see here his library, a conserva today in his native city, Werncastle-Kus and a page
of manuscript from his collection, which is the translation of the ethics by Leonardo
Bruni.
At the center of our project is the critical edition and analysis of Cusano's marginalia,
the autographed notes he left in the margins of the books he possessed and read.
Yet, as often happens in research, one looks for one thing and unexpectedly discovers something
else or believes to discover something else.
In working on Cusano's marginalia, it has become clear to me that these notes are not
merely evidence of his engagement with the sources or the intellectual genesis of his
works.
They also bear witness to a distinctive philosophical practice, one that may have been for Cusano's
even more important than the writing of his own treatises.
In other words, and this is my hypothesis, for Cusano's to do philosophy was first of
all to read.
And this ideal of philosophical research was rooted in an art of reading and annotating
books.
This insight led me to the questions I've already mentioned at the beginning.
To what extent can reading itself be studied as a philosophical activity in its own rights?
And what role does it play in the historical development of philosophy?
I do not have answers to these questions.
However, in the spirit of this lecture series, as far as I understood it, I would like to
use our meeting today not to present the specific findings of my project, but to reflect with
you on the broader theoretical and methodological framework of our discipline.
My lecture is divided into two main parts.
In the first part, history of reading and historiography of medieval philosophy, I argue
that reading must be included in our historical understanding of medieval philosophy.
And I highlight the distortions that may follow when it is neglected.
In the second part, marginalia, reading mind and writing hand, my claim is that marginalia
are essential sources for the study of medieval philosophy.
Not merely to expand the corpus of written texts, but to illuminate a largely invisible
yet crucial agency in the history of medieval thought, what I call the reading mind.
And in this section, I will also briefly refer to my project as a case study in order to
substantiate my hypothesis.
Let us begin.
Our understanding of the history of philosophy rests on authored texts.
Philosophers appear primarily as authors and our view of their practice is shaped by writing
as the main medium through which philosophical thought is produced, recognized and transmitted.
In short, the history of philosophy we know is, to put it pointedly, a historiography
of the written word.
My lecture begins from a simple consideration.
Reading despite being ubiquitous and constitutive of intellectual activity is almost entirely
absent from this picture.
In standard narratives of the history of philosophy, of the history of thought, it
rarely appears, even though it underlies every act of reception, interpretation or elaboration
of texts.
There are at least two assumptions at the origin of this absence, in my opinion.
First, reading is often considered as a receptive or derivative practice, not as a mode of thinking
or an expression of philosophical stance in its own right.
Second, reading is regarded as a cognitive act that remains relatively constant and is
largely unaffected by historical changes that matter to philosophy.
What varies according to this idea are the material medium and the context of reading,
not the act, the cognitive act of reading itself.
In this lecture, I propose to question both assumptions by bringing into the history of
philosophy insights from a field that has taken shape over the past decades and is generally
known as the history of reading associated with the work of scholars like Antoni Grafton,
Roger Chartier, or Mary Carruthers.
This implies looking at the history of philosophy from a different angle, not only from the
vantage point of the texts that were written, but also from the many ways in which they
were read.
To this shift in perspective, I would like to add a specific research hypothesis concerning
medieval philosophy, which I formulate in a deliberately broad and provocative terms.
Perhaps a disclaimer at this point, to be honest, I don't believe that this hypothesis
is correct in its full generality.
But I'm convinced that it is heuristically productive and merits critical discussion
and qualification.
My hypothesis is the following.
Medieval thought often exhibits a primacy of reading as a philosophical practice, while
writing appears as a secondary outcome of that activity, a means of articulating, preserving
and transmitting insights gained through reading.
My aim, of course, is not to downplay the importance of writings, but rather to consider
it to consider texts in the light of the practices that co-determined their meaning and reception.
My focus here is on Latin culture, and the very notion of medieval philosophy is inherently,
if you want, Latin and Europe centred, in my opinion.
Yet I think that the same set of issues could be fruitfully extended to coeval linguistic
and cultural contexts due to the common roots of these traditions, but also to the entanglements
of their histories.
I will try to qualify this hypothesis by way of three subsequent observations.
Let me begin with a famous representation of reading in the cards Discours de la method,
which I will use later as a contrasting foil to bring medieval conceptions of reading into
a sharper focus.
The card writes, the reading of all good books is like a conversation with the most notable
people of past centuries, who were the authors of those books, but to converse with people
of other centuries is, in a way, the same as travelling.
It is good to know something about the customs of different people, yet those who spend too
much time travelling eventually become strangers in their own country.
For this reason, as soon as my age allowed me to free myself from dependence on my teachers,
I completely abandoned the study of bookish learning, determined to seek no other knowledge
except what I might find within myself.
As is well known, the card stages here a new beginning, a radical break with tradition.
He claims to have freed himself from the bonds of books.
Reading for him is like a conversation with the people of the past or a journey.
It can be instructive, but those who travel too much risk becoming alienated from themselves
and from their origins.
What is relevant here is the opposition between reading and independent thought and philosophy.
For the card, the disputes and disagreements among philosophical doctrines are grounds
to deem them useless.
He writes, when I consider how many different opinions have been defended within it by scholars
on the same subject, I came to regard as almost false everything that was merely probable.
In a nutshell, the card's method of self-examination and securing evidence, which you will later
call meditation begins only when reading stops.
My first observation on this first part of my lecture is this.
The divorce of philosophy from reading, which the card formulates in such a programmatic way,
is a modern construction that has had enormous historiographical impact.
In this context, I am not concerned with assessing the extent to which the card's mise-en-scene
corresponds to his actual philosophical practice.
I'm rather sceptical on this point and today we know, for instance, that the card was very
good at concealing its sources.
What matters here is that, since the early Enlightenment, this view has shaped our narratives
of the history of philosophy in at least two ways.
First, by tying philosophical mind to originality and independence from sources.
Second, by perpetuating the prejudice that medieval philosophy, precisely because it
works within a given textual tradition, is deferential to authority and therefore of
only secondary philosophical standing or secondary philosophical dignity.
It is enough to...
This was just a summary of the card's representation of reading, the two main aspects of extrapolated
from this quotation.
It is enough to open a page of Brooker's monumental Historia Critica Philosophiae
to encounter the definition of a historiographical paradigm that continues to exert influence
to this day.
I am not going to comment on these passages, but it's important for me to stress two things.
First, two philosophers, eclectic philosophers in Brooker's words, are those whose distance
themselves from all forms of authority, textual tradition or sectarian partiality, and instead
follows only the rule of their mind.
The true philosopher for Brooker, for the great founder of the modern history of philosophy
as a discipline, true philosopher is someone who begins something new.
When reading the meditations of other thinkers, true philosophers accept nothing that does
not meet their standards of reasoning.
In Legendi Saliorum Philosophorum Meditationibus Niil Rechibit, there is a dismissal of reading
as a direct source of knowledge or philosophical activity.
Second, for Brooker, medieval thinkers are interpreters, and bad ones for Brooker, rather
than philosophers in the proper sense, precisely because of their subordination to authority
of books.
Medieval philosophy is, in Brooker's view, a pseudo-philosophia.
Not only for this reason, of course, there are a lot of critical aspects Brooker highlighted,
but this subordination to the authority of books is a central aspect of his critique
and destruction, let's say, of medieval tradition.
In short, the historiographical marginalization of reading as a philosophical practice and
the devaluation of medieval philosophy share common roots, in my opinion.
This leads to my second observation.
The modern emphasis on originality, independence from sources, and offership does not adequately
reflect how medieval thinkers conceived of their own practices, of their philosophical
activity.
I briefly discuss two examples, both of which provide a vivid counter-image to Descartes'
book.
This is the first one, concerns reading as a philosophical self-formation.
Whereas Descartes conceives of reading as a form of travel and of estrangement, there
exists a long tradition, rooted in latent antiquity, that understands reading as an
exercise in self-knowledge and self-formation.
The metaphor of the page as a mirror of the soul, speculum animi, as we find, for instance,
already in Augustine, capture a reflexive dynamic that profoundly shapes monastic models
of education, and the page is here, of course, the paradigmatic page, if you want, is the
page of the Bible.
But the same is transposed also to other sources, to the reading of other sources.
Crucially, the self that the page makes visible does not correspond to the reader's present
state, but to a regulative ideal, to a model to which the reader is called to conform through
the act of reading.
And in this perspective, the counterpart presented by the text is neither foreign nor simply
past.
It is the object of a transformative appropriation unfolding in the present, which is also called
meditatio.
In the 12th century, Hugh of St. Victor devised a pedagogical and philosophical program grounded
in this model.
His widely received treatise, the Daskalikon sieve de studio legendi, is the first work
to the best of my knowledge, explicitly conceived as a theory and guide to proper philosophical
reading.
There are, above all, two things by which everyone is instructed in knowledge, namely
reading, lectio, and meditation, meditatio.
Of these two, reading holds the first play in teaching.
For you, the teaching of philosophy consists first and foremost in determining which books
are to be read, and in establishing the proper order and method of their reading.
The texts are already given.
The task is to learn how to use and interpret them rightly.
Yet for Hugh, reading reaches its fulfillment only in meditation.
Without meditation, he insists, reading would remain sterile and ineffective.
Without reading, on the contrary, meditation would be empty and lack its proper object.
Meditation would be without reading, objectless, without a concrete object.
It is also important to ask what writing and authorship mean in this framework, in this
context.
Philosophy practice emerges from reading, preserving its fruits while transforming them
into one's words.
What does it mean?
Notoriously, writing largely consists of compilations, glosses, paraphrases of earlier authors, Augustine,
Boisius, Isidore.
This should not be taken as a sign of dependence or dismissed as plagiarism.
Rather, it is the characteristic product of a philosophical practice of formation.
Meditative reading is immediately expressed in authorial production, which seeks to constitute
the reader's transformed self.
As Hugh writes, through study we are restored, reparable.
Let us take another step.
It is perhaps not an overly bold generalization to suggest that the three rules of reading
set out by Hugh of St. Victor are reflected in the organization of university knowledge
during the Middle Ages.
The canon of books, the order of their readings, and the method of engaging with them were
at the center of academic regulations and discussions.
Hugh had already emphasized that the verb legere describes all aspects of teaching and
learning in a reciprocal way, especially the relationship between masters and students,
the activity of the teacher, legere librum ili, as well as that of the student, legere
librum ab ilo.
Medieval institutions of knowledge were essentially communities of reading.
Teaching was structured around the legzio, while writing practices, such as commentaries
or questionnaires, arise from the need to transmit what has been read and at the same
time to reshape it, to reorder it.
However, with the professionalization of learning and the expansion of the philosophical corpus
in the 12th and 13th centuries, something fundamental changed.
Reading emancipated itself from meditation.
It no longer aimed at transforming the reader, but at a productive engagement with tradition.
And this is the second figure of reading, which illuminates another contrast to Descartes'
conception.
But this leads also to my third and final observation from this first part.
Reading has a philosophical history, and shifts in the art of reading correspond to developments
in the modes of thinking and, above all, of philosophical writing.
At this point, I would like to briefly turn to a very well-known text, which Martin Grubman
famously regarded as a fundamental or a foundational document of the so-called Scholastic Method,
Peter Abelart's Sique et. Non.
Without endorsing Grubman's thesis, I'm interested in this work here only as a rare
and lucid, I would say, witness to reflection on reading, whose influence extended at least
into the Renaissance.
Matoriously, Abelart collects contradictory sentences on central theological questions,
not in order to resolve them or defend a specific position in the Sique et. Non, but to demonstrate
how texts should be read.
Abelart writes,
I wish to collect divergent opinions of the Holy Fathers, such as, I recall, which because
of their discrepancy give rise to questions that encourage readers to the greatest exercise
in the search for truth, sharpening their sight through inquiry.
For this is considered the first key to wisdom, namely, constant and frequent questioning.
Here, Abelart proposes a precise technique of reading willed on the confrontation of
divergent opinions.
The aim of reading is not a sense of deference to authority, but the generation of questions.
Not here, once again, the fundamental difference from the card.
The search for truth and the exercise of independent thinking are not hindered by the
contradictions of tradition as the card maintained, but are precisely set in motion by them.
Reading in this sense is conceived as a structurally agonistic practice.
It stages a dispute within tradition and compels the reader to take a position.
Abelart, again, this kind of writing should not be read with the obligation to believe,
but it should be read with the freedom to judge.
For Abelart, the reader becomes the final link in the chain of transmission, acting
as its judge.
The question, which developed as a specific literary genre within and beyond the medieval
university, emerges first and foremost as a tool of reading.
In this view, philosophical thinking takes shape as a reworking and reordering of what
has been read through rational explanation.
And this was the first part of my presentation.
I hope I have still enough time here.
May I drink a little bit?
Okay.
We can move to the second part, marginalia, reading mind and writing hand.
What emerges from the examples discussed so far?
Duke's model of reading as self-formation and Abelart's conception of reading as an
art of the opposites or of contradictions is the outline of a philosophical agency
that does not coincide with authorship.
This is the most important aspect.
It is an agency that takes shape in the engagement with texts and which I have proposed to call
the reading mind.
At this point, however, we are faced with a fundamental problem.
If reading constitutes a genuine philosophical practice, how can it be traced historically?
How can we reconstruct this form of agency given that our descriptions of it have so
far relied once again on written texts?
In other words, where does the reading mind leave its material traces?
And I come to the problem of materiality, which is very dear to your group.
In order to address this problem, I would like to advance once again three observations
on this second constellation of questions.
Let me begin with a suggestive passage from Michel de Sertoz, L'ambvencion du Cote d'Yenne,
a work that in the last decades played a decisive role in shaping the history of reading as
a field of research, at least in the French media.
De Sertoz's reflections are particularly interesting, also because they offer another
variation on the Cote's metaphor of reading as travel, or testify to its lingerie if you want.
De Sertoz writes, far from being writers, founders of their own place, readers are travelers.
They move across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads, pushing their way across
fields they did not write.
Writing accumulates, stalks up, resists time by the establishment of a place, and multiplies
its production through the expansionism of reproduction.
Reading takes no measure against the erosion of time, one forgets oneself and also forgets.
It does not keep what it acquires.
In this passage, De Sertoz draws a sharp and fundamental contrast.
Writing aspires to permanence, it resists, to the passage of time through accumulation
and reproducibility.
Reading by contrast appears as an ephemeral practice, bound to the immediacy of its exercise
and to the singularity of the moment in which it occurs.
My first observation of the second part is this, marginalia, as a document, challenge
precisely this separation between writing and reading.
In fact, the contrast described by De Sertoz becomes far less clear-cut once we consider
the practice of annotation.
Marginal notes embody a hubrid form of document that questions rigid taxonomies.
They turn now to be, on the one hand, the writing form of a reader who heals to the
temptation to leave trace.
On the other hand, as the reading exercise of a writer would deliberately renounce authorship
of the main text, we can read marginalia from both perspectives as reading and exercise
and the exercise of a reader or an exercise of a writer.
Seen from this perspective, marginalia offer both material evidence and conceptual insight
into an interdependence between reading and writing, or if you want, into a point of conjunction
between reading mind and writing hand.
A brief clarification is here in order.
Reading marginalia at the centre of philosophical research does not follow a mere logic of inclusion
according to which every document counts as relevant, however fragmentary.
Nor does it amount to a mere expansion of the textual corpus.
As I said, rather it reflects an attempt to grasp a form of philosophical agency that
escapes the classical historiography centred on author texts.
This leads to my second observation.
Marginalia are not texts in the proper sense and do not testify to authorship, at least
not directly.
Yet it is precisely for this reason that a philosophical historiography attentive to
marginalia can bring into view a central dimension of medieval philosophy by relativising
the primacy of the author and finished work.
I do not dwell on possible definitions of marginalia.
I can recommend a wonderful essay of Adolfo Tura on this aspect, but I would like to suggest
some consideration.
Consider for instance an annotated page from the private library of Nicholas of Cusa.
We encounter manicule, note assigns, underlinings, single words, brief clauses.
Are manicule texts?
And when Cusano simply repeats in the margin, words taken from Plato in the main text.
Who is the author of that marginal note?
Cusano, who pens it, or Plato, who is responsible for the words themselves.
Each marginal annotation encapsulates in Nunché a challenge of categorisation.
It stands at the intersection of two histories.
The Virchungske Sichte of the book being read, and the formation history of the reader, and
of the reader's thought.
Borrowing a formulation from Paul Ricoeur, marginalia mark an encounter between the word
of the book, on the one hand, and the word of the reader, an encounter in which both
are in a certain sense transformed.
At closer inspection, it is precisely this transitional status of marginalia that makes
them philosophically productive.
They offer a vantage point from which to unsettle traditional interpretive dichotomies between
original and derivatives, authorial and imitative, and thus open the way to a historiography capable
of integrating reading as a genuine philosophical agency.
This brings me to my third observation.
The evolution of annotation practices is an integral part of the history of medieval philosophy
itself.
However, while marginalia have attracted increasing attention in recent years, especially within
book history and manuscript studies, we still lack a genuinely philosophical history that
accounts from how changes in annotation practices relate to changes in philosophical thinking
itself.
In the time that remains, I would like to make this claim more concrete by briefly indicating
what I have learned by following this line of inquiry in my project on the marginalia
of Nicholas of Cusa.
Do I still have five or ten minutes?
Yes.
Okay.
Thank you.
My aim here is not to present results in detail, as I said, but to show what becomes visible
once marginalia are treated as a philosophical sources rather than as ancillary historical
material.
Nicholas of Cusa is of course one of the most extensively studied authors of the 15th century.
The critical edition of his works has been completed, and the publication of the biographical
documentation, the so-called Akta Kusana, is nearing its conclusion.
And yet systematic research on his marginalia has led me to a thesis that I had not anticipated
at the outset of the project, and which may sound deliberately provocative.
I claim that Nicholas of Cusa's most extensive and perhaps important work, the one he never
says thinking about, has so far been ignored as such, namely his library.
What does it mean?
I argue that Nicholas of Cusa's library must be seen as a fundamental expression of his
thought and as a key for interpreting his conception of knowledge and philosophical
research.
More precisely, Cusano's autograph marginalia transform his manuscript collection into
what may be called a work of the reader, library as a work of the reader.
Three findings have substantiated this perspective.
First, Cusano's marginalia are not occasional or spontaneous traces of use.
Marginalia are in this case not at all traces of uses.
They reflect a consistent working method.
Across his books, marginal notes establish dense networks of intertextual reference,
linking individual manuscripts to one another and connecting the books Cusano's read with
his own writings.
Here just an example taken from Cusano's De Berilo, with a clear intertextuality with
two manuscripts Cusano's read and annotated Aristotle's Metaphysics and Plato's Phaedon.
In this sense, marginalia trace a philosophical path across the library as a whole, revealing
a distinctive mapping of knowledge.
This is a philosophical itinerary, if you want.
Second, marginal notes were not conceived as private annotations.
They presuppose a readership that corresponds to the circle of Cusano's collaborators
and to the users of his library.
Cusano's was not the sole glosator of his manuscripts, rather the books bear witness
to a community of readers and to ongoing scholarly exchange.
We have here the example of a page from Plato's Parmenides, which we can find a marginal annotation
by Nicholas of Cusa and Cardinal Bessarion, and also by the translator of the Latin version
of Plato's Parmenides, George of Trebizond.
On the same page of a manuscript we find different notes developing an exchange, a dialogue.
But manuscripts circulated also, were borrowed and lent, and Cusano's marginal notes were
even copied and migrated into other collections.
Cusano's marginalia are sometimes copies of another reader's notes.
Here an example from Eusebius' Preparatio of Angelica, Cusano's marginalia were copied
and Cusano's was also a copyist of marginalia.
Third point, Cusano's marginalia must be distinguished sharply from the scholastic
glosses characteristic of university manuscripts.
They are not commentaries in the strict sense, nor do they participate in the scholastic
practice of textual explanation and authority management.
Cusano's mode of annotation instead reflects a self-conscious departure from university
forms of knowledge.
His marginal notes follow lines of inquiry determined not by the text's argumentative
structure but by the reader's own philosophical research, thus recording a dialogical intersection
between the mind in the book and the mind of the reader.
Even together, considering marginalia as a work of the reader suggests an important
historiographical consequence.
If we focus exclusively on Cusano's authoritative writings and isolate them from the annotated
library in which they took shape, from the ecology of the library, we miss a crucial
dimension of his philosophical activity.
Of course, I'm not saying that we have to concentrate only on marginalia, downplaying
the importance of the writings, but I think that we can fully interpret his philosophy
only if we include marginalia in our consideration.
I come to my conclusion.
In this lecture, I have deliberately left the comfort zone of my narrow research project
in order to discuss a broader historiographical agenda that I hope has become visible.
My last words concerns an inherent challenge in any attempt to conceptualize reading as
a philosophical agency.
For a history of philosophy attentive to reading faces a kind of irritation.
This irritation, which is productive in my opinion, arises from two facts that seem to
contradict one another.
First, the act of reading itself is not contained in any text.
As Plato already remarked in the Phaedrus, no written word can control how it is received
or used.
A history of philosophy centered on reading must therefore take up a position somewhat
eccentric or of center to the text.
It directs attention to the institutional and social contexts that structure and regulate
reading and to the material media through which texts are transmitted and made available.
For readers, never encounter abstract, dematerialized texts, but concrete, written artifacts, books
that both shape how texts were used and preserve traces of their reading.
Second, however, every philosophical text is also a reworking and the result of earlier reading,
either directly in glosses or excerpts or indirectly in commentaries, sume or questiones.
These texts explicitly reflect on reading or they reconfigure what has been read,
formulating interpretive criteria and generating new levels of meaning.
Between these two poles, the inaccessibility of reading itself on the one hand and the
availability of the text as witness to reading, there opens up the paradox of a research perspective
that in my view can reveal some of the central features of what we call properly or improperly
medieval philosophy.
Thank you very much for your attention.
Thank you.