WEBVTT - autoGenerated 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:13.640 I would like to contribute to this lecture series by reflecting on reading both as a 00:00:13.640 --> 00:00:20.040 philosophical practice and as an object of historiographical inquiry. 00:00:20.040 --> 00:00:27.760 My aim is to ask to what extent the act of reading can be regarded as an exercise of 00:00:27.760 --> 00:00:35.120 philosophy and whether and how it might be integrated into our narratives of the history 00:00:35.120 --> 00:00:38.880 of philosophy. 00:00:38.880 --> 00:00:45.320 The choice of this topic grows out of a project that I am currently developing at the University 00:00:45.320 --> 00:00:51.200 of Zeigen, the Manikula Project, which Anna mentioned. 00:00:51.200 --> 00:00:56.360 Together with my team, I am exploring the philosophical library of Nicholas of Cusa or 00:00:56.360 --> 00:01:02.360 Cusano's, one of the most remarkable fears of the 15th century. 00:01:02.360 --> 00:01:11.480 You can see here his library, a conserva today in his native city, Werncastle-Kus and a page 00:01:11.480 --> 00:01:20.160 of manuscript from his collection, which is the translation of the ethics by Leonardo 00:01:20.160 --> 00:01:22.960 Bruni. 00:01:22.960 --> 00:01:27.960 At the center of our project is the critical edition and analysis of Cusano's marginalia, 00:01:27.960 --> 00:01:34.440 the autographed notes he left in the margins of the books he possessed and read. 00:01:34.440 --> 00:01:41.800 Yet, as often happens in research, one looks for one thing and unexpectedly discovers something 00:01:41.800 --> 00:01:46.640 else or believes to discover something else. 00:01:46.640 --> 00:01:52.480 In working on Cusano's marginalia, it has become clear to me that these notes are not 00:01:52.480 --> 00:01:59.480 merely evidence of his engagement with the sources or the intellectual genesis of his 00:01:59.480 --> 00:02:00.680 works. 00:02:00.680 --> 00:02:07.920 They also bear witness to a distinctive philosophical practice, one that may have been for Cusano's 00:02:07.920 --> 00:02:13.280 even more important than the writing of his own treatises. 00:02:13.280 --> 00:02:19.340 In other words, and this is my hypothesis, for Cusano's to do philosophy was first of 00:02:19.340 --> 00:02:21.720 all to read. 00:02:21.720 --> 00:02:30.320 And this ideal of philosophical research was rooted in an art of reading and annotating 00:02:30.320 --> 00:02:32.680 books. 00:02:32.680 --> 00:02:37.600 This insight led me to the questions I've already mentioned at the beginning. 00:02:37.600 --> 00:02:46.440 To what extent can reading itself be studied as a philosophical activity in its own rights? 00:02:46.440 --> 00:02:54.300 And what role does it play in the historical development of philosophy? 00:02:54.300 --> 00:02:57.740 I do not have answers to these questions. 00:02:57.740 --> 00:03:03.700 However, in the spirit of this lecture series, as far as I understood it, I would like to 00:03:03.700 --> 00:03:11.500 use our meeting today not to present the specific findings of my project, but to reflect with 00:03:11.500 --> 00:03:19.180 you on the broader theoretical and methodological framework of our discipline. 00:03:19.180 --> 00:03:28.160 My lecture is divided into two main parts. 00:03:28.160 --> 00:03:33.640 In the first part, history of reading and historiography of medieval philosophy, I argue 00:03:33.640 --> 00:03:40.600 that reading must be included in our historical understanding of medieval philosophy. 00:03:40.600 --> 00:03:46.840 And I highlight the distortions that may follow when it is neglected. 00:03:46.840 --> 00:03:53.280 In the second part, marginalia, reading mind and writing hand, my claim is that marginalia 00:03:53.280 --> 00:03:58.520 are essential sources for the study of medieval philosophy. 00:03:58.520 --> 00:04:06.720 Not merely to expand the corpus of written texts, but to illuminate a largely invisible 00:04:06.720 --> 00:04:14.840 yet crucial agency in the history of medieval thought, what I call the reading mind. 00:04:14.840 --> 00:04:20.840 And in this section, I will also briefly refer to my project as a case study in order to 00:04:20.840 --> 00:04:25.680 substantiate my hypothesis. 00:04:25.680 --> 00:04:31.280 Let us begin. 00:04:31.280 --> 00:04:38.400 Our understanding of the history of philosophy rests on authored texts. 00:04:38.400 --> 00:04:47.360 Philosophers appear primarily as authors and our view of their practice is shaped by writing 00:04:47.360 --> 00:04:55.360 as the main medium through which philosophical thought is produced, recognized and transmitted. 00:04:55.360 --> 00:05:02.460 In short, the history of philosophy we know is, to put it pointedly, a historiography 00:05:02.460 --> 00:05:05.920 of the written word. 00:05:05.920 --> 00:05:09.680 My lecture begins from a simple consideration. 00:05:09.680 --> 00:05:17.880 Reading despite being ubiquitous and constitutive of intellectual activity is almost entirely 00:05:17.880 --> 00:05:21.320 absent from this picture. 00:05:21.320 --> 00:05:25.320 In standard narratives of the history of philosophy, of the history of thought, it 00:05:25.320 --> 00:05:34.200 rarely appears, even though it underlies every act of reception, interpretation or elaboration 00:05:34.200 --> 00:05:36.280 of texts. 00:05:36.280 --> 00:05:42.160 There are at least two assumptions at the origin of this absence, in my opinion. 00:05:42.160 --> 00:05:50.880 First, reading is often considered as a receptive or derivative practice, not as a mode of thinking 00:05:50.920 --> 00:05:56.920 or an expression of philosophical stance in its own right. 00:05:56.920 --> 00:06:04.320 Second, reading is regarded as a cognitive act that remains relatively constant and is 00:06:04.320 --> 00:06:10.880 largely unaffected by historical changes that matter to philosophy. 00:06:10.880 --> 00:06:18.360 What varies according to this idea are the material medium and the context of reading, 00:06:18.360 --> 00:06:23.840 not the act, the cognitive act of reading itself. 00:06:23.840 --> 00:06:29.240 In this lecture, I propose to question both assumptions by bringing into the history of 00:06:29.240 --> 00:06:36.440 philosophy insights from a field that has taken shape over the past decades and is generally 00:06:36.440 --> 00:06:44.600 known as the history of reading associated with the work of scholars like Antoni Grafton, 00:06:44.600 --> 00:06:49.440 Roger Chartier, or Mary Carruthers. 00:06:49.440 --> 00:06:55.240 This implies looking at the history of philosophy from a different angle, not only from the 00:06:55.240 --> 00:07:02.080 vantage point of the texts that were written, but also from the many ways in which they 00:07:02.080 --> 00:07:04.880 were read. 00:07:04.880 --> 00:07:10.240 To this shift in perspective, I would like to add a specific research hypothesis concerning 00:07:10.760 --> 00:07:18.720 medieval philosophy, which I formulate in a deliberately broad and provocative terms. 00:07:18.720 --> 00:07:24.200 Perhaps a disclaimer at this point, to be honest, I don't believe that this hypothesis 00:07:24.200 --> 00:07:28.640 is correct in its full generality. 00:07:28.640 --> 00:07:36.960 But I'm convinced that it is heuristically productive and merits critical discussion 00:07:37.200 --> 00:07:40.400 and qualification. 00:07:40.400 --> 00:07:43.400 My hypothesis is the following. 00:07:43.400 --> 00:07:50.760 Medieval thought often exhibits a primacy of reading as a philosophical practice, while 00:07:50.760 --> 00:08:00.200 writing appears as a secondary outcome of that activity, a means of articulating, preserving 00:08:00.440 --> 00:08:07.720 and transmitting insights gained through reading. 00:08:07.720 --> 00:08:15.320 My aim, of course, is not to downplay the importance of writings, but rather to consider 00:08:15.320 --> 00:08:25.880 it to consider texts in the light of the practices that co-determined their meaning and reception. 00:08:25.880 --> 00:08:33.160 My focus here is on Latin culture, and the very notion of medieval philosophy is inherently, 00:08:33.160 --> 00:08:41.920 if you want, Latin and Europe centred, in my opinion. 00:08:41.920 --> 00:08:47.960 Yet I think that the same set of issues could be fruitfully extended to coeval linguistic 00:08:47.960 --> 00:08:57.920 and cultural contexts due to the common roots of these traditions, but also to the entanglements 00:08:57.920 --> 00:09:01.320 of their histories. 00:09:01.320 --> 00:09:09.040 I will try to qualify this hypothesis by way of three subsequent observations. 00:09:09.040 --> 00:09:16.200 Let me begin with a famous representation of reading in the cards Discours de la method, 00:09:16.200 --> 00:09:23.800 which I will use later as a contrasting foil to bring medieval conceptions of reading into 00:09:23.800 --> 00:09:30.600 a sharper focus. 00:09:30.600 --> 00:09:36.800 The card writes, the reading of all good books is like a conversation with the most notable 00:09:36.800 --> 00:09:46.200 people of past centuries, who were the authors of those books, but to converse with people 00:09:46.200 --> 00:09:51.560 of other centuries is, in a way, the same as travelling. 00:09:51.560 --> 00:09:57.120 It is good to know something about the customs of different people, yet those who spend too 00:09:57.120 --> 00:10:03.800 much time travelling eventually become strangers in their own country. 00:10:03.800 --> 00:10:10.040 For this reason, as soon as my age allowed me to free myself from dependence on my teachers, 00:10:10.040 --> 00:10:16.840 I completely abandoned the study of bookish learning, determined to seek no other knowledge 00:10:16.840 --> 00:10:22.000 except what I might find within myself. 00:10:22.000 --> 00:10:29.160 As is well known, the card stages here a new beginning, a radical break with tradition. 00:10:29.160 --> 00:10:34.560 He claims to have freed himself from the bonds of books. 00:10:34.560 --> 00:10:40.880 Reading for him is like a conversation with the people of the past or a journey. 00:10:40.880 --> 00:10:47.520 It can be instructive, but those who travel too much risk becoming alienated from themselves 00:10:47.520 --> 00:10:51.320 and from their origins. 00:10:51.320 --> 00:11:01.400 What is relevant here is the opposition between reading and independent thought and philosophy. 00:11:01.400 --> 00:11:08.640 For the card, the disputes and disagreements among philosophical doctrines are grounds 00:11:08.640 --> 00:11:11.920 to deem them useless. 00:11:11.920 --> 00:11:20.180 He writes, when I consider how many different opinions have been defended within it by scholars 00:11:20.180 --> 00:11:31.780 on the same subject, I came to regard as almost false everything that was merely probable. 00:11:31.780 --> 00:11:39.340 In a nutshell, the card's method of self-examination and securing evidence, which you will later 00:11:39.340 --> 00:11:47.820 call meditation begins only when reading stops. 00:11:47.820 --> 00:11:54.060 My first observation on this first part of my lecture is this. 00:11:54.060 --> 00:12:01.220 The divorce of philosophy from reading, which the card formulates in such a programmatic way, 00:12:01.220 --> 00:12:08.220 is a modern construction that has had enormous historiographical impact. 00:12:08.220 --> 00:12:15.100 In this context, I am not concerned with assessing the extent to which the card's mise-en-scene 00:12:15.180 --> 00:12:19.340 corresponds to his actual philosophical practice. 00:12:19.340 --> 00:12:26.300 I'm rather sceptical on this point and today we know, for instance, that the card was very 00:12:26.300 --> 00:12:30.900 good at concealing its sources. 00:12:30.900 --> 00:12:38.700 What matters here is that, since the early Enlightenment, this view has shaped our narratives 00:12:38.700 --> 00:12:43.900 of the history of philosophy in at least two ways. 00:12:43.900 --> 00:12:51.900 First, by tying philosophical mind to originality and independence from sources. 00:12:51.900 --> 00:12:59.140 Second, by perpetuating the prejudice that medieval philosophy, precisely because it 00:12:59.140 --> 00:13:06.740 works within a given textual tradition, is deferential to authority and therefore of 00:13:06.740 --> 00:13:19.980 only secondary philosophical standing or secondary philosophical dignity. 00:13:19.980 --> 00:13:21.540 It is enough to... 00:13:21.540 --> 00:13:30.300 This was just a summary of the card's representation of reading, the two main aspects of extrapolated 00:13:30.300 --> 00:13:33.660 from this quotation. 00:13:33.660 --> 00:13:40.620 It is enough to open a page of Brooker's monumental Historia Critica Philosophiae 00:13:40.620 --> 00:13:48.220 to encounter the definition of a historiographical paradigm that continues to exert influence 00:13:48.220 --> 00:13:51.340 to this day. 00:13:51.340 --> 00:14:02.340 I am not going to comment on these passages, but it's important for me to stress two things. 00:14:02.340 --> 00:14:09.900 First, two philosophers, eclectic philosophers in Brooker's words, are those whose distance 00:14:09.900 --> 00:14:18.180 themselves from all forms of authority, textual tradition or sectarian partiality, and instead 00:14:18.180 --> 00:14:21.900 follows only the rule of their mind. 00:14:21.900 --> 00:14:28.500 The true philosopher for Brooker, for the great founder of the modern history of philosophy 00:14:28.500 --> 00:14:43.820 as a discipline, true philosopher is someone who begins something new. 00:14:43.820 --> 00:14:55.140 When reading the meditations of other thinkers, true philosophers accept nothing that does 00:14:55.140 --> 00:15:00.500 not meet their standards of reasoning. 00:15:00.500 --> 00:15:14.300 In Legendi Saliorum Philosophorum Meditationibus Niil Rechibit, there is a dismissal of reading 00:15:14.300 --> 00:15:21.660 as a direct source of knowledge or philosophical activity. 00:15:21.660 --> 00:15:30.500 Second, for Brooker, medieval thinkers are interpreters, and bad ones for Brooker, rather 00:15:30.500 --> 00:15:35.860 than philosophers in the proper sense, precisely because of their subordination to authority 00:15:35.860 --> 00:15:38.580 of books. 00:15:38.580 --> 00:15:45.180 Medieval philosophy is, in Brooker's view, a pseudo-philosophia. 00:15:45.180 --> 00:15:51.180 Not only for this reason, of course, there are a lot of critical aspects Brooker highlighted, 00:15:51.180 --> 00:16:00.980 but this subordination to the authority of books is a central aspect of his critique 00:16:00.980 --> 00:16:06.020 and destruction, let's say, of medieval tradition. 00:16:06.020 --> 00:16:13.100 In short, the historiographical marginalization of reading as a philosophical practice and 00:16:13.100 --> 00:16:19.460 the devaluation of medieval philosophy share common roots, in my opinion. 00:16:19.580 --> 00:16:21.940 This leads to my second observation. 00:16:21.940 --> 00:16:28.780 The modern emphasis on originality, independence from sources, and offership does not adequately 00:16:28.780 --> 00:16:36.580 reflect how medieval thinkers conceived of their own practices, of their philosophical 00:16:36.580 --> 00:16:37.580 activity. 00:16:37.580 --> 00:16:48.580 I briefly discuss two examples, both of which provide a vivid counter-image to Descartes' 00:16:48.580 --> 00:16:50.860 book. 00:16:50.860 --> 00:16:57.820 This is the first one, concerns reading as a philosophical self-formation. 00:16:57.820 --> 00:17:05.540 Whereas Descartes conceives of reading as a form of travel and of estrangement, there 00:17:05.540 --> 00:17:11.220 exists a long tradition, rooted in latent antiquity, that understands reading as an 00:17:11.220 --> 00:17:16.340 exercise in self-knowledge and self-formation. 00:17:16.340 --> 00:17:23.980 The metaphor of the page as a mirror of the soul, speculum animi, as we find, for instance, 00:17:23.980 --> 00:17:30.220 already in Augustine, capture a reflexive dynamic that profoundly shapes monastic models 00:17:30.220 --> 00:17:40.260 of education, and the page is here, of course, the paradigmatic page, if you want, is the 00:17:40.260 --> 00:17:42.900 page of the Bible. 00:17:42.900 --> 00:17:51.380 But the same is transposed also to other sources, to the reading of other sources. 00:17:51.380 --> 00:18:00.580 Crucially, the self that the page makes visible does not correspond to the reader's present 00:18:00.580 --> 00:18:11.220 state, but to a regulative ideal, to a model to which the reader is called to conform through 00:18:11.220 --> 00:18:12.660 the act of reading. 00:18:12.660 --> 00:18:20.140 And in this perspective, the counterpart presented by the text is neither foreign nor simply 00:18:20.140 --> 00:18:21.420 past. 00:18:21.420 --> 00:18:28.140 It is the object of a transformative appropriation unfolding in the present, which is also called 00:18:28.140 --> 00:18:31.900 meditatio. 00:18:31.900 --> 00:18:38.340 In the 12th century, Hugh of St. Victor devised a pedagogical and philosophical program grounded 00:18:38.340 --> 00:18:40.060 in this model. 00:18:40.060 --> 00:18:46.780 His widely received treatise, the Daskalikon sieve de studio legendi, is the first work 00:18:46.780 --> 00:18:53.180 to the best of my knowledge, explicitly conceived as a theory and guide to proper philosophical 00:18:53.180 --> 00:18:56.420 reading. 00:18:57.420 --> 00:19:04.060 There are, above all, two things by which everyone is instructed in knowledge, namely 00:19:04.060 --> 00:19:08.420 reading, lectio, and meditation, meditatio. 00:19:08.420 --> 00:19:13.860 Of these two, reading holds the first play in teaching. 00:19:13.860 --> 00:19:20.860 For you, the teaching of philosophy consists first and foremost in determining which books 00:19:20.860 --> 00:19:26.980 are to be read, and in establishing the proper order and method of their reading. 00:19:26.980 --> 00:19:29.100 The texts are already given. 00:19:29.100 --> 00:19:33.620 The task is to learn how to use and interpret them rightly. 00:19:33.620 --> 00:19:39.020 Yet for Hugh, reading reaches its fulfillment only in meditation. 00:19:39.020 --> 00:19:45.660 Without meditation, he insists, reading would remain sterile and ineffective. 00:19:45.660 --> 00:19:55.060 Without reading, on the contrary, meditation would be empty and lack its proper object. 00:19:55.060 --> 00:20:02.420 Meditation would be without reading, objectless, without a concrete object. 00:20:02.420 --> 00:20:08.900 It is also important to ask what writing and authorship mean in this framework, in this 00:20:08.900 --> 00:20:09.900 context. 00:20:09.900 --> 00:20:16.180 Philosophy practice emerges from reading, preserving its fruits while transforming them 00:20:16.180 --> 00:20:18.620 into one's words. 00:20:18.620 --> 00:20:20.260 What does it mean? 00:20:20.260 --> 00:20:31.900 Notoriously, writing largely consists of compilations, glosses, paraphrases of earlier authors, Augustine, 00:20:31.900 --> 00:20:33.580 Boisius, Isidore. 00:20:33.580 --> 00:20:38.540 This should not be taken as a sign of dependence or dismissed as plagiarism. 00:20:38.540 --> 00:20:45.180 Rather, it is the characteristic product of a philosophical practice of formation. 00:20:45.180 --> 00:20:52.580 Meditative reading is immediately expressed in authorial production, which seeks to constitute 00:20:52.580 --> 00:20:57.060 the reader's transformed self. 00:20:57.060 --> 00:21:04.900 As Hugh writes, through study we are restored, reparable. 00:21:04.900 --> 00:21:07.220 Let us take another step. 00:21:07.220 --> 00:21:15.540 It is perhaps not an overly bold generalization to suggest that the three rules of reading 00:21:15.540 --> 00:21:21.940 set out by Hugh of St. Victor are reflected in the organization of university knowledge 00:21:21.940 --> 00:21:24.420 during the Middle Ages. 00:21:24.420 --> 00:21:31.260 The canon of books, the order of their readings, and the method of engaging with them were 00:21:31.260 --> 00:21:38.300 at the center of academic regulations and discussions. 00:21:38.300 --> 00:21:44.820 Hugh had already emphasized that the verb legere describes all aspects of teaching and 00:21:44.820 --> 00:21:52.260 learning in a reciprocal way, especially the relationship between masters and students, 00:21:52.260 --> 00:21:59.540 the activity of the teacher, legere librum ili, as well as that of the student, legere 00:21:59.540 --> 00:22:03.060 librum ab ilo. 00:22:03.060 --> 00:22:09.300 Medieval institutions of knowledge were essentially communities of reading. 00:22:09.300 --> 00:22:15.980 Teaching was structured around the legzio, while writing practices, such as commentaries 00:22:15.980 --> 00:22:23.060 or questionnaires, arise from the need to transmit what has been read and at the same 00:22:23.060 --> 00:22:26.540 time to reshape it, to reorder it. 00:22:26.540 --> 00:22:34.580 However, with the professionalization of learning and the expansion of the philosophical corpus 00:22:34.580 --> 00:22:40.460 in the 12th and 13th centuries, something fundamental changed. 00:22:40.460 --> 00:22:43.980 Reading emancipated itself from meditation. 00:22:43.980 --> 00:22:56.460 It no longer aimed at transforming the reader, but at a productive engagement with tradition. 00:22:56.460 --> 00:23:06.540 And this is the second figure of reading, which illuminates another contrast to Descartes' 00:23:06.540 --> 00:23:08.420 conception. 00:23:08.420 --> 00:23:16.020 But this leads also to my third and final observation from this first part. 00:23:16.020 --> 00:23:26.140 Reading has a philosophical history, and shifts in the art of reading correspond to developments 00:23:26.140 --> 00:23:32.180 in the modes of thinking and, above all, of philosophical writing. 00:23:32.180 --> 00:23:38.180 At this point, I would like to briefly turn to a very well-known text, which Martin Grubman 00:23:38.180 --> 00:23:45.060 famously regarded as a fundamental or a foundational document of the so-called Scholastic Method, 00:23:45.060 --> 00:23:48.940 Peter Abelart's Sique et. Non. 00:23:48.940 --> 00:23:57.620 Without endorsing Grubman's thesis, I'm interested in this work here only as a rare 00:23:57.620 --> 00:24:04.660 and lucid, I would say, witness to reflection on reading, whose influence extended at least 00:24:04.660 --> 00:24:07.100 into the Renaissance. 00:24:07.100 --> 00:24:15.060 Matoriously, Abelart collects contradictory sentences on central theological questions, 00:24:15.100 --> 00:24:23.340 not in order to resolve them or defend a specific position in the Sique et. Non, but to demonstrate 00:24:23.340 --> 00:24:27.340 how texts should be read. 00:24:27.340 --> 00:24:29.100 Abelart writes, 00:24:29.100 --> 00:24:38.020 I wish to collect divergent opinions of the Holy Fathers, such as, I recall, which because 00:24:38.020 --> 00:24:45.660 of their discrepancy give rise to questions that encourage readers to the greatest exercise 00:24:45.660 --> 00:24:55.300 in the search for truth, sharpening their sight through inquiry. 00:24:55.300 --> 00:25:01.100 For this is considered the first key to wisdom, namely, constant and frequent questioning. 00:25:01.100 --> 00:25:12.340 Here, Abelart proposes a precise technique of reading willed on the confrontation of 00:25:12.340 --> 00:25:14.660 divergent opinions. 00:25:14.660 --> 00:25:22.100 The aim of reading is not a sense of deference to authority, but the generation of questions. 00:25:22.100 --> 00:25:26.500 Not here, once again, the fundamental difference from the card. 00:25:26.500 --> 00:25:32.700 The search for truth and the exercise of independent thinking are not hindered by the 00:25:32.700 --> 00:25:43.380 contradictions of tradition as the card maintained, but are precisely set in motion by them. 00:25:43.380 --> 00:25:49.820 Reading in this sense is conceived as a structurally agonistic practice. 00:25:49.820 --> 00:25:57.940 It stages a dispute within tradition and compels the reader to take a position. 00:25:57.940 --> 00:26:07.340 Abelart, again, this kind of writing should not be read with the obligation to believe, 00:26:07.340 --> 00:26:15.020 but it should be read with the freedom to judge. 00:26:15.020 --> 00:26:22.700 For Abelart, the reader becomes the final link in the chain of transmission, acting 00:26:22.700 --> 00:26:25.340 as its judge. 00:26:25.340 --> 00:26:31.820 The question, which developed as a specific literary genre within and beyond the medieval 00:26:31.820 --> 00:26:37.540 university, emerges first and foremost as a tool of reading. 00:26:37.540 --> 00:26:43.740 In this view, philosophical thinking takes shape as a reworking and reordering of what 00:26:43.740 --> 00:26:48.980 has been read through rational explanation. 00:26:48.980 --> 00:26:53.020 And this was the first part of my presentation. 00:26:53.020 --> 00:26:56.260 I hope I have still enough time here. 00:26:56.260 --> 00:27:05.260 May I drink a little bit? 00:27:05.260 --> 00:27:08.500 Okay. 00:27:08.500 --> 00:27:22.140 We can move to the second part, marginalia, reading mind and writing hand. 00:27:22.140 --> 00:27:27.620 What emerges from the examples discussed so far? 00:27:27.620 --> 00:27:33.460 Duke's model of reading as self-formation and Abelart's conception of reading as an 00:27:33.460 --> 00:27:40.220 art of the opposites or of contradictions is the outline of a philosophical agency 00:27:40.220 --> 00:27:44.140 that does not coincide with authorship. 00:27:44.140 --> 00:27:48.340 This is the most important aspect. 00:27:48.340 --> 00:27:55.020 It is an agency that takes shape in the engagement with texts and which I have proposed to call 00:27:55.020 --> 00:27:57.020 the reading mind. 00:27:57.020 --> 00:28:01.340 At this point, however, we are faced with a fundamental problem. 00:28:01.340 --> 00:28:09.220 If reading constitutes a genuine philosophical practice, how can it be traced historically? 00:28:09.220 --> 00:28:16.180 How can we reconstruct this form of agency given that our descriptions of it have so 00:28:16.180 --> 00:28:21.540 far relied once again on written texts? 00:28:21.540 --> 00:28:26.980 In other words, where does the reading mind leave its material traces? 00:28:26.980 --> 00:28:36.900 And I come to the problem of materiality, which is very dear to your group. 00:28:36.900 --> 00:28:43.700 In order to address this problem, I would like to advance once again three observations 00:28:43.700 --> 00:28:50.780 on this second constellation of questions. 00:28:50.780 --> 00:28:58.100 Let me begin with a suggestive passage from Michel de Sertoz, L'ambvencion du Cote d'Yenne, 00:28:58.100 --> 00:29:05.020 a work that in the last decades played a decisive role in shaping the history of reading as 00:29:05.020 --> 00:29:11.740 a field of research, at least in the French media. 00:29:11.740 --> 00:29:17.020 De Sertoz's reflections are particularly interesting, also because they offer another 00:29:17.020 --> 00:29:29.580 variation on the Cote's metaphor of reading as travel, or testify to its lingerie if you want. 00:29:29.580 --> 00:29:39.940 De Sertoz writes, far from being writers, founders of their own place, readers are travelers. 00:29:39.940 --> 00:29:46.460 They move across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads, pushing their way across 00:29:46.460 --> 00:29:50.580 fields they did not write. 00:29:50.580 --> 00:29:57.980 Writing accumulates, stalks up, resists time by the establishment of a place, and multiplies 00:29:57.980 --> 00:30:03.060 its production through the expansionism of reproduction. 00:30:03.060 --> 00:30:10.860 Reading takes no measure against the erosion of time, one forgets oneself and also forgets. 00:30:10.860 --> 00:30:14.940 It does not keep what it acquires. 00:30:14.940 --> 00:30:20.660 In this passage, De Sertoz draws a sharp and fundamental contrast. 00:30:20.660 --> 00:30:27.460 Writing aspires to permanence, it resists, to the passage of time through accumulation 00:30:27.460 --> 00:30:29.700 and reproducibility. 00:30:29.700 --> 00:30:38.060 Reading by contrast appears as an ephemeral practice, bound to the immediacy of its exercise 00:30:38.060 --> 00:30:44.180 and to the singularity of the moment in which it occurs. 00:30:44.180 --> 00:30:52.100 My first observation of the second part is this, marginalia, as a document, challenge 00:30:52.100 --> 00:30:57.300 precisely this separation between writing and reading. 00:30:57.300 --> 00:31:04.260 In fact, the contrast described by De Sertoz becomes far less clear-cut once we consider 00:31:04.260 --> 00:31:07.140 the practice of annotation. 00:31:07.140 --> 00:31:20.660 Marginal notes embody a hubrid form of document that questions rigid taxonomies. 00:31:20.660 --> 00:31:27.980 They turn now to be, on the one hand, the writing form of a reader who heals to the 00:31:27.980 --> 00:31:32.420 temptation to leave trace. 00:31:32.420 --> 00:31:40.100 On the other hand, as the reading exercise of a writer would deliberately renounce authorship 00:31:40.100 --> 00:31:49.740 of the main text, we can read marginalia from both perspectives as reading and exercise 00:31:49.740 --> 00:31:55.580 and the exercise of a reader or an exercise of a writer. 00:31:55.580 --> 00:32:00.780 Seen from this perspective, marginalia offer both material evidence and conceptual insight 00:32:00.780 --> 00:32:09.140 into an interdependence between reading and writing, or if you want, into a point of conjunction 00:32:09.140 --> 00:32:15.660 between reading mind and writing hand. 00:32:15.660 --> 00:32:22.660 A brief clarification is here in order. 00:32:22.660 --> 00:32:31.580 Reading marginalia at the centre of philosophical research does not follow a mere logic of inclusion 00:32:31.580 --> 00:32:37.420 according to which every document counts as relevant, however fragmentary. 00:32:37.420 --> 00:32:42.380 Nor does it amount to a mere expansion of the textual corpus. 00:32:42.380 --> 00:32:47.980 As I said, rather it reflects an attempt to grasp a form of philosophical agency that 00:32:47.980 --> 00:32:54.580 escapes the classical historiography centred on author texts. 00:32:54.580 --> 00:32:57.420 This leads to my second observation. 00:32:57.420 --> 00:33:06.180 Marginalia are not texts in the proper sense and do not testify to authorship, at least 00:33:06.180 --> 00:33:08.260 not directly. 00:33:08.260 --> 00:33:12.940 Yet it is precisely for this reason that a philosophical historiography attentive to 00:33:12.940 --> 00:33:21.140 marginalia can bring into view a central dimension of medieval philosophy by relativising 00:33:21.140 --> 00:33:26.220 the primacy of the author and finished work. 00:33:26.220 --> 00:33:29.740 I do not dwell on possible definitions of marginalia. 00:33:29.740 --> 00:33:42.660 I can recommend a wonderful essay of Adolfo Tura on this aspect, but I would like to suggest 00:33:42.660 --> 00:33:48.820 some consideration. 00:33:48.820 --> 00:33:54.340 Consider for instance an annotated page from the private library of Nicholas of Cusa. 00:33:54.340 --> 00:34:03.180 We encounter manicule, note assigns, underlinings, single words, brief clauses. 00:34:03.180 --> 00:34:05.860 Are manicule texts? 00:34:05.860 --> 00:34:14.740 And when Cusano simply repeats in the margin, words taken from Plato in the main text. 00:34:14.740 --> 00:34:18.380 Who is the author of that marginal note? 00:34:18.380 --> 00:34:26.740 Cusano, who pens it, or Plato, who is responsible for the words themselves. 00:34:26.740 --> 00:34:34.260 Each marginal annotation encapsulates in Nunché a challenge of categorisation. 00:34:34.260 --> 00:34:39.220 It stands at the intersection of two histories. 00:34:39.220 --> 00:34:47.940 The Virchungske Sichte of the book being read, and the formation history of the reader, and 00:34:47.940 --> 00:34:50.460 of the reader's thought. 00:34:50.460 --> 00:34:55.860 Borrowing a formulation from Paul Ricoeur, marginalia mark an encounter between the word 00:34:55.860 --> 00:35:02.180 of the book, on the one hand, and the word of the reader, an encounter in which both 00:35:02.180 --> 00:35:05.900 are in a certain sense transformed. 00:35:05.900 --> 00:35:11.820 At closer inspection, it is precisely this transitional status of marginalia that makes 00:35:11.820 --> 00:35:14.700 them philosophically productive. 00:35:14.700 --> 00:35:22.340 They offer a vantage point from which to unsettle traditional interpretive dichotomies between 00:35:22.340 --> 00:35:30.700 original and derivatives, authorial and imitative, and thus open the way to a historiography capable 00:35:30.700 --> 00:35:37.740 of integrating reading as a genuine philosophical agency. 00:35:37.740 --> 00:35:41.620 This brings me to my third observation. 00:35:41.620 --> 00:35:48.260 The evolution of annotation practices is an integral part of the history of medieval philosophy 00:35:48.260 --> 00:35:49.820 itself. 00:35:49.820 --> 00:35:59.100 However, while marginalia have attracted increasing attention in recent years, especially within 00:35:59.100 --> 00:36:06.220 book history and manuscript studies, we still lack a genuinely philosophical history that 00:36:06.220 --> 00:36:14.860 accounts from how changes in annotation practices relate to changes in philosophical thinking 00:36:14.860 --> 00:36:17.940 itself. 00:36:17.940 --> 00:36:25.820 In the time that remains, I would like to make this claim more concrete by briefly indicating 00:36:25.820 --> 00:36:31.860 what I have learned by following this line of inquiry in my project on the marginalia 00:36:31.860 --> 00:36:33.940 of Nicholas of Cusa. 00:36:33.940 --> 00:36:37.060 Do I still have five or ten minutes? 00:36:37.060 --> 00:36:38.060 Yes. 00:36:38.060 --> 00:36:39.060 Okay. 00:36:39.060 --> 00:36:40.060 Thank you. 00:36:40.060 --> 00:36:46.900 My aim here is not to present results in detail, as I said, but to show what becomes visible 00:36:46.900 --> 00:36:56.820 once marginalia are treated as a philosophical sources rather than as ancillary historical 00:36:56.820 --> 00:36:59.580 material. 00:36:59.580 --> 00:37:06.340 Nicholas of Cusa is of course one of the most extensively studied authors of the 15th century. 00:37:06.340 --> 00:37:12.140 The critical edition of his works has been completed, and the publication of the biographical 00:37:12.140 --> 00:37:16.900 documentation, the so-called Akta Kusana, is nearing its conclusion. 00:37:16.900 --> 00:37:24.420 And yet systematic research on his marginalia has led me to a thesis that I had not anticipated 00:37:24.420 --> 00:37:32.620 at the outset of the project, and which may sound deliberately provocative. 00:37:32.620 --> 00:37:40.540 I claim that Nicholas of Cusa's most extensive and perhaps important work, the one he never 00:37:40.540 --> 00:37:49.060 says thinking about, has so far been ignored as such, namely his library. 00:37:49.060 --> 00:37:50.260 What does it mean? 00:37:50.260 --> 00:37:56.700 I argue that Nicholas of Cusa's library must be seen as a fundamental expression of his 00:37:56.700 --> 00:38:03.500 thought and as a key for interpreting his conception of knowledge and philosophical 00:38:03.500 --> 00:38:05.340 research. 00:38:05.340 --> 00:38:13.460 More precisely, Cusano's autograph marginalia transform his manuscript collection into 00:38:13.460 --> 00:38:20.180 what may be called a work of the reader, library as a work of the reader. 00:38:20.180 --> 00:38:25.260 Three findings have substantiated this perspective. 00:38:25.700 --> 00:38:35.580 First, Cusano's marginalia are not occasional or spontaneous traces of use. 00:38:35.580 --> 00:38:40.620 Marginalia are in this case not at all traces of uses. 00:38:40.620 --> 00:38:44.620 They reflect a consistent working method. 00:38:44.620 --> 00:38:51.500 Across his books, marginal notes establish dense networks of intertextual reference, 00:38:51.500 --> 00:38:59.220 linking individual manuscripts to one another and connecting the books Cusano's read with 00:38:59.220 --> 00:39:02.420 his own writings. 00:39:02.420 --> 00:39:10.780 Here just an example taken from Cusano's De Berilo, with a clear intertextuality with 00:39:10.780 --> 00:39:19.980 two manuscripts Cusano's read and annotated Aristotle's Metaphysics and Plato's Phaedon. 00:39:19.980 --> 00:39:27.420 In this sense, marginalia trace a philosophical path across the library as a whole, revealing 00:39:27.420 --> 00:39:31.860 a distinctive mapping of knowledge. 00:39:31.860 --> 00:39:37.900 This is a philosophical itinerary, if you want. 00:39:37.900 --> 00:39:45.300 Second, marginal notes were not conceived as private annotations. 00:39:45.300 --> 00:39:51.060 They presuppose a readership that corresponds to the circle of Cusano's collaborators 00:39:51.060 --> 00:39:55.300 and to the users of his library. 00:39:55.300 --> 00:40:01.180 Cusano's was not the sole glosator of his manuscripts, rather the books bear witness 00:40:01.180 --> 00:40:08.780 to a community of readers and to ongoing scholarly exchange. 00:40:08.780 --> 00:40:16.620 We have here the example of a page from Plato's Parmenides, which we can find a marginal annotation 00:40:16.620 --> 00:40:25.660 by Nicholas of Cusa and Cardinal Bessarion, and also by the translator of the Latin version 00:40:25.660 --> 00:40:32.180 of Plato's Parmenides, George of Trebizond. 00:40:32.180 --> 00:40:46.740 On the same page of a manuscript we find different notes developing an exchange, a dialogue. 00:40:46.740 --> 00:40:54.060 But manuscripts circulated also, were borrowed and lent, and Cusano's marginal notes were 00:40:54.060 --> 00:40:59.940 even copied and migrated into other collections. 00:40:59.940 --> 00:41:06.300 Cusano's marginalia are sometimes copies of another reader's notes. 00:41:06.300 --> 00:41:15.060 Here an example from Eusebius' Preparatio of Angelica, Cusano's marginalia were copied 00:41:15.060 --> 00:41:20.140 and Cusano's was also a copyist of marginalia. 00:41:20.140 --> 00:41:30.380 Third point, Cusano's marginalia must be distinguished sharply from the scholastic 00:41:30.380 --> 00:41:35.300 glosses characteristic of university manuscripts. 00:41:35.300 --> 00:41:41.220 They are not commentaries in the strict sense, nor do they participate in the scholastic 00:41:41.220 --> 00:41:46.020 practice of textual explanation and authority management. 00:41:46.580 --> 00:41:52.940 Cusano's mode of annotation instead reflects a self-conscious departure from university 00:41:52.940 --> 00:41:54.780 forms of knowledge. 00:41:54.780 --> 00:42:01.460 His marginal notes follow lines of inquiry determined not by the text's argumentative 00:42:01.460 --> 00:42:09.100 structure but by the reader's own philosophical research, thus recording a dialogical intersection 00:42:09.100 --> 00:42:15.660 between the mind in the book and the mind of the reader. 00:42:15.660 --> 00:42:22.260 Even together, considering marginalia as a work of the reader suggests an important 00:42:22.260 --> 00:42:24.140 historiographical consequence. 00:42:24.140 --> 00:42:31.900 If we focus exclusively on Cusano's authoritative writings and isolate them from the annotated 00:42:31.900 --> 00:42:37.860 library in which they took shape, from the ecology of the library, we miss a crucial 00:42:37.860 --> 00:42:40.660 dimension of his philosophical activity. 00:42:40.660 --> 00:42:46.260 Of course, I'm not saying that we have to concentrate only on marginalia, downplaying 00:42:46.260 --> 00:42:54.420 the importance of the writings, but I think that we can fully interpret his philosophy 00:42:54.420 --> 00:43:02.540 only if we include marginalia in our consideration. 00:43:02.540 --> 00:43:07.540 I come to my conclusion. 00:43:07.540 --> 00:43:13.740 In this lecture, I have deliberately left the comfort zone of my narrow research project 00:43:13.740 --> 00:43:20.780 in order to discuss a broader historiographical agenda that I hope has become visible. 00:43:20.780 --> 00:43:34.380 My last words concerns an inherent challenge in any attempt to conceptualize reading as 00:43:34.380 --> 00:43:38.420 a philosophical agency. 00:43:38.420 --> 00:43:44.420 For a history of philosophy attentive to reading faces a kind of irritation. 00:43:44.420 --> 00:43:53.220 This irritation, which is productive in my opinion, arises from two facts that seem to 00:43:53.220 --> 00:43:56.500 contradict one another. 00:43:56.500 --> 00:44:04.060 First, the act of reading itself is not contained in any text. 00:44:04.060 --> 00:44:11.580 As Plato already remarked in the Phaedrus, no written word can control how it is received 00:44:11.580 --> 00:44:13.820 or used. 00:44:13.820 --> 00:44:21.060 A history of philosophy centered on reading must therefore take up a position somewhat 00:44:21.060 --> 00:44:25.220 eccentric or of center to the text. 00:44:25.220 --> 00:44:32.380 It directs attention to the institutional and social contexts that structure and regulate 00:44:32.380 --> 00:44:39.660 reading and to the material media through which texts are transmitted and made available. 00:44:39.660 --> 00:44:50.780 For readers, never encounter abstract, dematerialized texts, but concrete, written artifacts, books 00:44:50.780 --> 00:44:57.260 that both shape how texts were used and preserve traces of their reading. 00:44:57.580 --> 00:45:07.180 Second, however, every philosophical text is also a reworking and the result of earlier reading, 00:45:07.180 --> 00:45:16.940 either directly in glosses or excerpts or indirectly in commentaries, sume or questiones. 00:45:16.940 --> 00:45:25.100 These texts explicitly reflect on reading or they reconfigure what has been read, 00:45:25.100 --> 00:45:31.500 formulating interpretive criteria and generating new levels of meaning. 00:45:31.500 --> 00:45:40.300 Between these two poles, the inaccessibility of reading itself on the one hand and the 00:45:40.300 --> 00:45:48.380 availability of the text as witness to reading, there opens up the paradox of a research perspective 00:45:48.380 --> 00:45:56.220 that in my view can reveal some of the central features of what we call properly or improperly 00:45:56.220 --> 00:45:58.300 medieval philosophy. 00:45:58.300 --> 00:46:00.140 Thank you very much for your attention. 00:46:18.380 --> 00:46:20.380 Thank you.