Abstract

Thanks to university and faculty statutes and regulations, we are well informed about the way in medieval and early modern universities teaching was organized. College lecture notes, syllabi and other course materials provide a good insight into the structure and content of the courses taught. In this contribution we have elaborated on the teaching tools being in use at the University of Leuven during the ancien régime and on the changes that occurred in the course of time. We made use of some written testimonies of the learning process such as professorial course material, lecture notes, disputations, theses etc. that are kept in great numbers in the university archives and libraries of both the Louvain Universities and elsewhere. One of the striking facts is that students continued to write themselves lecture notes even after the introduction of the printing press. The use of illustrations, for its part, evolved in the course of time from merely illustrative to practical.