Gesturing in the Early Universities

Abstract

Research into the oral and literary traditions of scholastic education usually emphasizes the significance of the word in late medieval pedagogy. This paper suggests that coded hand signals provided early university scholars with an important non-verbal means of communication too. Using illustrations of classroom scenes from early university manuscripts, this paper analyzes the artistic conventions for representing gestures that these images embody. By building up a typology of these gesticulations, it demonstrates that the producers of these images and their audience shared a perception of scholastic education that embraced a sophisticated understanding of the activities associated with university education.