Of course those manuscripts cannot capture all the personal and oral interactions between teacher and students in the classroom or outside it, but they give us valuable access to the student experience that complements other sources such as official regulations and curricula and printed theses or treatises. Footnote 3 For the historian student manuscripts offer unique insight into not only the content of courses that were never published, but also the methods of teaching and learning that can be inferred from the surviving manuscripts. Student scripts have been the basis for many published works, from the teachings of Aristotle to seventeenth-century Paris professors, to modern works by Kant, Hegel or Ferdinand de Saussure, although that millennial practice may become superseded by the use of audio- and video recordings of lectures. Footnote 2 We most often become aware of these scripts when they have been published, either at the time by the professor or his students (often just after the latter’s death), or in modern editions. Transcripts of courses from early modern European universities survive in considerable numbers but are hard to study systematically since they are often scattered across many libraries as a result of the movement of students and teachers, and the impact of the modern market in rare materials. Footnote 1 Manuscripts played an especially important role in academic contexts, since handwriting was (and is still) valued as an aid to retention and gave flexibility to both teachers and students in creating a record of a course. Recent attention to the uses of manuscripts in the handpress era has shown that handwriting was preferred over print as a mode of dissemination in a variety of circumstances, notably to produce a small number of copies at lesser expense or to attempt to limit or control circulation. theses printed for disputations or as teaching aids), and periodicals. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, manuscript academic lecture scripts were an important part of a learned written culture that included printed books, pamphlets and broadsides (e.g. He studied philosophy with Chouet in 1678–80 and his coursebook, which unfortunately does not include the section on physics, is exceptionally beautifully kept and illustrated. The most famous of Chouet’s students whose coursebooks survive is Nicolas Fatio de Duillier (1664–1753), who was later a friend of Newton’s.
The students also exercised individual choice in the format, layout, and trappings of their manuscript coursebook, which could include an alphabetical index or decorative elements. Teaching by dictating a coursebook to students allowed the professor to adjust his course at every iteration.
We compare eight surviving student manuscripts, noting much continuity but also some changes in organization, presentation, and content (in particular a greater attention to the topics of place and extension important to Cartesianism). This chapter analyzes how the physics courses of Jean-Robert Chouet (1642–1731) changed across the twenty years of his career as a professor of philosophy, first at the Academy of Saumur (starting in 1664) then at the Academy of Geneva (1669–86).
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