by Vigdis Andrea Evang

In Europe, scholasticism was the dominant mode of teaching for at least five centuries. Yet all we tend to hear about it is how useless it was. It has come down to us as a joke and a warning: do not let your learned knowledge ossify into self-referential learned doggerel.

I first encountered this depiction of scholasticism in François Rabelais’ sixteenth-century novel Gargantua,where the learned theologian Janotus de Bragmardo is sent to bargain with the eponymous protagonist for the return of the bells of Notre-Dame, which our hero had purloined in a previous chapter. Bragmardo’s speech reaches a climax with this gem of a sentence:

Hem, hem, hem, haikhash! For I prove unto you, that you should give me them. Ego sic argumentor. Omnis bella bellabilis in bellerio bellando, bellans, bellativo, bellare facit, bellabiliter bellantes. Parisius habet bellas. Ergo gluc, Ha, ha, ha.

Omnis bella bellabilis in bellerio bellando—there is a nursery-rhyme catchiness to it, which has made it stick in my memory for a decade and a half. You do not need to speak Latin to understand that this is not how Latin is supposed to be spoken. What does it mean? Nothing, really. The learned man plays around with the language, creating a sentence that almost makes sense—every bell-able bell belling in the belfry—expressing little except that he is familiar with Latin declensions. In his book, Rabelais lets this oration be met with laughter.

A very different emotion characterizes current-day philosopher Alexander Douglas’ description of peer-reviewed journal articles:

During my doctorate, exposure to peer-reviewed journal articles nearly put me off the whole idea of philosophy. Having been philosophically raised on the exciting narrative that began with Descartes shining a ray of clear light through the accumulated fog of Scholastic decadence, I was disheartened to discover a whole industry churning out reams of (largely unread) philosophical literature so dull and lifeless it would shame the most pedantic monk of the darkest age.

Douglas’ tone is tongue-in-cheek, but the image he sketches—the brilliant light of reason shearing through centuries’ worth of scholastic dust—is a recognizable one. Many of us were raised on that same narrative. And as we tend to spend more time reading current-day peer-reviewed articles (or being peer-reviewers ourselves) than we do reading medieval scholasticism, there are few opportunities to balance out that narrative with, say, the innovative works of twelve-century scholastics, who took on the daunting task of making their Greco-Roman textual inheritance agree with Christian theology.

Unlike early scholastic works, peer review rarely inspires joy, but it has still been accepted as the way of doing business across virtually all academic subjects. Not everyone supports this consensus, however. The psychologist Adam Mastroianni received a great deal of attention, positive and negative, after he first uploaded his research findings to the internet, written in a straightforward and accessible style, and later proposed to do away with peer review altogether. There are also critiques coming from within the system, such as Remco Heesen and Liam Kofi Bright’s article “Is Peer Review a Good Idea?” in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.

In short, the post-war peer-review system is accused of being a bother that does not actually function as a means of quality control. If this is the case (and this essay is not going to be the one to settle that question), the peer-review system may, in fact, be worse off than the much-derided scholasticism. In the words of Blaise Dufal:

Medieval scholasticism was the major apparatus of the process of veridiction—determining the truth—as a social and cultural activity, an institution which organized the production, circulation and consumption of the truth.

We can understand academic publishing today as a process of veridiction as well; as a social and cultural activity which produces and circulates—what, exactly? And for what purpose?

Although we have centuries’ worth of hindsight to contend with here, it seems that scholasticism knew what it was about. The aim was to guide humanity towards God by way of true knowledge. The means was acquiring and transmitting knowledge of authoritative texts by way of definition, division, and reasoning (190-191). These texts were read out in a classroom setting, split up into subsections, and carefully analyzed and explained, piece by piece.

One great advantage of this way of doing scholarly work was that it reproduced both the authoritative text in question and a key to understanding it. This was not a given. The written word was considerably more difficult to come by in, say, the thirteenth century than today. Writing on the teaching of medicine in medieval Paris, Cornelius O’Boyle describes how most medical students had to copy out their own version of the Ars medicine, the curriculum of the day. Finding a volume to copy from was a challenge in itself, followed by months of careful and probably quite tedious scribal work (158-160; 180-182).

The students, then, who needed both the text and a way to understand it, would travel to a university where they could acquire both and would leave, book in hand and with three layers of meaning—littera, sensus, sententia—in mind. If we consider scholasticism as a system of knowledge production and circulation, one can hardly deny that it managed to do what it set out to do.

On the other hand, our current day system of academic publishing is a strange creature. Previously, it produced physical objects, printed on paper and distributed them to universities, libraries, and individual readers. Today, while it still prints ink on paper, its primary purpose seems to be leasing out digital objects to universities and libraries by way of subscription services beyond the financial means of most individual readers.

What makes this arrangement odd is that it is no longer necessary. Academics can create digital versions of their work themselves—and some do. As Mastroianni puts it: “Well, last month I published a paper, by which I mean I uploaded a PDF to the internet.” During the Covid pandemic, we saw a great surge of preprints being uploaded to databases and made publicly and freely available. The information technology underpinning academic work has changed. What does that mean for our apparatus of veridiction?

While the rise of the Internet and digital media has marked a great technological shift, a change in information technology does not necessarily mean that radical social or organizational change must follow. For instance, scholastic medicine (to the extent it makes sense to use that term) survived the introduction of the printing press. At the same time, some other things changed. Students were hungry for textbooks they did not have to copy out by hand, and European printers of the fifteenth century came to realize the benefits of a customer base that always needed more copies of the same works. Most of the time, the market situation these printers faced was much more unpredictable. In the manuscript world, text was usually created on demand only, whilst, in the world of print, printers needed to estimate how many copies of a given volume would sell and then print the run, hoping to recoup their expenses. It has now become possible to produce too much text.

In the age of Johannes Gutenberg, the penalty for overproduction fell on the printer who needed to turn a profit. For him, unsold books were a potential catastrophe. Printing was a tricky business that saw many go bankrupt—including Gutenberg himself. Students, meanwhile, were quite happy to be able to buy their textbooks instead of having to copy them by hand, while professors could use the new printing technology to publish their work. In parallel with today’s academic publishing practices, though, authors were rarely paid for their work and, in some cases, were the ones who paid in order to see their names in print.

Similarly, academics today mostly write their articles for free, send them to journals, which are often staffed by volunteers, and then have those articles sent out to peer-reviewers who also work for free. Large commercial publishers, on the other hand, do still quite like to earn a profit. Subscriptions to academic journals tend not to come for free. And today, if the penalty of overproduction falls on someone, it is rarely the publisher.

The existence of the Internet, which allows us to make our work public ourselves, does not spell the end of traditional academic publishing in and of itself, but it does open up a possibility. We should probably ask ourselves what the aims of our collective work are—the sheer pursuit of truth? Public utility? —and whether we are using the means at our disposal in the best way to achieve those aims. I have the impression that our apparatus of veridiction, in the form of academic publishing, has run away with us.

Scholasticism was far from perfect. Go looking, and you will find as much bellabilis in bellerio bellando as groundbreaking work. Still, looking back at this past practice, we can discern a clarity of purpose that we will need today if we are to put the communication technology at our disposal to the best possible use. What is it we intend for academia to accomplish? What role ought it play in society? How does our current set of practices help us in reaching our aims?

At least in terms of that clarity of purpose, we may indeed want to go back to scholasticism.

Vigdis Andrea Evang is a PhD researcher in the Department of History at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.

Edited by Jonas Bakkeli Eide

Featured image: Henry of Germany delivering a lecture to university students in Bologna by Laurentius de Voltolina, via Wikimedia Commons.