The Punctatw Iibrorum and the Three Phases of Instruction
Toward the middle of the thirteenth century we can begin to see signs of a phenomenon that marked university teaching for a very long time. The student corporations, the universitates, put pressure on the professors to present their lessons in a more orderly fashion and to distribute them better throughout the academic year.
We do not know with certainty whether or not such demands were met, but a number of indications suggest that, for some decades at least, the university statutes were respected and reflected in practice.Instruction was divided into three distinct activities. Beginning in some schools in the mid-twelfth century, the Iectura was accompanied by two other exercises, solemn disputation on particular quaestiones ex facto emergentes and special sessions in which the topics of the lesÂson were treated in more detail than was possible in the official lesson. Thus there came to be three distinct forms of instruction: the tradiÂtional lectura, now (as we shall see) revitalized, the quaestio publice disÂputata, and the repetitio.
Students had begun to show signs of concern and dissatisfaction with the lectura. Some scrupulous professors (and some who made a show of their rectitude) declared their intention to read the whole of Justinian’s compilation: in the mid-thirteenth century Odofredus tells us as much of himself, comparing his deportment to that of colÂleagues past and present, with the clear intent of discrediting their fame or their success.[125] Other professors followed the easier path, however, and read only random selections from the Code or the DiÂgestum vetus, beginning over every year and yielding to the temptaÂtion to treat the easier passages at length and ignore the obscure or difficult ones. Bartolus of Saxoferrato remarked that such professors passed over the hard passages sicco pede—without getting their feet wet.[126]
The students’ solution to their ongoing dissatisfaction was to subÂject their professors to discipline and to write precise professorial obÂligations into the statutes of the student universities (in Bologna in 1252 and the years following). This discipline was known as thepunc- tatio Iibrorum.[127]
Through their universitates, the students declared that the passages to be read and explicated in the lesson must be determined in advance by an analytic selection process entrusted to a student commission working with professorial assistance.
This commission drew up lists of the texts selected and divided them into a number of groups, or puncta. For each punctum it set a period of time, called a terminus, that it considered sufficient, and it obliged the professor to read the text or texts in 1hepunctum within that time limit. The terminus varied seasonally from a maximum of fifteen days in the winter to a miniÂmum of twelve days in the summer, following the ecclesiastical comÂputation of time that divided each of the two parts of the day, light and dark, into a fixed number of hours, thus shortening the “hour” in the winter and lengthening it in the summer, as opposed to the Roman system of telling time, which divided the day—daylight and nighttime hours alike—into twenty-four equal hourly units.The procedure specified in Xhepunctatio Hbrorum and the resulting lists subjected the professors to fairly rigid constraints. The professor who failed to read the texts of a given punctum within the allotted time had to pay a sizable fine (according to complex mechanisms inÂvolving denunciation of the violation and guarantees for the payment of the fine). Now that he was accountable for his time, the professor forbade the students from speaking during the lectura, since when prolonged discussion got out of hand it exposed him to the risk of failing to fulfill his obligations and having to pay the fine.
Thus the Iectura became wholly magistralis, and the quaestiones that the professor felt obliged to treat during the lesson, carefully gauging the time he had available for elucidation and elaboration, were called quaestiones magistrales.
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