The Repetitio

Thus Xhepunctatio Hbrorum took away the students’ right to speak during the lectura. Now that the professor risked having to pay a fine if he failed to complete the punctum within the allotted number of days, he was no longer willing to give over part of his precious time to general discussion.

Within the lesson the professor could expound completely only some of the legislative texts included in the puncta. What is more, there were other texts that contained problems that needed to be in­vestigated in greater depth, articulated in specific ways, or, when it proved necessary or useful, discussed by being subjected to objections and questions (cum oppositis et quesitis). For this reason, some texts were the object of a particular didactic activity known as the repetitio, called necessaria because every professor was obliged to hold at least one such session per year. In practical terms it was certainly a freer exercise, because ample time was made available to discuss each topic.

The repetitio took place only one day a week (in Bologna, for exam­ple, on Mondays) in the afternoon and during a time-span shorter than the academic year, from St. Luke’s Day (18 October), when teaching activities began, to Christmas, and again from Easter to the Kalends of August.

The repetitio seems to have been held both for the students of one school and for students from an entire sector of jurisprudence—all the civilians, for example, or all the canonists—who were invited to attend open sessions outside their school.

In Bologna, in fact, an order of priority was respected that makes sense only if the repetitio is understood as a didactic activity that brought together students from various schools. Professors of the schools that were recognized by the student universitates were called on to hold repetitiones in order of age, from the youngest to the oldest, and each teacher was obliged to give only one repetitu). This system meant that only rarely was a repetitio necessaria offered by the same professor who had given a formal lesson on the legislative text to which the repetitio referred.

Accompanying the repetitiones necessariae that the university stat­utes obliged the professor to offer, there were repetitiones voluntariae that every master was free to organize in connection with the needs of his own course of lessons.

There were also other sessions (not to be Confusedwith the official repetitiones, either necessariae or voluntariae) carried on by private re­petitores not recognized by the universitates scholarium. The profes­sional qualifications of these repetitores varied greatly and were at times dubious or nonexistent. Such persons served as assistants, offer­ing supplementary didactic support to students in difficulty because of their scanty cultural background, their limited intellectual capacit­ies, or their wavering motivation.

The structure of the official repetitio differed little from the formal lesson, the lectura. Both involved explication of a legislative text of the Corpus iuris civilis or the Corpus iuris canonici. The two forms of instruction may have differed in thoroughness and in their proce­dures, but this is difficult to ascertain from the way the original oral repetitio is presented in the remaining documentation. In fact, we have evidence of instances in which the professor himself Succincdy noted down the essence of his own oral discourse (in which case we have a repetitio redacta) or one of his pupils did so (repetitio reportata); in other instances the oral presentation was thoroughly reworked and elaborated when it was transferred to parchment and to definitive written form; in still others an original, more detailed redaction was summarized and abridged to give the nub of the argument for the purposes of a Iectura.^[128]

8.