Old Manuscripts are sexy ^_^
O! she doth teach the scriva to burn bright.
Which work of Shakespeare was the original quote from?
Today, I spend most of the day at a conference dedicated to "Humanism and the University of Leipzig". The quality of the speakers and the interesting perspectives were far above the average conference. I heard much more boring lectures about urban history.
The most interesting topics were:
1. "The Black Art - the first printers in Leipzig and their relation to the university". According to the speaker, Leipzig was the only late medieval university town in which most of the special study editions and much material for the lectures was printed. The statutes of the university demanded that the students owned certain book necessary for the curriculum. Apart from this, the professors had printed announcements of their lectures that included publicity for the booksellers, i. e. the printers.
2. "Lectures on Cicero around 1515": It is an ongoing project of the University of Tübingen. It's goal is the reconstruction of a couple of lectures on lesser known speeches of Cicero which had been held in Leipzig between 1514 and 1416. Main sources are the study editions of those speeches with glosses and interline comments of the students. Some of them are even known, and in a few cases, we obviously have original lecture notices. They look like mine would have looked if I had to write after the dictate of a professor. ^_- The main reason of those lectures was the amelioration of Latin and an introduction into classical Latin and argumentation.