Venedig und die Wissenschaftssprachen. (30. Symposium der Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftsgeschichte im Deutschen Studienzentrum in Venedig, 20.-23. Mai 1993)

Languages of science, the idioms of learning and teaching, depend on intellectual trends and cultural developments. Their characteristic adaptation and transformation was particularly evident in the Venetian history of mind which influenced — comparable to the humanist circles of Florence and Rome — wide parts of Europe. In the 12th century James of Venice translated Aristotle directly from the Greek originals, thus forming a new scholastic idiom, whereas — in the 14th century — Petrarch attacked the lingua franca of the scholastic researchers, stressing the importance of poetic and rhetoric elements. Scholastic and humanistic languages were regarded as irreconcilable. In the 15th century an approach was enabled by Bessarion and Ermolao Barbaro who accepted Aristotle and natural sciences as humanistic topics. Around 1500 the famous Venetian printing offices spread the specific idioms of science and researching in the European countries.     

Geistliche bildung und laienbildung. Zur überlieferung der schulschrift Compendium historiae in genealogia Christi (Compendium veteris testamenti) des Petrus von Poitiers (1205) in England

Historians and philologists alike seem to be all too often preoccupied with the study of texts that they, for one reason or another, regard as ‘important’. It is obvious, though, that this approach may miss the medieval reality. There are texts that have been given very little attention in modern times even though they once enjoyed a far greater resonance than others. A case to make this point is the Compendium historiae in genealogia Christi by Peter of Poitiers, a radically shortened version of biblical history, in pedigrees and diagrams, with short explanatory notes. This little work seems to have been rather popular as an introduction to the Bible, for clerks and laymen alike, and was also continued as a chronicle from the times of the apostles onwards. This paper argues that the Compendium became lay reading even in its Latin original form during the course of the thirteenth century, and that this may have been partly the effect of the moves by the official Church to ban the growing new class of literate laymen from reading the Holy Scripture on their own.