Language and Literature Teaching in the Sixteenth Century: Vergil and Homer at the Leuven Collegium Trilingue

During the Renaissance, humanist thought provoked great changes in school curricula across Europe. Latin and Greek language and literature were taught in a new way, classical writers were read in a different fashion. Whereas these new humanist pedagogical practices have been studied in some detail on a general level, especially with regard to Italy, they remain almost unstudied for the Southern Low Countries. For this reason I envisage to study how both Latin and Greek language and literature were taught at the Leuven Collegium Trilingue or Three Languages College, a rare Renaissance specimen of a multilingual academic institute. The proposed project will be centered around two recently discovered corpora of text editions with student annotations: one focusing on Vergil, the other on Homer. In addition to studying the teaching praxis at the Collegium Trilingue through these notes, the project will also contribute to the study of the literary reception of Vergil and Homer, as well as university history. The entire Leuven context will be connected to and confronted with the teaching practice at the Collège de France in Paris.