Or is note-taking a relatively new occurrence in the history of academia?
For written notes in medieval western Europe, the name of the game was wax tablets.
Borrowing from an earlier answer of mine:
Think of, sort of, a picture frame with a layer of wax spread across it, and some kind of stylus if possible. These were used for temporary communication and rough drafts and such, especially in the era of rather expensive parchment.
Probably the most "famous" (...lol) use of wax tablets is recorded in Eadmer's Life of Anselm of Canterbury, an 11th century bishop and one of the most important theologians of the Middle Ages, and it describes how Anselm was almost only 75% of his role as one of the most important theologians of the Middle Ages.
One night in the middle of the night, Anselm had a sudden flash of (divine, of course) inspiration for how to write the book he had been struggling for quite some time to write. He grabbed for wax tablets to scribble it down immediately, then handed it off to another monk.
Who promptly lost them.
Anselm tried again. This time he trusted nobody with them, and it seems, stacked them up next to him this other night.
And woke up in the morning with the tablets strewn about the floor.
Eadmer doesn't give any further details about whether they were out of order, or partially erased, and so forth. One way or another, Anselm painstakingly rescued his second draft out of the pieces. And after composing this third draft (whether just putting pieces in the right order, or filling in missing bits as well), he had other monks do the dirty work immediately and get the thing onto parchment.
Which, I suppose, is a really excellent reminder to save early and often.
Now, that story comes from a late-night cram session rather than a classroom, and not technically a university. However, we do know that people sometimes took detailed handwritten notes in university lectures--to the extent of pretty much transcribing the lectures. Quite a few surviving texts from medieval universities exist today only because of note-takers.
The most famous (er..."famous"...) is probably 13th century VIP theologian Bonaventure's Collationes in Hexameron, or "Gathered Thoughts on the Six Days of Creation." This text began life as a series of lectures by Bonaventure at the University of Paris. It's an important text on one hand because Bonaventure was so important in medieval theology. But it's also very cool in that the groundbreaking and major work of scholarship on it was written in the 1950s by one Herr Professor Joseph Ratzinger--you might know him better as Pope Benedict.
So yes, people at medieval universities kept written records of lectures at least sometimes, and wax tablets were their scrap paper.
But this is where things get really interesting. Because most note-taking in medieval universities and monasteries wasn't written at all: it was memory. And medieval monasteries had cultivated some pretty specific and kind of awesome tools for using memory to, in essence, take notes.
From another earlier answer:
However, the astronomical price of books even for university masters as well as the ultimately oral purpose of education (preaching) and means of instruction (spoken disputations) placed a high premium on memory even for those who could read. For example, sitting in your cell to comment on Peter Lombard's Sententiae--a quite basic academic exercise--you had to bring to bear everything you could from Augustine, the Bible, Aristotle, your teacher. But you couldn't type "biblegateway 1 cor 13" or "bible talks abouts pistachios what verse" into Google. You couldn't go to the library and walk out with City of God and Confessions and Against the Manichees. You had to know them. This is very evident reading medieval texts--there are some interesting mis-quotations from monks and nuns who didn't quite remember the source, or remembered the words but missed where it came from.
As a result, medieval writers were deeply invested in getting their memories into top form in the areas they needed them to be. They turned first of all to classical authors on rhetoric and oration, the art of arguing well.
In Quintilian, for example, they read of the importance of place: picturing the words on the page in your mind as you read them, and then recalling that visual image as you spoke or thought them later. Ad Herennium, which they thought was Cicero, recommended associating points you wanted to remember with a striking image, and then mentally "placing" them in a mental construction of your house so you would know where to find them again.
And so we have Hugh of St. Victor in the 12th century, instructing his readers to "paint" Noah's Ark in their minds in a very specific manner. A golden cross lies at the ark's center with an X on its right arm and an S on the left arm. X (chi) is the first letter in Christ's name and also the Roman numeral for 10 as in the Commandments; S is the last letter in Christ's name and represents 100 as in the perfection of grace. This image, Hugh says, will fix in the reader's mind that Christ is the beginning and the end, the bridge between the old law and the new.
You know how easy it is to memorize song lyrics? Medieval preachers understood! Fifteenth century French preacher Michel Menot used the notes of the musical scale to preach the horrors of hell:
The damned, he proclaimed, sang these notes in eternity. Sing it back to me, he exhorted his listeners. Remember these notes.
How about lists? I can name the U.S. presidents easily--but only in order, because that's how I learned them, sung to the tune of "Yankee Doodle". I struggle to do it backwards; alphabetically is impossible. The late Middle Ages loved its lists. A 1475 handbook on how to confess your sins properly outlined its mission thus:
From the nine estranging sins
To the eight ways of holiness
From the seven deadly sins
To the seven sacraments
To the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit
From the six sins against the Holy Spirit
To the six works of mercy, corporal and spiritual
From the five inner sins
From the five outer signs
From the four stirring sins
To the four angelic virtues
To the three godly virtues:
Through these, confession will go well.
Our medieval theorists on memory bridged the literate plane of the educated elite and their surrounding world of people who might recognize the letters in their own name, maybe. This position made them not just need strong memories in the areas they needed strong memories; it made them incredibly conscious of that need. Their sacred mission, in the end, was not to write books of obscure theology: it was to save the souls of medieval Europe. For that, they had to get people to learn and remember the tenets of Christian belief. And for that, they needed to know how to get people to learn and remember them.
We have amazing memories today, but in a lot of ways they aren't focused, and we don't train them systematically. Medieval writers, with a classical heritage (that they'd memorized...) knew these techniques explicitly, and used them purposefully to remember what they'd read or heard in a lecture.
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