This last spring semester, while studying in France, I got to take a course on 16th century French literature. While I cannot say that I understood more than 75% of the class, what I did gain was an interesting perspective on the French Renaissance and the evolution of pedagogy from the Middle Ages through the first thinkers of the new french era.
The Renaissance, as the professor kept explaining, was not a true 'rebirth' as the philosophers of the time period would have us, the future generations, believe. It was a time of change, but the ideas during the time period were a simple evolution; a slow progression that was a continuation of many of the ideas of the previous era. While the invention of the printing press was monuments and did indeed allow the thinkers of the time period to access the great texts of ancient Greece and Rome from within the comforts of their own nation, it took a long time for that invention to catch on and for the copies of such books to circulate up into France (as my professor in the history of media explained). Therefore, the invention of the printing press allowed the individual philosopher the chance to read more of the ancient texts without the need to travel to Egypt, or Italy, or Constantinople.
This time period was also fraught with the invention of encyclopedias and new dictionaries. Vernacular languages were gaining popularity and new dictionaries that taught how to translate from the ancient texts to the vernacular languages. Encyclopedias, written in vernacular tongues were written in order to teach about the past and present.
With this new information becoming more readily available by the decade, pedagogy became an increasingly important topic. How were the young to be educated in this new material? The previous method, deemed copia by some philosopher I cannot recall, was the most popular method. Students were expected to learn through memorization and imitation. The idea was that students would copy out the styles of the ancients and eventually learn, not a new style, but a combination of the old styles and ideas. However, during the latter part of the 16th century, thinkers such as Montaigne were encouraging original thought and analysis rather than memorization and the melange of random styles.
All of this information came to mind in Foucault's chapter on 'The Prose of the World'. He talks about 4 different kinds of similitudes, all of which humans use to make things alike so that they can be understandable. Language, the basis for understanding and knowledge, which at one time had much more significance than it does now, has been diluted, according to Foucault. The original words used to describe things were much closer to the objects they described. So I find it interesting that Foucault mentions the work of the late 16th and early 17th century thinkers in his analysis of language and its place in the way humans understand their world.
I don't pretend to understand anything of what Foucault was saying, half the time his words went in one eye and straight out the back of my head. But I find that his connection between mimesis, language and the 16th century to be very interesting. The time period was characterized by its attempts to understand the world through different epistemes. By studying and copying the texts of the ancients, these people tried to understand their world through the eyes of those who had never seen it. In order to understand these texts, publishers would write dictionaries that would take a more 'real' language and translate it into a vernacular tongue that was farther from what Foucault would describe as true language. But all this was done by making things that were non comprehensible like things that were comprehensible so that the former could be understood. This type of learning doesn't seem to have much room for originality or creativity, but perhaps that is what Foucault was getting at, there is nothing new left in this universe.
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