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Alex J. Novikoff, The Medieval Culture of Disputation: Pedagogy, Practice, and Performance Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013,327 pp.
The Medieval Culture of Disputation investigates the evolution of the scholastic method in the intellectual and cultural milieu of the medieval West (Europe) from the late eleventh century to the dawn of the fourteenth century, from a pedagogical ideal of monastic thought to one of the defining characteristics of medieval intel- lectual life. Specifically, the book attempts to trace the history of scholasticism from its origins as a dialogue genre in Greek, Roman and early Christian philosophical thought to its institutionalization as a standard of secular and religious apologetic debate in and out of the universities of Paris. In geographic, confessional and lin- guistic terms, the text is limited to Latin Christendom (Italy and France), particu- larly Parisian monastic and intellectual spaces. And though methodologically con- strained in its comparative scope, its reach is promising, offering fertile soil for the application of current scholarship on performance and performativity. Novikoff deftly problematizes how a developing "scholasticism" was negotiated in and out of private and public spaces, was practiced alternatively and perhaps simultaneously as written and oral polemical dialogic forms, and ultimately functioned as perfor- mance art.
Novikoff begins with a discussion of Lafranc and Anselm of Canterbury, and their circle of intellectuals, who established "a more dynamic and persuasive ap- proach to articulating the tenets of faith," particularly one that emphasized the power of reason and championed dialogue as "the literary genre most suited to their philosophical and theological purposes" (225-26). This section focuses...