The Medieval Culture of Disputation by Alex Novikoff (review)

It is likely that the practice of fashioning arguments closely followed the invention of language, but there is no more maligned tradition in the history of debate and dialogue than the scholastic method of disputation. Scholars since the Renaissance depicted scholastic argumentation as fruitless exercises that valued the sophistic juxtaposition of authorities over effective reasoning. Alex Novikoff argues that this stereotype persists in the modern imagination because historians do not study the long development of the medieval tradition of argumentation. Instead, historians predominantly discuss medieval methods of debate in the context of the schools of the High Middle Ages. Thus, they inadvertently relegate its milieu to the ivory tower rather than examine the interplay between scholastic thought and medieval culture. Novikoff redeems this tradition of argumentation by providing the first thoroughgoing study of medieval disputation that places its development and influence in a wider cultural context.

Novikoff argues that scholastic methods of argumentation escaped the confines of the university and appeared in a variety of public forums from the eleventh to the thirteenth century. To demonstrate the increasingly public nature of disputation in the Middle Ages, he uses a wide range of sources to demonstrate several transitions in the texts and activities of university scholars as well as a rise in discursive elements found in vernacular texts, popular entertainment, and iconography. Dialogues between fictive or real disputants become popular tropes in the works of dialectic, speculative theology, and natural philosophy produced by pioneering monastic and university teachers of the eleventh and twelfth century. These dialogues on the page or in the classroom give way to more public venues as quaestio disputata and quodlibeta become standard practices in the curriculum. However, Novikoff traces a simultaneous increase in the appearance of dialogues and debates in vernacular texts, music, poetry, drama, preaching, and religious polemic. While Novikoff is interested in identifying a rise in discursive elements in many expressions of medieval culture, he traces the public nature of arguments against Judaism as polemics progressively leave the pages of manuscripts and enter into the civic arena. By the end of the thirteenth century, disputation had grown from a facet of scholastic education to become one of the primary means by which Europeans expressed themselves in the arts, literature, and public life.

The majority of Novikoff’s research focuses on the high Middle Ages, but he expands his narrative by identifying ancient and late antique precursors to medieval disputation. He establishes that Greek dialogues had a performative quality and that the classical tradition of rhetoric was understood to be a public art. Late antique and early medieval Christian authors often defended their faith in the form of a dialogue or a public disputation, but they also promoted an internal dialogue that elevated the discourse to a spiritual plane and limited the number of participants to the author and God. The influence of Augustine stands out in both genres given his many public disputes with Christians, heretics, and pagans, as well as his meditative Confessions. This private, inner dialogue appealed to monastic communities and became a staple of their literary output. The practice of public disputation diminished in the early Middle Ages, but the use of dialogue survived as a pedagogical method and in Adversus Judeos polemics.

Novikoff dutifully addresses the return and institutionalization of disputation in the universities of the High Middle Ages, but his treatment provides salient arguments that expand our understanding of this facet of the scholastic tradition. First, disputations steadily become more combative as well as public, and scholars gradually become more comfortable with the confrontational art of dialectic. This point contextualizes the early backlash against the use of disputation in theological study since the methods and tone of disputatio little resembled the earlier contemplative practice of lectio that appeared in monastic works. Novikoff illustrates how scholars were keenly aware of the effective, yet dangerous nature of debate since they recognized that disputations could wring answers from thorny and important questions, but they also understood that public discussions often devolved into altercations...