The Medieval Culture of Disputation: Pedagogy, Practice, and Performance by Alex J. Novikoff (review)

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 intellectual 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 linguistic terms, the text is limited to Latin Christendom (Italy and France), particularly Parisian monastic and intellectual spaces. And though methodologically constrained 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 performance art.

Novikoff begins with a discussion of Lafranc and Anselm of Canterbury, and their circle of intellectuals, who established “a more dynamic and persuasive approach 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 its critical gaze on pedagogical innovations, such as the development of literary dialogue in the monastic milieu as the origin of scholastic dialectic methods. Differing with scholars such as Richard Southern concerning the influence of this particular method of philosophical investigation, using the Proslogion as a case study, Novikoff argues that the pro and contra of these “protoscholastic schools” become the twelfth-century questiones disputate and thirteenth-century summae, and suggests that the use of reason (ratio) and debate (disputatio) as a dialectical procedure with Scripture offers a sneak peek at the classroom setting of eleventh-century monastic schools, where polemical dialogue took center stage.

Next, Novikoff discusses the new schools of Italy and northern France where disputation as dialogical pedagogy moved out of the monasteries and into the tutorials of master dialecticians and cathedral schools, essentially systemizing disputation. His case studies are the personnalités or select masters (Peter Abelard, Aelred of Rievailx, Hugh of St. Victor and Rupert of Deutz, among others) who engaged in dialectic and rhetorical polemic as demonstrations of preeminence. Importantly, though apologetics remained the primary end goal, Novikoff demonstrates that arguments not conclusions were championed as the most effective promoters of knowledge. That is, both method and content had a role in promoting orthodoxy. Moreover, these methods demonstrate a transition from the silent contemplative spaces of the early Middle Ages to a broader culture of disputation, “explicitly incorporated into the everyday scholastic practices of the medieval curriculum” (101).

Novikoff then argues that the “recovery” of Aristotle’s Topics and Sophistical Refutations catalyzed the scholastic practice of disputation. Many twelfth-century commentators were fascinated by the concept of argumentation as strategy and stressed the harmony of instructing (officium docendi) and argumentative reasoning (officium disserendi). For others, like the satirists (e.g., the Geta of Vital of Blois or the Hora nona sabbati), the applications of this new disputative logic were unsettling and dangerous. A close reading of the Middle English poem The Owl and the Nightingale demonstrates not only an engagement with Aristotelian logic, but a transition of the practice of disputation from intellectual to popular spaces. Furthermore, not only was disputation institutionalized, it was becoming art. This evolution is seen foremost in Novikoff’s study of Thomas Aquinas, in particular the Jewish-Christian debates (Adversus Iudaeos). His study of the performativity of this debate culture is perhaps the greatest contribution of this volume, demonstrating that from the beginning disputation was a performative act. And like the concept (process) of Aristotelian aporiae, the performance of disputation...