Alongside the official university curriculum of arts and higher faculties, early modern Europe hosted a substantial extracurricular instruction economy: paid teaching outside the formal curriculum, in private, in smaller groups, on topics ranging from geography and natural curiosities to physiognomy, Lullian memory art, Paracelsian theories, and study methods. Blair uses Jean-Cecile Frey (Paris, active 1607-1631) as her principal case to illustrate this layer, noting that it "was likely present at most universities although it leaves no trace in official statutes and has rarely been studied."
The Pattern
Extracurricular instruction had several consistent features across cases:
- Paid directly to the master. Fees were private, not part of institutional tuition.
- Small groups or one-on-one. "A single student or a small group," vs. the larger public lectures
- Topics fashionable or practically useful. Geography, local antiquities, historia litteraria, study methods, occult and esoteric subjects — material outside the standard arts curriculum but of interest to students with money and specific aspirations
- Taught by serving faculty. Masters who taught curricular philosophy by day also taught extracurricular material privately; Frey published curricular Aristotelian courses alongside non-curricular works on the wonders of Gaul, physiognomy, and Lullian memory arts
- Clientele concentrated in the professionally ambitious. Frey's extracurricular students were "most likely young nobles of the robe or of the sword headed for leadership positions"
Case Study: Frey in Paris
Blair's detailed discussion of Frey is the richest documented case. His output included:
- Standard curricular philosophy: two beautiful folio volumes 1618-19 on logic, ethics, physics, metaphysics — over 800 leaves, never printed
- Shorter introductions to philosophy and to the arts and sciences (printed in his lifetime)
- Regional natural history: a collection of the wonders of Gaul — rivers, mountains, remarkable animals, agricultural qualities, bridges, amphitheaters, stained-glass windows, "great printers, writers and university professors"
- Religious-historical speculation: posthumous hailing of the philosophy and religion of the druids of ancient Gaul as most wise and descended directly from Adamic origins
- Cosmographical curiosities: monstrous peoples, sinking islands
- Critique of critics of Aristotle: Cribrum philosophicum
- Occult and fashionable topics: physiognomy, Lullian art of memory, Paracelsian theories — many of which "many disapproved" of, hence their remaining unpublished
Frey's teaching was posthumously published by Jean Ballesdens and friends using student manuscripts. The 1645 Opera and 1646 Opuscula varia show what the extracurricular market actually consumed: practically useful (study methods), locally interesting (French antiquities), fashionable (Paracelsus), and suspect (physiognomy).
Case Study: Helmstedt, Late 17th Century
Paul Nelles's research (cited by Blair) on Helmstedt documents a closely parallel pattern fifty years after Frey:
- Professors taught in their homes for extra pay
- Topics were outside the curriculum but fashionable (natural curiosities, local antiquities)
- Or of special practical interest to students (study methods, early historia litteraria)
Two German and French cases 50 years apart, matching closely — suggesting the pattern was general across European universities, not a Parisian peculiarity.
Why It Matters for PKM
The extracurricular instruction economy is a PKM-relevant precedent for several current phenomena:
- Creator economy / paid courses outside institutions. Contemporary paid newsletters, online courses, Patreon-funded instruction, cohort-based courses — all operate in a "professor teaches privately for extra pay on topics outside the formal curriculum" pattern. Frey's wonders-of-Gaul lectures have a clear lineage to contemporary paid creator-economy products.
- Knowledge outside institutional gatekeeping. Much of what Frey taught privately was precisely what the curriculum excluded. Contemporary PKM often similarly captures and develops knowledge the institutional world does not legitimize — personal frameworks, idiosyncratic interests, fashionable-but-unaccredited topics.
- Student-manuscript textbook pipeline applied to unofficial content. Frey's extracurricular output reached us through the same student-transcription-to-print pipeline as his curricular output. The PKM equivalent: personal notes on side interests flow into the same vault and the same publication workflows as professional work.
- The visibility problem. Extracurricular instruction "leaves no trace in official statutes and has rarely been studied." Much of contemporary knowledge work — conversations in DMs, ephemeral community exchanges, content taught privately — faces the same historiographic invisibility.
What Got Preserved
Blair's point: the only reason we know anything about Frey's extracurricular teaching is that student manuscripts survived and that posthumous editors chose to publish them. The paths of survival:
- A student took notes (dictation or reportatio)
- The manuscript was preserved in a library
- After the master's death, a friend or enterprising editor gathered the manuscripts
- A printer thought there was a market and published
Remove any link and the teaching is lost. This is a strong argument for PKM practices that preserve and cross-link interest-area work that currently lacks an economic or institutional home — it is exactly the unofficial material that posterity most easily loses.
Key Points
- Extracurricular instruction economy = paid teaching outside the formal curriculum, common across early modern European universities
- Case study: Jean-Cecile Frey (Paris, 1607-1631) — wonders of Gaul, physiognomy, Lullian memory, Paracelsus
- Similar pattern documented at Helmstedt late 17th c. (per Paul Nelles)
- Clientele: small groups of ambitious students willing to pay privately
- Survived to us only via student manuscripts → posthumous publication
- Direct ancestor of the contemporary creator-economy and paid-course ecosystem
Open Questions
- What fraction of early modern philosophical knowledge reached us through the extracurricular channel vs the curricular one?
- What did the actual content of pre-modern extracurricular courses tell us about student demand — and does it map onto today's creator-economy demand curves?
- What current knowledge currently produced outside institutions is at risk of being lost without a preservation mechanism equivalent to the student-manuscript pipeline?
References
- Ann Blair, "Textbooks and Methods of Note-Taking in Early Modern Europe" (2008)
- Paul Nelles, research on extracurricular teaching at Helmstedt (as cited in Blair)
- Jean-Cecile Frey, Opera (1645), Opuscula varia (1646)