Ledarskap och lidelse - Kungliga biblioteket

In oral communication, with its formulaic epic conventions, repetition
and elaboration only serve to help solidify memory. In the written world all
these techniques render futile memory.
As a response to the new mode of communication, an effort was made to
somehow preserve the participatory dimension of oral communication. Written
text can be daunting, as most readily acknowledge. By performing written text,
by introducing theatrical elements in education, it became possible to internalize
that which otherwise, due to its sheer quantity, could not be learned.
The notion of theater pervaded many
aspects of early modern culture. Even
education was, at times, set in a theatrical
setting. Here the anatomical theater in
Padua as depicted in G. PH. Tomasini’s
Gymnasium patavinum (Udine, 1654).
Never has the notion of “theater” been more pronounced as during the
period during which the written medium, facilitated by the printed word, was
making inroads in oral culture. It seems that there was no end to the number
of works in this transition stage that invoke this notion of theater – theatrum
europaeum being perhaps the most widely known, but also the theatrum
politicum, historicum, poeticum, mundi et temporis, even the visually spectacular
theatrum cometicum or the daunting theatrum diabolorum.
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