What Student Agency at the Academy of Zamość? Remarks on Some Political Oratory Texts

This chapter inquires into possible forms of student agency in some surviving documents of the Academy of Zamość. The academy program and other testimonies reveal that the students were highly involved in the life of the academy, especially through the practice of rhetoric in public sessions. My goal is to investigate whether the students actively contributed to producing notes and speeches. The surviving documents can also provide insights into possible cooperation between students and teachers, hence into educative relations in university environments. Throughout the essay, I examine two brief handwritten texts from a codex probably belonging to a student, and I briefly recall another oration from the Biblioteka Ordynacji Zamoyskiej library fund. Overall, these documents point to the existence of a ‘guided’ student agency: the students’ creativity was not independent of the supervision of teachers and tutors, who possibly encouraged them to explore and appropriate classical as well as contemporary literature.