Jul 23, 2015

Medieval Letters episode 1

Fragile as they are now and insignificant as they might have seemed to their authors, a remarkable number of medieval letters have survived the test of time.
a remarkable number of medieval letters have survived the test of time
From these documents we can glean details of daily life, religious concerns, legal obligations, social anxieties and even love affairs. Examples of such correspondence were tucked away in handbooks known as formularies. Formularies have their origins in antiquity and were used for centuries as manuals for the art of letter-writing and epistolary theory. At some universities letter-writing was taught as a subfield of one of the cornerstones of medieval education, rhetoric, and was therefore viewed as an essential skill to acquire. The writing masters and the students who produced formularies for the use of diplomatic figures and the highly educated also compiled a swath of original, true correspondence that reveals the character and quirkiness medieval people undoubtedly had, but that is sometimes difficult for us to see beneath the layers of dust (and hard-to-read Latin). The details within these letters do a splendid job of shaking off the cobwebs and may even remind us of our own modern attitudes as well as show how much things have undoubtedly changed.

Jul 15, 2015

Title pages

Pick up any modern printed book at random and open it up at front. Flip past any completely blank pages until you get to the first page with any text on it, e.g.


This image is somewhat ironic, because this page is not the title page of the book; it’s a kind of extra page that printers call the half-title (or bastard title). Here is the actual title page of this book:


The title page developed only after the invention of print technology.
The title page is a feature of the modern printed book that, I suspect, we take for granted: of course books have title pages. But medieval books did not. The title page developed only after the invention of print technology. Why it did so gives us a clue to answering the question of exactly what difference print really made to the form and function of the book.