The significance of the page

The layouts of a medieval manuscript’s individual pages expose valuable information about the manuscript, and therefore about texts. Some scholars are working ‘to reconstitute the page of the scribal manuscript as an authentic object in its own right. . . . [I]t is not a mere transparency through which the author’s “original” is to be viewed but rather an artifact of independent visual interest’ (Butterfield 49). Such scholars are trying to vouch for the worth of everything on any given manuscript page, because all added notes beyond the original text also reveal important information: ‘Every decision of layout—[including added glosses]—not only reflects the assumptions and cultural habits of medieval readers but also forms assumptions and habits that govern the way in which the text is received’ (Butterfield 49-50).

British Library MS Cotton Vespasian A.i, fol. 13r, detail (opening of Psalm 3)

Public text and ubiquitous literacy

Image: Yin Liu (Wisconsin, USA, 2013)

Up until a couple of centuries ago, a sign like this (which happens to proclaim the availability of cheese, and more generic food, in rural Wisconsin), would have been not only unlikely but also mostly pointless. For there would be no sense in putting up the word ‘CHEESE’ by the side of the road, visible to all, if very few people could read it.

One of the most deeply influential social transformations of the 19th century, especially in the West, was the creation of literate societies – that is, societies in which a majority of people could be expected to read and write, and therefore in which public textuality could be functional and ubiquitous. If you are reading this, chances are almost certain that you live in a world of text, and that you perform countless acts of reading every day, not just because you want to but because you are required to do so to function in a literate society. Every time you buy a package of food, or travel down a road, or surf the Web, you are expected to read. The technology of writing has become so powerful and foundational that we find it very difficult to imagine a world without writing, or a world in which writing plays a very small and specialised role.

Calculation to communication

Image: © Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY 2.5

Do you remember when mobile phones were actually used as telephones? That is, people put them next to their heads and used them to talk to other people at a distance. But now, of course, your mobile phone (unless you have a very very cheap model) does a lot of other things as well. Phones are used as cameras, maps, notebooks, recipe collections, timekeeping devices, compasses, flashlights, mirrors, radios and audio players, reading platforms, organisers, entertainment centres, tourist guides . . . At some point, a significant transition took place when a tool designed for one use (real-time voice transmission over distance) acquired other uses. These shifts in technology use can be deeply transformative, not only affecting the physical design of the technology so used but also the social practices related to that technology. However, shifts in technology use are often overlooked when we focus simply on ‘inventions’ – the physical devices themselves – without considering what people actually do with them.

Not dead yet

Is this a book?

London, British Library MS 89074. Image: British Library.

89074

89074

I’d say yes; it’s a fifteenth-century English-Latin glossary, the Catholicon Anglicum, in its original binding. It's handwritten rather than printed, but I think most people would call this a book.

On New Year’s Day, 2014, Robert Bolick reflected intelligently and thoughtfully on the recurring meme of ‘the death of the book’ in this blog post. Since the early 1990s, various people, mostly journalists, have been loudly proclaiming ‘the death of reading’, ‘the death of the book’, ‘the end of books’. In 1991, the murderer was television. More recently, it’s the e-reader. Cautionary voices have responded by noting that it is too early to pronounce the epitaph for books, that new media have not killed reading, and that something that continually needs to be thumped on the head and declared dead is, on the contrary, probably not dead yet.

Latin in the margins

In a previous post, ‘Starting in the margins’, I noted that early examples of English writing were typically not standalone texts; rather, they tended to be glosses to Latin texts. In such bilingual documents from early medieval England, the Latin text was given prominence visually – the script was larger and it filled the main text block – while the English gloss, squeezed in between the lines in a smaller script or placed in the margins, was clearly meant to be apparatus in a supporting role.

British Library MS Cotton Nero D.iv (Lindisfarne Gospels), fol. 45r.

Although this relationship of Latin and English continued to be expressed in similar ways in documents throughout the Middle Ages, there are also many cases in which the two languages appear to switch positions: English as the main text, Latin in the margins.

Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 12, fol. 10r (detail)