I recently re-encountered this ampersand (apologies for reproduction quality; it comes from an older microfilm that I have of a ms that is not yet online) which connects the ‘e’ and ‘t’ of two words. The fuller phrase runs aduersus nos … Continue reading
Every field has its ‘zombie ideas’, ideas based on disproved notions (and so are not ‘alive’), but whose influence persists in large part due to their intuitive appeal (and so they aren’t ‘dead’). In the early history of reading, we … Continue reading
for papers. Together with Orietta DaRold and Philip Shaw at Leicester, we will be running a small conference in Bergen in early June entitled Writing Europe before 1450. It builds on the successes of two ‘Writing England’ conferences held in … Continue reading
I recently started the lucid, engaging, careful and exciting Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire by William Johnson (Oxford UP, 2010). While the body chapters will be of most interest to those specifically engaged with particular authors, … Continue reading
A little later than the note reported by Helmut Gneuss is a notice found in the pastedown of a manuscript in Pembroke College, Cambridge (dated ?1170).* It states:** Pentatuchus. Iob. duodecim prophete. Math. et luc. cum pergameno salterii et epistolorum … Continue reading
References to the price and labour involved in producing early medieval books in Western Europe are hard to come by. However, thanks to Helmut Gneuss’s reconstruction of a scribal comment (aka colophon) now lost (but transcribed by a modern cataloguer … Continue reading
One of the most interesting (admittedly, to me) characteristics of manuscript culture, that is a literate culture distinct from print, is the handwritten transmission of texts, a phenomenon that demands a better understanding of the mechanics of copying. In short, … Continue reading
A wonderfully fun book! I read this last winter for a break from the medieval and was well rewarded. I admit that the title initially made me think that it might be a lament for print or an encomium for … Continue reading
Edward Tenner’s column at The Atlantic (Higher Education’s Tech Dilemmas) discusses research that shows that hyperlinked reading is not serving students. For a course a couple of years ago, I and the other instructors wrote the lecture notes out in … Continue reading
So a medievalist walks into a conference filled with M.D.’s, computer science people, developmental and cognitive psychologists, and a bunch of forensic document examiners. That in a nutshell was my trip to the International Graphonomics Society in Dijon almost two … Continue reading