- Mar 2024
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Notes
The audiobook version of this "text" omits the notes, acknowledgements, and importantly the indexes!
It ends with the coda followed by a copyright and production statement.
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Anindexer who tags a document has already done the work needed toproduce an ‘active index’, where each locator is a clickable link thatwill bring up its target page immediately.
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Theindexer will want a feel, before they begin, for the concepts that willneed to be flagged, or taxonomized with subheadings. They mightskim the book – reading it in full but at a canter – before tackling itproperly with the software open. Or they may spend a while, as apreliminary, with the book’s introduction, paying attention to itschapter outline – if it has one – to gain a sense of what to look outfor. Often, having reached the end of the book, the indexer will returnto the first few chapters, going over them again now that they havegained a conceptual mapping of the work as a whole.
It's no wonder that Mortimer J. Adler was able to write such a deep analysis of reading in How to Read a Book after having spent so much time indexing the ideas behind The Great Books of the Western World.
Indexing requires a solid inspectional read at minimum, but will often go deeper into contexts which require at least some analytical reading. To produce the Syntopicon, one must go even further into analytical reading to provide the proper indexing of ideas so that they may be sub-categorized and used for deeper analysis for things such as comparison and contrast of those ideas.
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- Feb 2024
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Duncan, Dennis. Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age. 1st ed. London: Allen Lane, 2021. https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324002543.
annotation link: urn:x-pdf:a4bd1877f0712efcc681d33d58777e55
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scholastic learning
How much different things may have been if the state, and not the Church, had been the progenitor and supporter of the early university?
How might education have been different if it came out of itself (or something like curiosity or even society in general) without the influences on either church or state?
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scholastic learning would favour externaldemonstration over inner revelation, intellectual agility over endlessmeditation.
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the reading-out of commentaries (a format with a now-familiar name: the lecture)
Link between the commentaries of the early middle ages and modern lectures
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centralizing reforms of Pope Gregory VII calledfor a more professionalized clergy. Church officials should now betrained administrators, versed not only in the scriptures but also inthe principles of accounting and law. A papal decree of 1079 orderedthat cathedrals should establish schools for the training of priests,
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Not so the tenth-century John of Gorze, who issaid to have pored continuously over the psalms with a soft buzzing‘in morem apis’: in the manner of a bee.8
quoted portion via:<br /> John of St Arnulf, ‘Vita Joannis abbatis Gorziensis’, Patrologia Latina, 137.280D.
relationship to collecting like the bees (rhetoric)
relationship to humming and rocking practices of Hassidic readers/learners/memorizers
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Looking back on his first encounters withAmbrose, Bishop of Milan, in the late fourth century, Augustineremembers noticing the curious way Ambrose would read: ‘his eyeswould scan over the pages and his heart would scrutinize theirmeaning – yet his voice and tongue remained silent’.7 This –reading in silence – is not normal, and Augustine wonders whatcould possess Ambrose to adopt such a practice. (Was it to preservehis voice? Or a way of avoiding unwanted discussions about the texthe was reading?)
quoted section via:<br /> St Augustine, Confessions, trans. by Carolyn J. B. Hammond, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), I, p. 243 (VI 3.3).
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As thehistorian Jean Leclercq, himself a Benedictine monk, puts it, ‘in theMiddle Ages, one generally read by speaking with one’s lips, at leastin a whisper, and consequently hearing the phrases that the eyessee’.6
quoted section from:<br /> [au moyen âge, on lit généralement en pronançant avec les lèvres, au moins à voix basse, par conséquent en entendant les phrases que les yeux voient.] Jean Leclercq, Initiation aux auteurs monastiques du Moyen Âge, 2nd edn (Paris: Cerf, 1963), p. 72.
What connection, if any, is there to the muscle memory of movement while speaking/reading along with sound/hearing to remembering what we read? Is there research on this? Implications for orality and memory?
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in the nunnery, where St Caesarius prescribes two hours to beset aside for reading in the early morning and a nominated reader tobe the only audible voice both at mealtimes and during the nuns’daily weaving. And woe betide the sister who finds herself drifting off:‘If anyone should become drowsy, she shall be ordered to standwhile the others are seated, so that she can banish the heaviness ofsleep.’5
quoted portion from:<br /> The Rule for Nuns of St Caesarius of Arles, trans. by Maria McCarthy (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1960), p. 175.
see related version in Benedictine Rule: https://hypothes.is/a/oJWB5tKAEe6FRGuIAPWmZQ
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the Benedictine Rule stipulatesthat monks should then apply themselves to two hours of reading,after which they may either go back to bed, ‘or if anyone mayperhaps want to read, let him read to himself in such a way as not todisturb anyone else’.4 At mealtimes, one monk will be appointed toread to the others, who must keep absolute silence ‘so that nowhispering may be heard nor any voice except the reader’s’.
quoted portions from:<br /> St. Benedict’s Rule for Monasteries, trans. by Leonard J. Doyle (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1948), p. 67.
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StAugustine draws this same parallel when he writes to a communityof nuns, ‘let it not be only your mouth that takes food, but let yourears also drink in the word of God’.3
quoted section from:
St Augustine, Letters, trans. by Wilfrid Parsons, 5 vols. (Baltimore, MD: Catholic University of America Press, 1956), V, Letter 211, ‘To a Convent of Consecrated Virgins’, p. 43.
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‘Blessed Lord, which hast caused al holy Scriptures to bee written forour learnyng; graunte us that we maye in such wise heare them,read, marke, learne, and inwardly digeste them.’2
quote from:<br /> The Booke of the Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments (London: 1549), sig. B iiv.
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What happens to the page layout now that the book is beingused as a container for many discrete pieces of information, ratherthan for a single, continuous narrative?
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Hugh will be the first to produce aconcordance to the Bible, to break the book down and rearrange itinto an alphabetical index of its words.
Hugh of Saint-Cher was the first person to produce a concordance of the Bible around 1230.
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was the first to argue that rainbows arecaused by light refraction
earlier source:
Amelia Carolina Sparavigna, ‘On the Rainbow, Robert Grosseteste’s Treatise on Optics’, International Journal of Sciences 2.9 (2013): 108–13 (109).
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In fact, this final detail is a mistake, an anachronism. Hugh died acouple of decades too early to have benefitted from this invention:two magnifying glasses bound together by a rivet in their handles.
The image of Hugh of Saint-Cher wearing glasses in the fresco at the former convent of San Niccolò, Chapter Room, Treviso, is an anachronism as their invention was decades following his death in 1263.
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the fresco, byTomasso da Modena, was painted in 1352). It stresses theDominicans’ commitment to Bible study and to scholarship, and noportrait conveys this more than the image of Hugh of St Cher.
Image from: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:38_Ugo_da_San_Caro.jpgUgo da San Caro, serie dei Quaranta domenicani illustri, ex convento di San Niccolò, Sala del Capitolo, Treviso, 1352 (altezza di ciascun ritratto 150 cm circa) Image by Risorto Celebrano, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Thought to be one of the first images of a person wearing glasses. Image dated 1352.
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Between them, theyset up the axes by which we think about indexing: word versusconcept; concordance versus subject index; specific versusuniversal.
context: the simultaneous invention of two different methods of indexing: subject indexes and concordances
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Grosseteste’s great table – or Tabula
This introduction to Grosseteste's Tabula seems to be in medias res...
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imagined the birth of the universe asan expanding sphere of luminescence, taking science and scriptureand blending them into a kind of Big Bang Theory that still leavesroom for God to start it all off with ‘Let there be light’.
This blends a tidbit of scientific history regarding Robert Grosseteste's thought with modern science fiction. Surely Grosseteste was NOT prefiguring the Big Bang Theory.
Curious what the original citation was here.
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Only the largepelican, squatting in the trees, can break the connection, a symbol ofbad audience, staring insolently, resolutely offstage. But she is beinggradually struck out, her colours fading as the original red and giltborders reassert themselves reprimandingly from beneath, themanuscript exacting a slow punishment for the sin of inattention.
Dennis Duncan completely misreads this image of Grosseteste and the Pelican which appears in the Lambeth Palace Library's MS 522 of The Castle of love. (for image see: https://hypothes.is/a/RzHLjsz8Ee6dZLOTV5h65Q)
Duncan identifies Grosseteste's pose with his hand raised and his index finger extended as "the classic gesture of the storyteller." In fact, the bishop is pointing directly up at the pelican which sits just on top of the frame of the illuminated scene. This pelican is elevated above and just beyond the scene of the image because it represents, as was common in the time period, the suffering of Christ.
Bestiaries of the age commonly depicted the "pelican in her piety" which was noted by Isidore of Seville in his Etymologies (Book 12, 7:26) from the 7th century, a text which heavily influenced many of these bestiaries. It was also thought at the time that the insatiable and rapacious pelican ate lizards and crocodiles (or lived off of them); as these were associated with snakes and by way of the story of the Garden of Eden the devil, they were also further associated with Christ and driving sin out of the world.
Thus the image is more appropriately read in its original context as Grosseteste giving a sermon about the suffering of Christ who is represented by a pelican floating above the scene being depicted.
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