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The Future of the Page
Excerpt from “Introduction: Architectures,
Ideologies and Materials of the Page” in The Future of the
Page, edited by Peter Stoicheff and Andrew Taylor (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 2004): 3-15. The page and its predecessors have existed for at least 3,000 years,
and its modern rectangular form is now so familiar that we seldom notice
its appearance, shape, layout or materials. Yet the page has had a profound
influence on western culture and thought. From papyrus roll to manuscript
codex to printed book to hypertext, the page has shaped the way people
see the world. It has been the most significant site for displaying
information, and in the process it has determined what counts as intellectual
authority, logical argument and useful information. Recent studies of the book's history and impact have increased our understanding of the relationships between the book and political, cultural, literary, and economic power. It seemed likely to the editors of this volume that the page too -- the book's fundamental structural and informational unit -- has had an undeniable impact on the development of human societies. As we explored this issue of the page's role in the development of communication and of knowledge, we began to recognize that the book's phenomenal impact is itself a product of the page's characteristics, and that Western culture has been in many ways crucially determined by the page’s materials of information transfer and organization. For this reason it seemed valuable also to contemplate the ways in which the transformed digital page may be re-structuring aspects of contemporary life. Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Elizabeth Eisenstein, Adrian Johns, Christian Vandendorpe, and many others have shown how the consequences of the printing press have been innumerable and pervasive, revolutionizing human communication, scientific discovery, and literature. A most important question now is "How do we situate within the long history of the book, of reading, and of relations to the written word, the revolution . . . which transforms the book (or the written object) as we know it -- with its quires, its leaves, its pages -- into an electronic text to be read on a screen?"1 The advent of the digital page has created a writing space of tremendous flexibility and ease of use, and texts that are readily communicable around the globe. Digital texts can spread into infinite commentary and response, thus inserting “every text into a web of relations . . . for they allow nonsequential reading and thinking."2 Now “text” can be released from the strictly alphabetical to include the pictorial, acoustic, and cinematic. Its components can be readily copied, edited, and modified; its information is easily sent, received, and searched; it can circumvent the rituals of publication and be instantaneously available for wide access. Such preliminary thoughts on the history, transformations, and future of the page inspired us to hold a conference called "The Future of the Page" at the University of Saskatchewan in June of 2000 to explore them further, of which this volume is the result. *** What exactly is the page? Or, more precisely, what are the principles of the page's identity and influence? When we talk about "the page" do we refer to its present rectangular shape, to a single entity or an open-book display, a randomly or specifically shaped piece of paper, a surface particularly inscribed? Three aspects of the page begin to emerge in response to such inquiry. One is the page's materials such as papyrus (a mat of crushed Nile reeds), parchment and vellum (sheep, calf, or goat skin), paper, and the digitized screen. Another is its architecture: the underlying arrangement of information on a page or what medieval writers called its ordinatio. A third is its ideologies: the ways in which the arrangement of information shapes or reflects cultural systems. These aspects of the page are not mutually exclusive. The architectures of the page, while capable of separate study, are related to the ideologies that otherwise structured the cultures that designed and read them. Cultures with an ideological investment in information hierarchies produced pages whose organization helped consolidate those hierarchies. Page design and its related ideologies are themselves by-products of the materials of the page that have helped determine its shape and size. These categories do not exist in isolation, therefore, but influence and are influenced by each other. The page's rectangular shape and vertical format, for instance, are so familiar to us that we cease to see them as artificial. Yet a complex combination of material, social and economic practicalities have over the last 3,000 years led to those configurations. One of the standard explanations of the page's shape and format is that they were determined by the dimensions of sheepskin used to make parchment. The dried skin was artfully trimmed and folded to maximize the surface area available for eventual inscription, a process generating a space similar to that of the modern rectangular page.3 The vertical (or “portrait”) format of the sheepskin page was determined by a related material necessity, for the stitching had to follow the longer fold line to support the weight of the parchment. If the parchment were folded and stitched on the shorter side it would be weakened by the weight of the wider page and incapable of supporting as many folds (and consequently pages) as would the long-side stitch. Two aspects of the page's dimensions are involved here. One is the rectangular shape itself, and the other is the vertical orientation of that shape. Both can be partly explained in these ways through the materials of its production at the parchment stage of its history. Yet several components of its history and design remain unexplained by sheepskin theory. In fact, the theory applies mostly within the larger history of the book and is based on the assumption that the page emerged as an indirect result of the folding procedure that generated an early form of the book -- the parchment codex. The reasons behind the rectangular, vertical space of the page probably predate the determining factor of sheepskin, though: Roman wax tablets, some Egyptian and oriental stone tablets, and the units of text on papyrus and parchment scrolls were rectangular and vertical as well. Other material and psychological necessities may account for the pre-codex
“page” format and for its lasting influence through at least
two millennia. One is the rectangular and vertical space of the human
hand that held the text. In fact, the hand's dimensions that might have
determined the clay and wax tablets’ size and shape might also
have organized the vertical reading and writing process of oriental
ideogrammic inscription, for the tablet endured longer there than in
the Occident where the scroll emerged relatively quickly as a horizontal
solution to the problem of how to contain more information within a
document. Ancient scrolls contained units of text in lateral sequence
that resembled the modern page. Called paginae, whence our term derives,
they were taller than they were wide, a format that aided the process
of reading.4 Spaces between words would not become commonplace until
the medieval period, and the unbroken line of text was more easily read
if shorter, from left to right, than longer, allowing information to
be absorbed more readily, and to be read aloud more consistently without
losing one’s place. The width of the pagina varied; in the Dead
Sea Psalms Scroll, for example, it was between eight and eleven centimetres,
approximately the range of text widths found in standard paperbacks
today. Conformance to the Fibonacci sequence might be as significant as material and anatomical practicality in determining the page's width:height ratio. Despite millennia of material variation that ratio has remained constant and, evidently, appealing as a circumference for the space upon which information is inscribed and ordered. The geometrically simpler default boundary of the square, not as economical a use of the sheepskin as the rectangle, is also dismissed by nature and by the history of artistic construction as an inappropriate vessel for containing information. The page, participating as it does in the same activity, may be no less determined by such an arithmetic and aesthetic code. Those relative dimensions, compelled materially, anatomically, or aesthetically, have had consequences for the reading and ordering of its subject. Most noticeably, the page's shape encourages a vertical and hierarchical display of information. Sacra Pagina or Holy Page -- the medieval term for Scripture -- reminds us that the page is one of the most fundamental intellectual constructs in the Western tradition. Before the page was the roll, the elite format for publishing in classical antiquity. Prosperous Roman citizens would read from, or listen as slaves read from, the parchment or papyrus rolls that preserved serious works of literature, philosophy, and history. But the small and often impoverished Christian communities used a cheaper technology, binding flat sheets between wooden boards -producing what is now technically called a codex (from Latin caudex, meaning block of wood) but is normally just called a book. As the new religion gained authority, so too did its favoured method for preserving its central texts. While the mechanical advantages of the codex (chief among them that it could use lower quality parchment and permitted easier consultation of specific passages) must have played a significant role in its increased use, it was its association with Christianity that made it respectable. As Yvonne Johannot puts it, “it was the victory of Christianity in the Empire . . . that assured the definitive victory of the codex over the roll.”6 From around 400 A.D. on, therefore, the rectangular parchment page bound between two hard covers became the dominant form of textual support in the Western world and the prevailing symbol for any authoritative text. Régis Debray points out, for example, that "the Pentateuch was surely written on [a] scroll, but the tables of the Law in Christian iconography have taken on retrospectively the aspect of an open book."7 In general parlance, a book meant a parchment codex, and continued to mean a parchment codex until the paper revolution of the late Middle Ages. From around 1450, it increasingly meant a paper codex. From 1500 on it increasingly meant a printed codex. The influence of the format has been enormous and is very difficult to assess. The codex, and with it the page, have set the parameters for what in the Western tradition constitutes a text. In this tradition, a text is stable, has clear boundaries, and is silent. Yet this is not the inevitable condition of writing, typography, or other means of mechanical reproduction. If "the idea of the book . . . always refers to a natural totality," as Jacques Derrida argues, this totality is "profoundly alien to the sense of writing."8 One might raise what is probably an unanswerable question, and ask to what extent this sense of totality reflects the salient visual totality of neatly laid-out pages bound between two covers, the books that let us always feel with our right hand where the end is as we read them. The book is one of the most fundamental symbols in the medieval world. The world was a book written by God, the book of Nature; human fate was written in the Book of Life or Book of Judgment; human conduct was governed by the book of God's word. All were in reinforcing harmony. As David Jeffrey notes, "From Augustine forward, the idea that the book of God's word essentially accords with the book of his Works is the keystone of Christian thought and particularly of the doctrine of creation."9 The idea is expressed in a famous passage by the twelfth-century Neoplatonist, Alain de Lile:
The idea has a long legacy. In this symbolic world, the page had particular significance as a physical enactment of the central truth that in the beginning was the Word and the Word was made Flesh. Each Bible was a recapitulation of the Incarnation. On the manuscript page the word of God was etched into flesh, etched into the flesh of the sheep, calf, or goat in a writing process of intense physicality, which involved scraping the flesh with a knife and then writing on it with caustic inks. Textual metaphors like "writing," "the page," or the "book" retained strong concrete grounding. Today digitalization has opened up endless possibilities for visual and acoustic innovation, but our understanding of what constitutes a text remains rooted in the traditions of the medieval page. The architecture of the page has not changed significantly since then, a result of its tremendous economy and functionality. Technological innovation in transportation contributed the rocket to what used to be only the foot; in communication it contributed the satellite to what used to be only voice and gesture. The physical format of the page, however, has stayed the same despite revolutionary alterations in our technological environments. That resistance to technological adaptation might reflect several things. For one, change has not always been necessary: the page has been, from its beginning, an efficient space for information display requiring little modification. While a scroll demands that the reader work through the entire text, a collection of bound pages facilitates selective reading.11 The ease of manipulation also frees the hands of the reader, making it easier to add written commentary. For another, it may have so successfully embedded patterns of logic, thought, reading, writing, and information retrieval that possibilities for any shift in its conception have been minimal, and dependent upon larger shifts in cultural habits that have become, if anything, more ingrained and reflexive as a result of the power of the page. If so, the history of the page becomes a story both of communication
(in the page's unsurpassed economy) and of control (in its unchanging
determination of intellectual activity). The more recent emergence of
a digital environment has not yet changed the page substantially either.
The word processing programs we are using now display the traditional
features of the page for us to work on, behind which lurk outline templates
recalling the medieval ordinatio structure with astonishing accuracy.
So great is the gravity of the traditional page that websites conceived,
designed, and programmed on the horizontal or landscape orientation
of the typical computer screen stubbornly retain a vertical axis. *** Page layout and design, seemingly modern concepts, have in fact always had a significant relationship with the semantics of a text. In this eighth-century Bible, for example, the word of God keeps chaos at bay, driving it back to the margins so that the space becomes a force field and the text is defined by its opposition to its margins (see fig. 0.1).
Figure 0.1: “Liber generationis.” Lindisfarne Gospels, fol. 27r (British Library, MS Cotton Nero D. IV) In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, however, this space began to be coded far more elaborately. This development in book design corresponds closely to the contemporary development of academic institutions and professional academic culture, first in the cathedral schools of the early twelfth century, and then the universities, such as Bologna, which came into being in the early twelfth century, Montpellier, which was granted papal recognition in 1220, or Paris, formed from various schools in the second half of the twelfth century. The thirteenth century saw further expansion and internal consolidation of the universities, accompanied by the expansion and consolidation of academic publishing, so that regulations governing curricula and regulations governing the copying of textbooks often follow hard upon each other. During the second half of the thirteenth century, for example, the University of Oxford defined its curriculum, took measures to bring all students in the city under the control of official university professors, and fought for its independence from ecclesiastical control.12 At roughly the same period in major university centres there developed a professional core devoted to book production, including stationers, who were both booksellers and makers, scribes, parchment sellers, and illuminators, many of them clustered together in the same quarter or even, in the case of Oxford, along a single street. In response, the university took various measures to control publication, most notably the development of the pecia system of copying textbooks, in which a licensed stationer kept an approved exemplar (the pecia) which he would rent out to students for them to copy.13 This method depended upon the existence of a well-defined and stable curriculum and of a well-defined and stable corporate body that controlled it and whose licensing rights were supported by civic and ecclesiastical authorities, however much they may have been resented by the stationers. The socio-economic formation of academia and book production was in turn reflected in the physical make-up of university books. At the most fundamental level there was a profound shift in the way books were read as, from about the year 1000 on, scholastic or analytic reading increasingly replaced the older, slower, subvocalizing rumination of monastic reading, transforming the page "from a score for pious mumblers into an optically organized text for logical thinkers."14 Page layout now becomes crucial, arranging different levels of information according to clearly delineated hierarchies: text, authoritative gloss, less authoritative gloss, student's personal gloss. All these categories could be arranged and subdivided according to the demands of scholastic logic, so that, as Malcom Parkes argues, during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries "the structure of reasoning came to be reflected in the physical appearance of books."15 Parkes finds telling parallels between the visual clarity of the thirteenth-century school text, often laid out in two columns, with clear separation between words and an elaborate gradation of textual authority, from major to minor glosses, and the structure of scholastic thought, with its elaborate division and subdivison of an argument. As Parkes observes, in the glossed Biblical commentaries of the twelfth century "the whole process of indicating text, commentary and sources was incorporated into the design of the page" (116). The rediscovery of Aristotelean logic and its elaborate categories in the thirteenth century, and "the consequent interest in more rigorous philosophical procedures entailed the adoption of principles which demanded a more precise method of dissecting and defining human knowledge" (119). These in turn led to an even more elaborate and clearly defined ordinatio. The term ordinatio is more than just a synonym for layout. It alludes to the combination, or mutual reinforcement, of layout and certain kinds of intellectual structure. The more modest claim, advanced by Malcolm Parkes, is that ordinatio reflected the structure of high scholastic reasoning, with its elaborate subdivision of knowledge, a subdivision that can be seen in the schematic outline of one of the most famous scholastic collections, or summae, the Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas. A more radical claim is that these principles of layout set fundamental conceptual parameters that prevail to this day, shaping our conceptions of textual authority. Even such an aggressively presentist notion as "information," which reduces knowledge to a kind of electronic liquidity, privileges the visual and ignores the acoustic in ways that can be traced back to medieval scholastic culture. The basic social logic of ordinatio is very clear in any academic text: an authoritative critical edition is one that has notes. Commentary by a doctor (one who is learned, or doctus, and whose learning has been officially recognized, i.e., in most cases a professional academic) is a crucial indicator of a text's status. Unlicensed commentary, such as that offered by interested amateurs, does not count, anymore than do nontextual extrapolations (such as illustrations, readings, or dramatic performances). To publish means to generate fixed texts (and has very little to do with any attempt to make commentary publicly available). In the humanities the medieval legacy is even more marked, for here publishing essentially means to gloss. Nor is this understanding of textual authority limited to academe. In particular, prevailing methods of legal judgment, in Canada and internationally, operate according to similar principles. It is scarcely surprising, given this close relation between our habits of reasoning and these long-standing ways of presentation, that approaches to page design, especially among academics, remain so similar to those of the thirteenth century. After all, modern academic buildings (with their lecture halls and, for the more privileged, monastic quadrangles), corporate structures (with their largely self-licensing and self-governing professoriate), hierarchies of degrees, and traditions of textual commentary are all based on medieval models. *** Just as modern academics continue to work within these medieval structures, we continue to work in the intellectual framework of the medieval page. The present digital hypertext environment, for example, with its elaborate hierarchy of information and privileging of visual over acoustic data, is a continuation of this tradition. "Hypertext" is a term devised by Theodor Nelson in 1965 to name "nonsequential writing -- text that branches and allows choices to the reader, best read at an interactive screen."16 At the time, it represented a politicized vision of reading that swung authority from the writer to the reader. It was a vision (minus the interactive screen) arrived at from a different direction by numerous literary theorists, of that decade and later, who sought to give a reader's interpretive interaction with a text precedence over its author's intention. Nelson's desire, though, was not interpretive so much as mechanical -- hypertext would disentangle readers from the sequential physical book and allow them to determine in what order and what context its information would be accessed. The vision was considered realizable because of the swift and simultaneous evolution of the computer, capable of organizing information in a variety of ways and displaying it on a screen. Writers such as George P. Landow, Jay David Bolter, Geoffrey Nunberg, Richard Lanham, Christian Vandendorpe and Espen Aarseth -- forerunners in the emerging discipline of hypertext studies -- consistently trace the hypertextual activity back to concepts first articulated by the MIT information theorist Vannevar Bush. His work, described in a 1945 Atlantic Monthly article "The Way We May Think," involved developing a new system of information retrieval that would escape the ordinatio-like system of categorization.17 In its place he hoped to create a process that allowed the scholar's information search to be "an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory" (103) that operated by association rather than categorization. As Landow points out, Bush achieved two things in this pre-digital period: he recognized the need to "append one's own individual, transitory thoughts and reactions to texts" and the need for the "conception of a virtual, rather than a physical, text."18 Amid these reconceptions of information retrieval and display the page remained serenely undisturbed. Landow's early hypertext projects such as the In Memoriam site, and the early Story Space platform that was designed and marketed to realize Bush's "memex" in a digital environment, alter the dynamics of access to, but not the inscription site of, information display. The ideology of hypertext, formulated by its early proponents and practitioners, is a result of a conditioned return to Bush, the "memex," Nelson, and mid-twentieth century information theory that tends to ignore the material and aesthetic determinants of information display and transfer. Thus, while the dynamic pattern of information retrieval has been altered by the new digital environment and, according to Landow, by the convergence of contemporary critical theory and technology, the page has retained its traditional architecture. Initially, new media emulate the media that they replace, before creating any new paradigms. As George Bornstein and Theresa Tinkle point out, “Electronic editions represent another stage in cultural transmission rather than an ultimate stage replacing its antecedents.”19 There are signs, however, that the digital screen and its evolving design have begun to break from such a strong influence and to begin altering hierarchical notions of the central and the primary, the marginal and the secondary. The digital page now encourages a non-linear progression through a text, which in turn has begun to reshape how literary texts, written for the digital platform, are conceived and structured. Since the mid-1990s attempts have been made to redraw the architecture of the page to exploit the possibilities of the digital medium. Electronic editions of literary texts have witnessed a good part of the early work in this respect. In "Rationale of Hypertext" Jerome McGann argues that the examination or representation of a book through another book will yield only predictable results that are determined by the fact that the scales of subject and vehicle are the same: [W]e no longer have to use books to analyze and study other books or texts. That simple fact carries immense, even catastrophic, significance. Until now the book or codex form has been one of our most powerful tools for developing, storing, and disseminating information. . . . Brilliantly conceived, these works are nonetheless infamously difficult to read and use. Their problems arise because they deploy a book form to study another book form. 20 . . . The problems grow more acute when readers want or need something beyond the semantic content of the primary textual materials -- when one wants to hear the performance of a song or ballad, see a play, or look at the physical features of texts. A growing number of projects have responded to such a challenge in many ways, ranging from regarding the computer as a way of enhancing indexing capabilities through SGML and XML, to visually re-engaging the reader with a text's material conditions, to providing an archive of related information of a geographical, historical or biographical nature. The list, lengthening considerably each year, includes the many at University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, the British Library Board’s Electronic Beowulf, De Montfort University’s Canterbury Tales project, the University of Indiana’s Victorian Women Writers project, and more. The motivations behind the creation of these digital projects varies. Some, such as The Walt Whitman Archive at the University of Virginia, are a response to the fact that Whitman’s “work defies the constraints of the book. [His work] was always being revised, was always in flux, and fixed forms of print do not adequately capture his incessant revisions.” 21 Others, such as the Rossetti Archive at the University of Virginia, exploit the visual capabilities of the digital environment: “all texts deploy a more or less complex series of bibliographical codes, and page design -- if not page ornament and graphic illustration -- in a rich scene of textual expression. Computerized tools that deploy hypermedia networks and digitization have the means to study visual materials and the visibilities of language in ways that have not been possible before.”22 The Canterbury Tales project has still another mandate. The Tales are in a state of textual disarray and present the reader with many questions concerning the composition history and the status of the manuscripts. Peter Robinson describes the project’s origins as lying “in the perception that the advent of computer technology offers new methods, which might help us ask these questions in a new and more fruitful manner.”23 Yet as the MIT Media Lab designer David Small noted in 1996, "the
display of information by computers does not often fulfil the promise
of the computer as a visual information appliance". He has explored
ways of transcending the two-dimensional, page-inspired tendencies of
computerized texts: The glowing glass screen of the computer is seen as a flat surface on which are pasted images that resemble sheets of paper. Window-like systems have advanced this emulation only to the extent that they allow for many rectangular planes of infinitely thin virtual paper to be stacked haphazardly around the glass surface of the computer display. The graphic power of computer workstations has now advanced to the point where we can begin to explore new ways of treating text and the computer display. By allowing the computer to do what it can do well, such as compute three-dimensional graphics and display moving images, we can develop a truly new design language for the medium.23 Choosing Shakespeare's plays as an example of complex information, he has designed a navigational process that regards the page as a landscape that can be entered, moved behind and rotated. The result is a three-dimensional text in the shape of a cube that “escap[es] the confines of the flat sheet of paper" and "arrange[s] information into meaningful landscapes that exhibit qualities of mystery, continuity, and visual delight.”25 The three-dimensional environment also enlarges possibilities for supplemental information display. For instance, glosses on the text can appear at right angles to it, so that when the text is read directly in front of the reader the 90-degree gloss disappears. When the cube is slightly rotated the gloss begins to appear, keeping the primary text in view simultaneously. The design has the added advantage of permitting an infinite sense of scale. A panoptic view of all Shakespeare's plays reveals structural patterns at a glance, such as the frequent brevity of the fourth act, and the relative length of the texts. Scrolling through incremental stages of proximity draws the reader to single plays, acts, scenes, speeches, lines and words, with commensurate 90-degree commentaries and glosses. Such experiments defamiliarize the rectangular two-dimensional architecture of the modern page and reinterpret it as an artificial and still highly flexible space that is capable not only of containing more and different information but also of altering how information is accessed and how reading occurs. … NOTES 1. Roger Chartier, Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances and Audiences from Codex to Computer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 14. 2. George P. Landow, Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 82. 3. The numerous accounts of this process include D. V. Thompson, “Medieval Parchment Making,” The Library, 4th Series, 16 (1936), 113-17 and Jacques Stiennon, Paléographie du moyen âge (Paris: Armand Colin, 1973). Stiennon draws attention to the illustration of a parchment maker’s atelier in the Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Paris, 1765), 11: 929-31. By far the most detailed account, however, is that of R[onald]. Reed, in Ancient Skins, Parchments and Leathers (London and New York: Seminar Press, 1972), 118-73 and The Nature and Making of Parchment (Leeds: Elmete Press, 1975). 4. Christian Vandendorpe, Du papyrus … l'hypertexte: Essai sur les mutations du texte et de la lecture. (Quebec: Boreal, 1999), 193-95. 5. See Albert Kapr, Johann Gutenberg: The Man and His Invention, trans. Douglas Martin (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), 163. Kapr notes that the Golden Ratio became “a proportional canon applied in monasteries throughout the Middle Ages” (161), and derives this finding from S. Corsten, “Die Drucklegung der zweiundvierzigzeiligen Bible: Technische und chronologische Probleme,” Kommentarband zur Faksimile Ausgabe (Munich, 1979). 6. Yvonne Johannot, Tourner la page. Livre, rites et symboles (Paris: Éditions Jérôme Millon, 1988), 29, drawing on the important initial survey of Colin H. Roberts, “The Codex,” Proceedings of the British Academy 40 (1954), pp. 169-204, revised as Colin H. Roberts and T.C. Skeat, The Birth of the Codex (London and New York: British Academy and Oxford University Press, 1983). 7. Régis Debray, “The Book as Symbolic Object” in Geoffrey Nunberg, ed. The Future of the Book (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 141. 8. In Spivak, trans. Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 18. 9. David L. Jeffrey, People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary Culture (Cambridge: Institute for Advanced Christian Studies, 1996), 147. The classic introduction to this topic is Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953), 319-26. 10. Psalterium Profanum, ed. Joseph Eberle (Zurcih: Manesse Verlag, 1962), 126, cited in Jeffrey 147. 11.Vandendorpe, Du papyrus, 53. 12. We echo here the comments in Andrew Taylor, Textual Situations: Three Medieval Manuscripts and Their Readers. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 149. See also Alexander Murray, Reason and Society in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), who traces the formation and self-aggrandizement of medieval university scholars as an intellectual elite, and the essays gathered together in J. I. Catto, ed., The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 1, The Early Oxford Schools (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), especially M .B. Hackett, “The University as a Corporate Body” and J. M. Fletcher, “The Faculty of Arts.” 13. Jean Destrez, La “pecia” dans les manuscrits Universitaires du XIII et du XIV siècle (Paris: Éditions Jacques Vautrain, 1935). Destrez’s conclusions are summarized by Marcel Thomas, “Manuscripts,” a prefatory essay in Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800, trans. David Gerard (London: Verso, 1976), 21, who describes the pecia system as one intended to give the University “intellectual as well as economic control over the use of books.” Mary A. Rouse and Richard H. Rouse provide some useful corrections in "The Book Trade at the University of Paris, ca. 1250- ca. 1350," originally published in L. J. Battailon, B. G. Guyot, and R. H. Rouse, eds. La production du livre au moyen âge: exemplar et pecia (Paris, 1988), 41-114, and reprinted in Mary and Richard Rouse, Authentic Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 259-338. See also their recent study Manuscripts and their Makers: Commercial Book Producers in Medieval Paris, 1200-1500 (Turnhout, Belgium: Harvey Miller, 2000). Claire Donovan provides an evocative description of the early Oxford book trade in The de brailes Hours: Shaping the Book of Hours in Thirteenth-Century Oxford (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 13-17. 14. Ivan Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh’s Didascalicon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 2. The fullest account of this transition is that of Paul Saenger, Space between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), which is particularly valuable for its discussion of eleventh-century Latin manuscripts. 15. M.B. Parkes, "The Influence of the Concepts of ordinatio and Compilatio on the Development of the Book" in J.J.G. Alexander and M.T. Gibson, eds., Medieval Learning and Literature: Essays Presented to Richard William Hunt (Oxford; Clarendon, 1976), 121. 16. Theodor Nelson, Literary Machines (Sausalito, California: Mindful Press, 1992), 0/2. 17. Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” Atlantic Monthly 176 (July 1945): 101-8. 18. Landow, Hypertext, 8. 19. George Bornstein and Theresa Tinkle, eds., The Iconic Page in Manuscript, Print, and Digital Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,1998), 3. 20. Jerome McGann, “The Rationale of HyperText,” in Electronic Text. Investigations in Method and Theory, ed. Kathryn Sutherland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 20 (online version at http://~jjm2f/rationale.html). 21. Ken Price in “Introduction” to the Walt Whitman Archive (<http://www.iath.virginia.edu/whitman/introduction/.). 22. Jerome McGann, “The Rossetti Hypermedia Archive: An Introduction” (<http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/rossetti/introduction.html>) 23. Peter Robinson, “New Methods of Editing, Exploring, and Reading the Canterbury Tales” (<http://www.cta.dmu.ac.uk/projects/ctp/desc2.html>). 24. David Small, “Navigating Large Bodies of Text,” IBM Systems Journal (Vol. 35, nos. 3 & 4, 1996): 515. 25. Small, 516. |
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