![]() After around 1200 with the rise of towns and the growth of a money economy, production shifted to city centers. ![]() Like a website, a manuscript realizes its purpose in its dynamic engagement with its user. Before about the year 1200, medieval manuscripts were made in monasteries by monks and sometimes nuns, who were scribes and artists working in the service of God. Readers of this enlightening and entertaining survey won’t take the humble index for granted again. Medieval manuscripts are not static products. Contending that indexes have had a profound yet overlooked impact on the evolution of human knowledge, he highlights key innovations in the centuries-long development of this search tool, including the trend towards putting words in alphabetical order the shift from scrolls to codexes, whose page numbers were crucial to the creation of a usable index and the rise of medieval universities, where scholars needed “new ways of efficiently finding parcels of text.” Characterizing the index as the precursor to Google search, Duncan dismisses fears that an overreliance on search engines will diminish humans’ cognitive abilities as “nothing more than a recent outbreak of an old fever.” Despite long-standing worries that indexes will reduce engagement with books and alter reading habits and attention spans for the worse (“the book index: killing off experimental curiosity since the seventeenth century”), Duncan makes a persuasive argument that it is natural for reading methods and text technology to evolve in order to make information easier to find. The site includes identifications of scribal hands and individual letter forms. As the age of digitization rolls on, it is high time that our analyses engage more deeply with these highly charged affective experiences growing from increasingly rich combinations of camera, software, text. Duncan (coeditor, Book Parts), a lecturer in English at University College London, mixes humor and scholarship to brilliant effect in this accessible deep dive into the history of indexes. DigiPal - a useful resource developed at Kings College London for those interested in early medieval English records, this database holds handwriting samples from manuscripts and charters dating between 1000-1100. Digitization and digital medieval manuscripts may create new challenges and concerns, but they also promote new methods of enjoyment.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |