Author: biblonia

Astonishingly, there are no surviving memoirs of ancient or medieval scribes. For all the writing these people did over the centuries, one would hope that at least one would turn the quill towards the act of scribal copying itself and offer some insights to those outside the profession. The scribes’ only testament are the written … Continue reading The diary of a medieval scribe

While human cultures and societies grow from simple to complex, languages seem to evolve in the opposite direction. The ancestors of most European languages were far more complex, convoluted and intricate than the languages we have today. Old English was more tortuous than modern English. The same story with Old French and Old German. Not … Continue reading Unnatural evolution

As I’m on holiday this week, I’ll let Cicero lead today’s rant. And he has a story about how the method of memorizing information by visually modelling it in the mind – the so called method of loci – once doubled as a forensic tool. It later became one of the features of the medieval … Continue reading The memory of places, the places of memory

Literature in the manuscript age is a living organism, breathing its progeny out in the attempt to give the geniture a chance to extend its longevity despite the perils of existence. Before the deus ex machina of machine duplication, before the printing press and the instant multiplication of electronic media, books struggled to outlive their … Continue reading An archetype in search of copies

Information is useless if it can’t be stored. It’s even more useless if it can’t be retrieved. Without memory and memorialisation, we’d live in a perpetual present – and I have a feeling it wouldn’t be great. So I’m thankful for memory, but even as I express my gratitude, I acknowledge our debt to memory, … Continue reading Remembering how to remember

One of the most distinctive visual features of medieval manuscripts is the arabesque decoration surrounding the text on the page. It is also one of the most enduring legacies of medieval bookmaking. In fact, the arabesque, or foliage decoration, became a stock mark of the medieval page towards the end of the Middle Ages and … Continue reading Arabesque entanglements

My heart misses a beat (and that’s quite often) each time I read popular books about the history of the world which marginalise the role writing played in the rise of civilisations and in paving the road we walk today. It’s the agricultural revolution and then industrialisation which focus most of the attention. As for … Continue reading Reading continents

And what if Hansel had a smartphone, or Gretel a social media account? They did not awake until it was dark night, and Hansel comforted his little sister and said, “Just wait, Gretel, until the moon rises, and then we shall see the crumbs of bread which I have strewn about, they will show us … Continue reading Analog Hansel, digital Gretel

Last February, the news came that Umberto Eco’s library would pass under the protection of the Italian state. His modern library, including his archives, would be preserved at the University of Bologna, while Eco’s ancient library would be kept by the Braidense National Library in Milan. Despite becoming one of the world’s leading medievalists and … Continue reading The lunatic library

Perhaps it’s time to stop speculating over Wheel 2.0 and start looking at ways to improve Wheel 1.0, the one and only wheel, already invented but recently abandoned. Reinventing the wheel usually makes one forget what the wheel was for in the first place. And perhaps it is time to recover old myths. It’s true, … Continue reading Recovering old myths