Authors: Alex Wright
1 Louis Baudin,
A Socialist Empire: The Incas of Peru
, quoted in “The Quipucamayu,”
http://www.spanish.sbc.edu/MMLatAm/Quipus.html
; accessed 7 December 2006.
2 John McCrone,
Going Inside: A Tour Round a Single Moment of Consciousness
(London: Faber and Faber, 1999).
3 Steven Kuhn et al., “Ornaments of the Earliest Upper Paleolithic,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
98 (2001), 7641-7646.
4 Randall White, quoted in William F. Allman,
The Stone Age Present: How Evolution Has Shaped Modern Life: From Sex, Violence, and Language to Emotions, Morals, and Communities
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 215.
5 Ibid., 209.
6 Scholars have variously speculated that cave paintings were used for hunting rituals or religious ceremonies; more recently, some scholars have suggested they may be the ancient equivalent of teenage graffiti.
7 Wilson, op. cit., 142.
1 Perhaps not coincidentally, the earliest known examples of Chinese writing have been discovered on a 6,000-year-old turtle shell.
2 Thomas Cahill,
The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels
(New York: Nan A. Talese, 1998), 11.
3 While Sumerians pioneered the notion of keeping time, they did not understand time the same way we do. Sumerian “hours” varied by season, depending on the availability of sunlight (a Sumerian hour was about one-sixth of a day’s sunlight). The Babylonians later introduced the notion of 24 uniform hours in a day.
4 While traditional Western histories have situated Mesopotamia as the birthplace of writing, many historians now believe that writing emerged independently in at least three locations: Sumer, China, and the ancient Mayan civilization.
5 V. Gordon Childe,
Man Makes Himself
(New York: New American Library, 1951).
6 Wayne A. Wiegand and Donald G. Davis,
Encyclopedia of Library History
(New York: Garland Pub, 1994), 24.
7 Walter J. Ong,
Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word
(London: Methuen, 1982), 94.
8 Anonymous, quoted in Lionel Casson,
Libraries in the Ancient World
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 5.
9 Melvil Dewey was the inventor of the Dewey Decimal System, still used in most U.S. public libraries (see
Chapter 10
).
10 Michael H. Harris and Elmer D. Johnson,
History of Libraries in the Western World
(Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1984), 7.
11 Matthew Battles,
Library: An Unquiet History
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 7.
12 A. C. Moorhouse, “The Historical Influence of Writing,” in
Writing and the Alphabet
(London: Cobbett Press, 1946), 68-74.
13 Wiegand, op. cit., 27.
14 Battles, op. cit., 12.
15 Foster Stockwell,
A History of Information Storage and Retrieval
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001), 11.
16 Robert Lamberton,
Hesiod
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 64.
17 Ibid., 39.
18 This phrase was coined by librarian and classicist H. Curtis Wright.
19 Lamberton, op. cit., 41.
20 Merlin Donald,
Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 275.
21 Plato,
Phaedrus
, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Champaign, IL: Project Gutenberg, 1999),
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext99/phdrs10.txt
; accessed 7 December 2006.
22 Donald, op. cit., 273.
23 Karl Popper draws much the same distinction between scientific and “pre-scientific” thought.
24 Donald, op. cit., 343.
25 Ibid., 274.
26 Strabo, quoted in Lionel Casson,
Libraries in the Ancient World
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 29.
27 Aristotle,
The Categories
, trans. E. M. Edghill (Champaign, IL: Project Gutenberg, 2000),
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext00/arist10.txt
; accessed 7 December 2006.
28 Leslie W. Dunlap,
Readings in Library History
(New York: R. R. Bowker, 1972), 20.
29 Amr, quoted in Matthew Battles,
Library: An Unquiet History
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 22-23.
30 Ausonius,
The Origins of the English Library,
trans. John Evelyn, quoted in Raymond Irwin (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), 133.
31 Martial, quoted in Dunlap, op. cit., 32.
32 Ammanius, quoted in Dunlap, op. cit., 34.
1 Christopher De Hamel,
A History of Illuminated Manuscripts
(London: Phaidon Press, 1994), 22.
2 Michael E. Hobart and Zachary Sayre Schiffman,
Information Ages: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Computer Revolution
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 91.
3 Thomas Cahill,
How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe
(New York: Nan A. Talese, Doubleday, 1995), 163.
4 De Hamel, op. cit., 11.
5 Bede, quoted in De Hamel, op. cit., 40.
6 Cambrensis, quoted in Celtic Network,“The Book of Kells: Celtic Art’s Most Magnificent Masterpiece,”
http://www.celticnetwork.com/culture/celtic-art/book-of-kells.html
; accessed 7 December 2006.
7 Cassiodorus, quoted in Leslie W. Dunlap,
Readings in Library History
(New York: R. R. Bowker, 1972), 68.
8 Matthew Battles,
Library: An Unquiet History
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 60.
9 James J. O’Donnell,
Cassiodorus
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979). “Postprint,” 1995,
Chapter 5
,
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/texts/cassbook/toc.html
; accessed 7 December 2006.
10 Ivan Illich,
In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh’s Didascalion
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 54.
11 Ong, op. cit., 119.
12 Saint Benedict, quoted in Karl Christ,
The Handbook of Medieval Library History
(Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1984), 17.
13 Alcuin unwittingly anticipated use of the term “walled garden” by modern-day software developers—that is, as a sealed information environment (AOL, for example, is a classic example of a networked “walled garden”).
14 J. J. O’Connor and E. F. Robertson, “Alcuin of York,” 1999,
http://wwwgroups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Alcuin.html
; accessed 7 December 2006.
15 Battles, op. cit., 79.
16 James Westfall Thompson,
The Medieval Library
(New York: Hafner, 1957), 348-350.
17 Ibid., 357.
18 Gibbon,
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
(New York: Modern Library, 2005), 1139.
1 Whit Andrews, personal correspondence with Alex Wright, 7 April 2006.
2 Samuel A. Ives and Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt,
An English 13th Century Bestiary, a New Discovery in the Technique of Medieval Illumination
(New York: H. P. Kraus, 1942).
3 Brian Stock,
The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 32.
4 Ibid., 18.
5 Ibid., 62.
6 “Social fact” is a term coined by Emile Durkheim.
7 Stock, op. cit., 88.
8 “Document nation” is a term coined by Brian Stock.
9 Not to be confused with the modern stationer, the medieval stationer performed a complicated role involving taxation, quality assurance, and distribution of master copies of important texts.
10 Lucien Paul Victor Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin,
The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800
(London: Verso, 1990), 167.
11 Johann Koelhoff, quoted in Ibid., 171.
12 Indulgences were remittances granted by the church to allay punishment for sins. The practice of selling indulgences was eventually banned by Pope Pius VI in 1567.
13 Febvre and Martin, op. cit., 173.
14 Ibid., 79.
15 Ibid., 96.
16 Xylography was a popular printing technique using wood-cut engravings.
17 Febvre and Martin, op. cit., 97.
18 John Henry Newman Newman,
Idea of a University
, quoted in George P. Landow,
Hypertext 2.0
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 26.
19 Febvre and Martin, op. cit., 261.
20 Stockwell, op. cit., 47.
21 Landow, op. cit., 21.
22 Elizabeth Eisenstein,
The Printing Press as an Agent of Change
(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 303.
23 Ibid., 304.
24 Leonard Shlain,
The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image
(New York: Penguin, 1999), 325.
25 Ibid., 331.
26 John Lothrop Motley, “The Rise of the Dutch Republic,” in
The History of the Netherlands, Complete
, 1855,
http://www.literaturemania.com/jm00v10/page86.asp
; accessed 7 December 2006.
27 Shlain, op. cit., 345.
28 Ibid., 372.
29 Ibid., 375.
1 Frances Amelia Yates,
The Art of Memory
(London: Routledge, 1999), 137.
2 Rhodri Lewis, “From Athens to Elsinore: The Early Modern Art of Memory, Reconsidered” (Preprint, Berlin: Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 2006), 5-7.
3 Thomas Aquinas,
De anima
, quoted in Yates, op. cit., 32.
4 Willis, quoted in Lewis, op. cit.,19.
5 Yates, op. cit., 121.
6 Yates, op. cit., 80.
7 Ibid., 113.
8 Ibid., 123.
9 Ibid., 172.
10 Lewis, op. cit., 10-12.
11 Ibid., 158.
12 Ibid., 127.
13 Bruno, quoted in Ibid., 200.
14 Bruno, quoted in Ibid., 228.
15 Yates, op. cit., 223.
16 Like the Gnostics, Bruno believed that 30 was a mystical number (representing, for example, the number of disciples of John the Baptist and the number of eons). Thirty is also deeply associated with magical practices like those of Simon Magus.
17 Yates, op. cit., 212-213.
18 Bruno, quoted in Yates, op. cit., 217.
19 See
Chapter 1
.
20 Lewis, op. cit., 14.
21 Aubrey, quoted in Yates, op. cit., 370.
22 Bacon, quoted in Yates, op. cit., 371.
23 Francis Bacon,
Novum Organum
, 2.26 in Graham Rees and Lisa Jardine, eds.,
The Oxford Francis Bacon
, 15 vols. (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1996-), 11, 285-287.
24 Francis Bacon, quoted in John Henry,
Knowledge Is Power: How Magic, the Government and an Apocalyptic Vision Helped Francis Bacon to Create Modern Science
(Cambridge, England: Totem Books, 2004), 43.
25 Bacon,
Novum Organum
, quoted in Ibid., 49.
26 The title is play on Aristotle’s
Organon.
27 Bacon, quoted in William Sessions,
Francis Bacon Revisited
(New York: Twayne, 1996), 79.
28 Bacon,
Great Instauration
, quoted in Stephen Jay Gould, “Bacon, Brought Home,”
Natural History
108(1999), 28-32, 72-78.
29 Bacon, quoted in Matthew Battles,
Library: An Unquiet History
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 84.
30 Bacon, quoted in Sessions, op. cit., 78.
31 Rhodri Lewis,
Language, Mind and Nature: Artificial Languages in England from Bacon to Locke
(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2007),
Chapter 5
.
32 Ibid., 224.
33 Wilkins, quoted in Lewis, op. cit., 230.
34 Ibid., 237.
35 “John Wilkins,”
BBC History
,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/wilkins_john.shtml
; accessed 5 February 2004.
36 Jorge Luis Borges, “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” in
Other Inquisitions: 1937-1952,
trans. Ruth L. C. Simms (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1964).