Book Read Free

A History of Reading

Page 34

by Alberto Manguel


  10. Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, The Works of Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, Vol. I, trans. L.P. McCauley & A.A. Stephenson (Washington, 1968).

  11. Seneca, Epistulae Morales, ed. R.M. Gummere (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1968), Letter 56.

  12. The refrain tolle, lege doesn’t appear in any ancient children’s game known to us today. Pierre Courcelle suggests that the formula is one used in divination and quotes Marc le Diacre’s Life of Porphyrus, in which the formula is uttered by a figure in a dream, to induce consultation of the Bible for divinatory purposes. See Pierre Courcelle, “L’Enfant et les ‘sortes bibliques’ ”, in Vigiliae Christianae, Vol. 7 (Nîmes, 1953).

  13. Saint Augustine, Confessions, IV, 3.

  14. Saint Augustine, “Concerning the Trinity”, XV, 10: 19, in Basic Writings of Saint Augustine, ed. Whitney J. Oates (London, 1948).

  15. Martial, Epigrams, trans. J.A. Pott & F.A. Wright (London, 1924), I. 38.

  16. Cf. Henri Jean Martin, “Pour une histoire de la lecture”, Revue française d’histoire du livre 46, Paris, 1977. According to Martin, Sumerian (not Aramaic) and Hebrew lack a specific verb meaning “to read”.

  17. Ilse Lichtenstadter, Introduction to Classical Arabic Literature (New York, 1974).

  18. Quoted in Gerald L. Bruns, Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern (New Haven & London, 1992).

  19. Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Princeton, 1976).

  20. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, ed. J.E. King (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1952), Disputation V.

  21. Albertine Gaur, A History of Writing (London, 1984).

  22. William Shepard Walsh, A Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities (Philadelphia, 1892).

  23. Quoted in M.B. Parkes, Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (Berkeley & Los Angeles, 1993).

  24. Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars, ed. J.C. Rolfe (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1970).

  25. T. Birt, Aus dem Leben der Antike (Leipzig, 1922).

  26. Gaur, A History of Writing.

  27. Pierre Riché, Les Écoles et l’enseignement dans l’Occident chrétien de la fin du Ve siècle au milieu du XIe siècle (Paris, 1979).

  28. Parkes, Pause and Effect.

  29. Saint Isaac of Syria, “Directions of Spiritual Training”, in Early Fathers from the Philokalia, ed. & trans. E. Kadloubovsky & G.E.H. Palmer (London & Boston, 1954).

  30. Isidoro de Sevilla, Libri sententiae, III, 13: 9, quoted in Etimologías, ed. Manuel C. Díaz y Díaz (Madrid, 1982–83).

  31. Isidoro de Sevilla, Etimologías, I, 3: 1.

  32. David Diringer, The Hand-Produced Book (London, 1953).

  33. Parkes, Pause and Effect.

  34. Carlo M. Cipolla, Literacy and Development in the West (London, 1969).

  35. Quoted in Wilhelm Wattenbach, Das Schriftwesen im Mittelalter (Leipzig, 1896).

  36. Alan G. Thomas, Great Books and Book Collectors (London, 1975).

  37. Saint Augustine, Confessions, VI, 3.

  38. Psalms 91: 6.

  39. Saint Augustine, Confessions, VI, 3.

  40. David Christie-Murray, A History of Heresy (Oxford & New York, 1976).

  41. Robert I. Moore, The Birth of Popular Heresy (London, 1975).

  42. Heiko A. Oberman, Luther: Mensch zwischen Gott und Teufel (Berlin, 1982).

  43. E.G. Léonard, Histoire générale du protestantisme, Vol. I (Paris, 1961–64).

  44. Van Wyck Brooks, The Flowering of New England, 1815–1865 (New York, 1936).

  45. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude (Cambridge, Mass., 1870).

  THE BOOK OF MEMORY

  1. Saint Augustine, “Of the Origin and Nature of the Soul”, IV, 7: 9, in Basic Writings of Saint Augustine, ed. Whitney J. Oates (London, 1948).

  2. Cicero, De oratore, Vol. I, ed. E.W. Sutton & H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass.,& London, 1957), II, 86: 354.

  3. Louis Racine, Mémoires contenant quelques particularités sur la vie et les ouvrages de Jean Racine, in Jean Racine, Oeuvres complètes, Vol. I, ed. Raymond Picard (Paris, 1950).

  4. Plato, Phaedrus, in The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton & Huntington Cairns (Princeton, 1961).

  5. Mary J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory (Cambridge, 1990).

  6. Ibid.

  7. Eric G. Turner, “I Libri nell’Atene del V e IV secolo A.C.”, in Guglielmo Cavallo, Libri, editori e pubblico nel mondo antico (Rome & Bari, 1992).

  8. John, 8:8.

  9. Carruthers, The Book of Memory.

  10. Ibid.

  11. Aline Rousselle, Porneia (Paris, 1983).

  12. Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London, 1966).

  13. Petrarch, Secretum meum, II, in Prose, ed. Guido Martellotti et al. (Milan, 1951).

  14. Victoria Kahn, “The Figure of the Reader in Petrarch’s Secretum”, in Petrarch: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (New York & Philadelphia, 1989).

  15. Petrarch, Familiares, 2.8.822, quoted in ibid.

  LEARNING TO READ

  1. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (Paris, 1955).

  2. A. Dorlan, “Casier descriptif et historique des rues & maisons de Sélestat” (1926), in Annuaire de la Société des Amis de la Bibliothèque de Sélestat (Sélestat, 1951).

  3. Quoted in Paul Adam, Histoire de l’enseignement secondaire à Sélestat (Sélestat, 1969).

  4. Herbert Grundmann, Vom Ursprung der Universität im Mittelalter (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1957).

  5. Ibid.

  6. Edouard Fick, Introduction to La Vie de Thomas Platter écrite par lui-même (Geneva, 1862).

  7. Paul Adam, L’Humanisme à Sélestat: L’École, les humanistes, la bibliothèque (Sélestat, 1962).

  8. Thomas Platter, La Vie de Thomas Platter écrite par lui-même, trans. Edouard Fick (Geneva, 1862).

  9. Israel Abrahams, Jewish Life in the Middle Ages (London, 1896).

  10. I am grateful to Professor Roy Porter for this caveat.

  11. Mateo Palmieri, Della vita civile (Bologna, 1944).

  12. Leon Battista Alberti, I Libri della famiglia, ed. R. Romano & A. Tenenti (Turin, 1969).

  13. Quintilian, The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, trans. H.E. Butler (Oxford, 1920–22), I i 12.

  14. Quoted in Pierre Riche & Daniele Alexandre-Bidon, L’Enfance au Moyen Age. Catalogue of exhibition at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, Oct. 26, 1994—Jan. 15, 1995 (Paris, 1995).

  15. Ibid.

  16. M.D. Chenu, La Théologie comme science au XIIIe siècle, 3rd ed. (Paris, 1969).

  17. Dominique Sourdel & Janine Sourdel-Thomine, eds., Medieval Education in Islam and the West (Cambridge, Mass., 1977).

  18. Alfonso el Sabio, Las Siete Partidas, ed. Ramón Menéndez Pidal (Madrid, 1955), 2 31 IV.

  19. We have a letter, from about the same time, from a student requesting that his mother obtain some books for him, without concern about the cost: “I also want Paul to buy the Orationes Demosthenis Olynthiacae, have it bound and send it to me.” Steven Ozment, Three Behaim Boys: Growing Up in Early Modern Germany (New Haven & London, 1990).

  20. Adam, Histoire de l’enseignement secondaire à Sélestat.

  21. Jakob Wimpfeling, Isidoneus, XXI, in J. Freudgen, Jakob Wimphelings pädagogische Schriften (Paderborn, 1892).

  22. Isabel Suzeau, “Un Écolier de la fin du XVe siècle: À propos d’un cahier inédit de l’école latine de Sélestat sous Crato Hofman”, in Annuaire de la Société des Amis de la Bibliothèque de Sélestat (Sélestat, 1991).

  23. Jacques Le Goff, Les Intellectuels au Moyen Age, rev. ed. (Paris, 1985).

  24. Letter from L. Guidetti to B. Massari dated Oct. 25, 1465, in La critica del Landino, ed. R. Cardini (Florence, 1973). Quoted in Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).

  25. Wimpfeling, Isidoneus, XXI.

  26. Adam, L’Humanisme à Sélestat.

  27. Ibid.

  28. I
n the end, Dringenberg’s preference became prevalent: in the early years of the sixteenth century, as a reaction to the Reformation, the teachers at the Latin school eliminated all pagan writers deemed “suspect”, i.e., not “canonized” by authorities such as Saint Augustine, and insisted on a strict Catholic education.

  29. Jakob Spiegel, “Scholia in Reuchlin Scaenica progymnasmata”, in G. Knod, Jakob Spiegel aus Schlettstadt: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des deutschen Humanismus (Strasbourg, 1884).

  30. Jakob Wimpfeling, “Diatriba” IV, in G. Knod, Aus der Bibliothek des Beatus Rhenanus: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Humanismus (Sélestat, 1889).

  31. Jerôme Gebwiler, quoted in Schlettstadter Chronik des Schulmeisters Hieronymus Gebwiler, ed. J. Geny (Sélestat, 1890).

  32. Nicolas Adam, “Vraie manière d’apprendre une langue quelconque”, in Dictionnaire pédagogique (Paris, 1787).

  33. Keller, Helen, The Story of My Life, 3rd ed. (London, 1903).

  34. Quoted in E.P. Goldschmidt, Medieval Texts and Their First Appearance in Print, suppl. to Biographical Society Transactions 16 (Oxford, 1943).

  35. The Catholic Church did not revoke the ban on Copernicus’s writings until 1758.

  THE MISSING FIRST PAGE

  1. Franz Kafka, Erzählungen (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1967).

  2. Cf. Goethe (quoted in Umberto Eco, The Limits of Interpretation [Bloomington & Indianapolis, 1990]): “Symbolism transforms the experience into an idea and an idea into an image, so that the idea expressed through the image remains always active and unattainable and, even though expressed in all languages, remains inexpressible. Allegory transforms experience into a concept and a concept into an image, but so that the concept remains always defined and expressible by the image.”

  3. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, 1979).

  4. Dante, Le Opere di Dante. Testo critico della Società Dantesca Italiana, ed. M. Barbi et al. (Milan, 1921–22).

  5. Ernst Pawel, The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka (New York, 1984).

  6. Franz Kafka, Brief an den Vater (New York, 1953).

  7. Quoted in Pawel, The Nightmare of Reason.

  8. Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka, trans. Goronwy Rees, 2nd ed., revised and enlarged (New York, 1971).

  9. Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim, 2 vols., trans. Olga Marx (New York, 1947).

  10. Marc-Alain Ouaknin, Le Livre brûlé: Philosophie du Talmud (Paris, 1986).

  11. Pawel, The Nightmare of Reason.

  12. Janouch, Conversations with Kafka.

  13. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1968).

  14. Ibid.

  15. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. David Magarshack, Vol. I (London, 1958).

  16. Janouch, Conversations with Kafka.

  17. Eco, The Limits of Interpretation.

  18. Pawel, The Nightmare of Reason.

  19. Janouch, Conversations with Kafka.

  20. Quoted in Gershom Sholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1981).

  21. Marthe Robert, La Tyrannie de l’imprimé (Paris, 1984).

  22. Jorge Luis Borges, “Kafka y sus precursores”, in Otras Inquisitions (Buenos Aires, 1952).

  23. Robert, La Tyrannie de l’imprimé.

  24. Vladimir Nabokov, “Metamorphosis”, in Lectures on Literature (New York, 1980).

  25. Pawel, The Nightmare of Reason.

  PICTURE READING

  1. Luigi Serafini, Codex Seraphinianus, intr. by Italo Calvino (Milan, 1981).

  2. John Atwatter, The Penguin Book of Saints (London, 1965).

  3. K. Heussi, “Untersuchungen zu Nilus dem Asketem”, in Texte und Untersuchungen, Vol. XLII, Fasc. 2 (Leipzig, 1917).

  4. Louis-Sébastien Le Nain de Tillemont, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire ecclésiastique des six premiers siècles, Vol. XIV (Paris, 1693–1712).

  5. Dictionnaire de théologie catholique (Paris, 1903–50).

  6. Saint Nilus, Epistula LXI: “Ad Olympidoro Eparcho”, in Patrologia Graeca, LXXIX, 1857–66.

  7. Quoted in F. Piper, Über den christlichen Biderkreis (Berlin, 1852).

  8. Quoted in Claude Dagens, Saint Grégoire le Grand: Culture et experience chrétienne (Paris, 1977).

  9. Synod of Arras, Chapter 14, in Sacrorum Nova et Amplissima Collectio, ed. J.D. Mansi (Paris & Leipzig, 1901–27), quoted in Umberto Eco, Il problema estetico di Tommaso d’Aquino (Milan, 1970).

  10. Exodus 20: 4; Deuteronomy 5: 8.

  11. I Kings 6–7.

  12. André Grabar, Christian Iconography: A Study of Its Origins (Princeton, 1968).

  13. Matthew 1: 22; also Matthew 2: 5; 2: 15; 4: 14; 8: 17; 13: 35; 21: 4; 27: 35.

  14. Luke 24: 44.

  15. A Cyclopedic Bible Concordance (Oxford, 1952).

  16. Saint Augustine, “In Exodum” 73, in Quaestiones in Heptateuchum, II, Patrologia Latina, XXXIV, Chapter 625, 1844–55.

  17. Eusebius of Caesare, Demostratio evangelium, IV, 15, Patrologia Graeca, XXII, Chapter 296, 1857–66.

  18. Cf. “For they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ”, I Corinthians 10: 4.

  19. Grabar, Christian Iconography.

  20. Quoted in Piper, Über den christlichen Bilderkreis.

  21. Allan Stevenson, The Problem of the Missale Speciale (London, 1967).

  22. Cf. Maurus Berve, Die Armenbibel (Beuron, 1989). The Biblia Pauperum is catalogued as Ms. 148 at the Heidelberg University Library.

  23. Gerhard Schmidt, Die Armenbibeln des XIV Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1959).

  24. Karl Gotthelf Lessing, G.E. Lessings Leben (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1793–95).

  25. G.E. Lessing, “Ehemalige Fenstergemälde im Kloster Hirschau”, in Zur Geschichte und Literatur aus der Herzoglichen Bibliothek zu Wolfenbüttel (Braunschweig, 1773).

  26. G. Heider, “Beitrage zur christlichen Typologie”, in Jahrbuch der K.K. Central-Comission zur Erforschung der Baudenkmale, Vol. V (Vienna, 1861).

  27. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York, 1964).

  28. François Villon, Oeuvres complètes, ed. P.L. Jacob (Paris, 1854).

  29. Ibid., “Ballade que Villon fit à la requeste de sa mère pour prier Nostre-Dame”, in Le Grand Testament:

  Femme je suis povrette et ancienne,

  Ne rien ne scay; oncques lettre ne leuz;

  Au monstier voy, dont suis parroissienne,

  Paradis painct, ou sont harpes et luz,

  Et ung enfer ou damnez sont boulluz:

  L’ung me faict paour; l’autre, joye et liesse.”

  30. Berve, Die Armenbibel.

  31. Schmidt, Die Armenbibeln des XIV Jahrhunderts; also Elizabeth L. Einsenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1983).

  BEING READ TO

  1. Philip S. Foner, A History of Cuba and Its Relations with the United States, Vol. II (New York, 1963).

  2. José Antonio Portuondo, ‘La Aurora’ y los comienzos de la prensa y de la organización en Cuba (Havana, 1961).

  3. Ibid.

  4. Foner, A History of Cuba.

  5. Ibid.

  6. Hugh Thomas, Cuba; the Pursuit of Freedom (London, 1971).

  7. L. Glenn Westfall, Key West: Cigar City U.S.A. (Key West, 1984).

  8. Manuel Deulofeu y Lleonart, Martí, Cayo Hueso y Tampa: La emigración (Cienfuegos, 1905).

  9. Kathryn Hall Proby, Mario Sánchez: Painter of Key West Memories (Key West, 1981). Also personal interview, Nov. 20, 1991.

  10. T.F. Lindsay, St Benedict, His Life and Work (London, 1949).

  11. Borges’s story “The Aleph”, in El Aleph (Buenos Aires, 1949), from which this description is taken, centres around one such universal vision.

  12. Garcia Colombas & Inaki Aranguren, La regla de San Benito (Madrid, 1979).

  13. “Thus there are two Books from whence I collect
my Divinity; besides that written one of God, another of his servant Nature, that universal and publick Manuscript, that lies expans’d unto the Eyes of all.” Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (London, 1642), I: 16.

  14. “The Rule of S. Benedict”, in Documents of the Christian Church, ed. Henry Bettenson (Oxford, 1963).

  15. John de Ford, in his Life of Wulfric of Haselbury, compares this “love of silence” to the Bride’s entreaties for the quiet in the Song of Songs 2: 7. In Pauline Matarasso, ed., The Cistercian World: Monastic Writings of the Twelfth Century (London, 1993).

  16. “I tell you brothers, no misfortune can touch us, no situation so galling or distressing can arise that does not, as soon as Holy Writ seizes hold of us, either fade into nothingness or become bearable.” Aelred of Rievaulx, “The Mirror of Charity”, in Matarasso, ibid.

  17. Cedric E. Pickford, “Fiction and the Reading Public in the Fifteenth Century”, in the Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, Vol. 45 II, Manchester, Mar. 1963.

  18. Gaston Paris, La Littérature française au Moyen Age (Paris, 1890).

  19. Quoted in Urban Tigner Holmes, Jr., Daily Living in the Twelfth Century (Madison, Wisc., 1952).

  20. Pliny the Younger, Lettres I–IX, ed. A.M. Guillemin, 3 vols. (Paris, 1927–28), IX: 36.

  21. J.M. Richard, Mahaut, comtesse d’Artois et de Bourgogne (Paris, 1887).

  22. Iris Cutting Origo, The Merchant of Prato: Francesco di Marco Datini (New York, 1957).

  23. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: Village occitan de 1294 à 1324 (Paris, 1978).

  24. Madeleine Jeay, ed., Les Évangiles des quenouilles (Montreal, 1985). The distaff, the cleft stick that holds wool or flax for spinning, symbolizes the female sex. In English, “the distaff side of the family” means “the female branch”.

  25. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha (Madrid, 1605), I: 34.

  26. Fourteen chapters earlier, Don Quixote himself has reproved Sancho for telling a story “full of interruptions and digressions”, instead of the linear narration that the bookish knight expects. Sancho’s defence is that “this is how they tell tales in my part of the country; I don’t know any other way and it isn’t fair of Your Grace to ask me to undertake new manners.” Ibid., I: 20.

 

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