MY THESIS

Ok, I went through Better Thesis Statements and here is my thesis (tell me what you think):

Although the Gothic, Blackletter font Textura is now considered "illegible"; cultural, political, and religious reasons behind its development should be taken into account in assessing its value.

THE PRINTING PRESS AND READING

"Using a book, not reading it, makes us wise."

-Geffrey Whitney (1586)

Two men demonstrating new ways of using a book:

One actively reading, engaged with the text (look, his hand is on it!) 

and the other standing, ready to act on the gained knowledge.

      As we've discussed in class, medieval reading was communal, out-loud, dogmatic.... very different from the silent reading we're used to today. The printing press had a big impact on reading, according to A History of Reading by Steven Roger Fischer. "With Gutenberg's inaugural tug on the screw press, reading's material, matter, language and practice began to change." Yes, the printing press changed a lot of things in European society, but I want to focus on the impact the printing press had on reading.

Bibliography: Fonts and Typefaces (between 1450-1700)

Burke, James. The Day the Universe Changed. London Writers Ltd., 1985. Burke describes the life of Gutenberg and his printing press then the development of standardized print type that followed. The humanist influences on style are described and the creation of "italic." I found this book in the bibliography of the Wikipedia article History of Western Typography.

Thank you, Dr. Ricks!

   Thanks to this man, the Roman group was able to translate their scroll. This Blog is dedicated to him because if it weren't for him, we would have never figured this thing out.
    I went to the JFSB knocking on every Hebrew or Arabic professor's door because, well.... I'm embarrassed to say they wouldn't answer my desperate emails.... So I became frantic. But thanks to this man, who graciously opened his door and let me into his office, our group has a translation! He said the Arabic was illegible... but he Hebrew he read just fine! He insisted that the direct translation was this: "When his Lord hear the words of his wife saying something like 'make me your servant or slave' he became angry." As I was writing his translation down I asked, "Something like?" and he said "Yes. Something like." So I wrote that down! Straight from the authority himself!
     Now, all that needs to be done is to carve it into our wax tablet! You'll see the final product tomorrow!

Happy 400th, KJB!

    Let me tell you about my experience at The Life and Legacy of the King James Bible exhibit in the HBLL!



Latin Bible (Vulgate).

Vellum manuscript from France, 13th century

     Can I just say that of ALL the ways you can use a book, perhaps the oddest is to put it on display? I like art museums, but art is specifically designed to be viewed. Looking at paintings and sculptures isn't weird to me, but as we begin our study of print knowledge and as I thought about books and went to this exhibit, I thought about how funny it was to look at an exhibit of books. Libraries facilitate the discovery of books by making them available to the public, but sometimes when I'm in the HBLL I see some books that make me wonder if anyone has even opened them before! Putting books on display certainly makes them visible, but the book also becomes inaccessible to someone who may want to reference it. After all, you can only open up a book so  that two pages are displayed (when they are in their original form, of course). The "interactive tool" we talk about in lecture that is a book becomes a piece of sculpture when you put it on diplay like that!
       So I guess I want to address the value of putting books on display, especially these ones. A library would have to have good reason to take books out of circulation and exhibit them (though I doubt these books have been accessible to the public for a long time, if they ever were.)

Hand me a Q-Tip, We're making Diptychs!

  
diptych:  device with two flat plates attached at a hinge
Plus, let me explain my awesome joke in the title:  Q-tips....ear wax... wax tablets.... 

A Riddle

   "Of honey-laden bees I first was born,  
     But in the forest grew my outer coat;  
     My shoes from tough hides came.  An iron point   
     In artful windings cuts a fair design, 
     And leaves long, twisted furrows, like a plow...." 
                    (Riddle 32:  Pitman 18-19)

The Greatest Treasure

      The TV show Meet the Anscestors had a special episode (yah, it was on BBC Television... a favorite cable channel of mine...) called "Our Top Ten Treasures"--British experts voted on the most important treasures found in Britain. Among the top ten treasures  was a chess set from around 1150 A.D., a solid ceremonial gold cape from 1900-1600 B.C., and a gold cup from about 1700-1500 B.C. 



 Some of the Vindolanda Tablets--Britain's Greatest Treasure

   
    The Greatest treasure, however, was the Vindolanda Tablets--they are estimated to have been written in the late first century A.D. They are considered the oldest surviving handwritten documents in Britain. They are wooden tablets with ink on them. They were made from birch, alder, and oak--there are nearly 500 of these, though most of them are broken and somewhat indecipherable.

      So, basically, I just want to highlight some of the most interesting tablets found in the Vindalonda Tablets and what we learn from them.

Why did Plato write??

Medieval portrayal of Socrates and his greatest pupil, Plato.

"The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them."

A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, p.39

    If you think about philosophy, it's about as dependent on writing as math. Formulating thoughts in the air is nearly impossible for me, and certainly impossible  for anyone else to understand (just think of how much harder it is to spell a word out loud than to write it down-- in a spelling bee I'd be thinking,"I could do this if i had a pen and paper..")

      However, we do know that Socrates didn't write a line of his thoughts, and he's considered the father of Greek philosophy and modern thought! We only know the things he said indirectly, kind of like how we have the teachings of Jesus Christ though we don't have his direct account--in this way the two have often been compared, because it has only been through the records of others that we know anything of them.  

     The written word, to Socrates, was as a child without a father: unable to protect itself. He said that writing is deceptive like a painting-- paintings portray things that are falsely living and can't answer questions, just as books can indicate things but cannot give further explanation or answers to questions. Once a man writes down his thoughts, he loses control of them, soon his words become a toy for everyone to play with--written words are vulnerable to having their true meaning lost to them. Socrates had no school, no books, he preferred to a "living" philosophy made of conversation with people he met on the streets. Philosophy was to be made in common with others, the research was made orally. So, even though in our minds philosophy is often represented by great literary works (Kant, Hegel, Descartes...), philosophy is not so clearly related to literacy.

     If Socrates was so opposed to writing, as we talked about in class, and he indoctrinated that belief into his greatest pupil, Plato, why, then, did Plato write?? 

Origin of Language

"The dominant contemporary theory of the origin of language proposes that genetic change produced genetic instructions for building a special module for grammar in the human brain. Before genetic specialization for grammar, people had no grammar at all: no grammatical speech, no parsing for grammar, no concept of grammar. To be sure, they communicated (birds and bees communicate) but their communication was totally ungrammatical. It was not language." 

Mark Turner, The Literary Mind (140)

   

    In The Literary Mind, Mark Turner explains a theory held by many scholars (including Noam Chomsky and Paul Bloom) that the development of language is genetic. The idea is that each child is born with special instructions in their genes that code for an autonomous grammar module. When a baby is learning language, then, it is really just learning which parts of its language module to leave on and which parts to turn off. 

Mark Turner comes right out and says "I think this theory of the historical origin of language is wrong."

Dr. Petersen brought up Turner's proposal in the seed post about language, that language came about as a result of story. I was looking at what he had to say and I think it's kind of interesting!