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.

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.)

Semites- More Than Just Jews

A stylised T and O map, depicting Asia as the home of the descendents of Shem (Sem). Africa is ascribed to Ham and Europe to Japheth

Map showing the distribution of Semitic languages

When I first learned that my blogs were to be on the Semitic civilization I thought that it would be pretty easy. I mean, when a person thinks of Semites they think of Jews don't they? But when I did a google search I was surprised what I found. Semites not only refer to Jews but to they whole region of Mesopotamia and Arabia. It turns out that the stereotype of only Jews being Semites is very recent.

The term Semitic was first suggested by German scholar Ludwig Schlozer, to signify languages that were closely related to Hebrew. The word "Semitic" is an adjective derived from Shem, one of the three sons of Noah in the Bible. The idea of "Semitic: peoples is derived from Biblical accounts of teh origins of the clutrues known to the ancient Hebrews. Those closest to them in culture and language were generally deemed to be descended from their forefather Shem. Enemeis were often said to be descendants of his cursed nephew, Canaan. In Genesis 10: 21-31, Shem is described as the father of Aram, Asshur, and Arpachshad: the Biblical ancestors of the Arabs, Arameans, Assyrians, Babylonians, Chaldeans, Sabaeans, and Hebrews, etc., all of whose languages are closely related. (Try saying this list out loud, you run out of breath pretty fast.)

The term "anti-Semitic" pretty much refers to Jews only. It was first used in 1879 by German journalist Wilhelm Marr in a pamphlet called, "The Victory of Germandom over Jewry." Marr argued that Jews who had Judaized Geramans beyond salvation. In 1879 marr founded the "League for Anti-Semitism".