Farewell the Tranquil Mind, Farewell Content, or Then Farewell Frost, and Welcome Heat!

Hehe, it's another pun... (These are both lines from Shakespeare; the first I made into a pun with "content," and in the second, I juxtaposed "heat" and "frost" because I'm headed back to the South after finishing exams!)

Although all four types of knowledge discussed in class- folk, oral, written, and print- have their own specialized uses in different areas, their uses today play a very different role than in the past. One's use has become very different from the others' in the modern age in terms of what knowledge it continues to preserve and deliver: oral knowledge has ceased to become an effective method of learning new knowledge but has instead taken the role of preserving past cultural knowledge.

Pre-Salon Post

For our final exam, we're having a salon discussion. This is my pre-salon post covering topics from class in a note/list-like format.

An Overview of Francophone Printing's Impediments

So in writing this post (which really is just an attempt to come out on top of what I've imagined as a race between Alex and myself to see who ends up with more blog posts... just kidding), I figured I would give a basic overview of the sections of my paper for general discussion.

Basically, I pinpointed the political, economic, and religious factors that impeded printing in the French world, focusing on the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Thesis in the Making

My British Lit teacher tells me every time I write a paper that the biggest problem is my thesis. (I'm not sure I agree, but that's not the point.) So, getting started is usually the hard part for me.

My paper revolves around printing in French-speaking Europe in the 15th to 18th century. My thesis, as of present, is thus:

The French-speaking world’s less-developed printing system in comparison to that of other Western European powers was a result of several political and economic disadvantages with which it was faced during the rise of the printing press in Western Europe.

Now, I have a slight issue with this. Does describing their printing system as "less-developed" make sense or does it seem inappropriately vague? It makes sense in my head because I know what I'm going to go on to talk about in my paper, but the lack of almost any specificity in my thesis seems a little undesirable in my mind...

Comments?
P.S. I apparently found out how to double-space part of my post. I'm not sure how to change it back to single-spaced, though, so I apologize if anyone else has OCD issues reading this because I kind of did...

Printing and its Effects on Libraries

Brianne's reflection in her post for the annotated bibliography assignment got me thinking about libraries. Remember way back when we discussed libraries as an institution of knowledge? We discussed the library as a institution of knowledge for a written medium. However, I'm sitting in a library right now, and there aren't too many hand-written manuscripts I can handle. It's mostly printed books. I am therefore going to take a look at libraries in terms of print knowledge.

Libraries (by which I mean the print-based libraries we're used to) are incredibly useful. When in doubt, we go to the library. When looking for information on printing and various topics related to it, we search in a library. When we need to kill a basilisk, we wander to the library, mirror in hand. When hunting Voldemort's horcruxes, we travel in a mobile library. You get the point.

L'Imprimerie en le Monde Francophone

In English: The Printing Press in the French World

For our annotated bibliography assignment, I went in with an idea of wanting to do something related to how printing varied from place to place. To begin my search for sources, I skimmed the "notes" for the two sections of Reinventing Knowledge that overlap with the same time span as our print unit: the University and the Republic of Letters. I got nine possible texts from this. Of these nine, six were English texts about Europe, one was on the Islam world (a very interesting sounding work called Technology and Religious Change: Islam and the Impact of Print), and one was on China (yes, I know, that's only eight... I'm going to get there). These last two got me thinking about how I'd like to possibly include a global scale of printing instead of focusing exclusively on Europe. Unfortunately, there was no version of the cool-sounding Islam text to be found. While I did find the Chinese text online through the library's website, I ended up deciding to drop it because of a lack of non-Western books on the subject and because, honestly, it didn't sound nearly as cool as the Islam one (the subtitle was "A Historical Essay" ... come on, that sounds boring even to me).

The last text I thought seemed applicable from the end notes for Reinventing Knowledge was entitled "L'Histoire de la République des Lettres en France" ("The History of the Republic of Letters in France," but you probably could have guessed that...) Now, I wasn't planning on focusing on France an French Europe specifically yet, but keep this in the back of your mind.

Reflections Related to the Roman Rosetta

In order to not bombard the blog with an excessive number of posts about my group's experience with the Rosetta Project, I have combined my three reflections into one very long blog post... Hopefully, it's not too long. (Ok, it is really long. That's because it's three posts of varying length in one, but it's more organized this way and less obnoxious, I think.)

Part One: Creating the Artifact
In creating wax tablets for the Rosetta Project, my group (see also the posts by Marc Wein (part 2) and Alyssa Cardon; Madison Grant will have one up, too; I am blatantly stealing pictures from their posts as well as the Asians who took more pictures of out tablet...) had the advantage of not needing to chisel out stone, but the creation process was a bit more involved than some of the others.

The final product should have looked something like this. Essentially, we have a wooden folder with wax on the inner right that we would write on. There's really two major differences between our wax tablet and the one that the Romans would have used. First, the Romans would have probably used beeswax, which we were unsuccessful at finding. Instead, we used what wax we could find, scented wax melts, which was good because my apartment smelled nice afterwards, but this provided a few challenges for us... Second, we weren't able to find anything at all authentic for the binding of the codex, so we just have single tablets that have been removed from a codex. (Come on, we weren't going to give another group a whole codex to translate! We don't want to give away that many of Ancient Rome's secrets!)

This is what our final product ended up looking like:

You did WHAT to the Bible?!?!?!

Going to the King James Bible exhibit, I imagined that the professors wanted, in addition to our gaining a greater appreciation of print culture, for us to become more appreciative of the great men who translated the Bible. This is not exactly how my experience went, though...

Rise of the Author

One thing that has been mentioned by Dr. Burton a couple of times in class is that the print culture led to the "rise of the author." I am going to both take issue with and defend this assessment.

There were, of course, authors before the middle ages. Well-known authors of antiquity included Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Homer, etc., but I'm pretty sure that this isn't what Dr. Burton means when he says "rise of the author." What Dr. Burton seems to be saying is that following the abundance of authorship in antiquity, there was virtually no authorship in the middle ages because they relied on classical texts so much but once the renaissance began after the development of the printing press, authorship resurfaced.

The Half-Blood Prints

Someone who is very knowledgeable, especially a college professor, is likely to be portrayed with a book about a favorite subject. Those who know a lot about several different topics is said to be "well-versed" (which I am assuming comes from a time before books, when bards would sing verses) or "well-read." Those who have an even more advanced knowledge that is mysterious or even mystical are also typically portrayed with a book, a book of spells.

If we see a depiction of Merlin, who lived before printed text existed, he would likely still have a book- and a rather large book at that. In addition to being highly expensive because of its size, such a book is worth even more because of the knowledge it contains. Clergymen, one of the most powerful class in the middle ages, always had another rather large book with them: the Bible, which although not a book of spells does have some similarities to one because of the super-human elements in both. Books have long been associated with both knowledge and power. But how does this concept change when books go from being hand-written to being printed?

To answer this question, I am going to do something incredibly post-medieval and post-Renaissance. I'm going to talk about our newest celebrity...

Counting Before and After

Dr. Burton got really excited about numeral systems in class today, and while many of us mentioned the images of the counting systems for our civilizations, no one created has a post about it (actually, it probably wasn't ever directly related to what we were talking about, but whatever). Since we all have at least a little familiarity with Roman numerals, and because numbers were important to the Romans, I figured I'd do a brief post on them.

The Problem with Writing

I feel like the overall theme we established with our unit on oral culture was, in simplified terms, something like "Oral preservation and subsequent acquisition of knowledge is much more important than we realized, and it has preserved a lot of knowledge about past civilizations." I feel like what we're kind of getting to with this unit is "Written knowledge enhanced the oral" with some sort of implication that the written is superior. HOWEVER, I think this is too hasty a statement for us to make without considering some downsides to written knowledge that haven't really been discussed yet.

Now that we write, we can draw horribly inaccurate pictures!

As I mentioned in my post about the transition from an oral culture to a written culture in Rome, the Empire itself had a very important use for writing, especially as Rome tried to manage its empire. One thing that helped Rome not only manage its empire but also expand it was Roman cartography, which was very much related to writing.

Roman Plates

I really enjoyed going to the Special Collections yesterday. Seeing all the items there was really cool, especially the hand-made illustrated book (I don't remember whether it was actually a Bible or not) from France. Out of all the things we looked at, there was one that stood out to me as very different: the Roman military/citizenship document. As Rome is my focus civilization, I figured I'd write a short post on the plates.

From Podium to Pen in Rome

So, we had a nice little break with King Benjamin and his teaching charity, one of the most important ideas of Christianity. Now... back to bloodthirsty and pagan Romans!

The Roman Empire serves as an excellent example of how a culture can change from being oral to being written. In a previous post, I mentioned how Virgil's Aeneid, published in 19 BC, showed how Roman culture was still principally oral. In his day, there would have been Romans who could tell the entire story of the Aeneas's journey in the Aeneid much like bards would have told stories such as Beowulf. Within half a century, however, this had changed. When Ovid published his Metamorphoses in 8 AD, there were still people who could orally tell the stories that he had published. Very few people, however, (if any other than Ovid himself) could tell all of these stories. Within the decade(s) after Metamorphoses was published, Rome had a very much written culture. (While Ovid's works, Metamorphoses in particular, played a role in this shift, I should clarify that I do not mean Ovid himself was solely responsible, for that would be a very generous assertion on his behalf.)

Class Recitation of King Benjamin's Speech

Great job group 1, and great job class! This was a really cool experience, once we overcame intense levels of anxiety and stress.

The King's Conference

As Dr. Burton mentioned in the instructor post Monday, we're kind of developing our own subject for our posts this week. I had an idea come to mind earlier today while listening to the class's performance of King Benjamin's speech regarding how the text is the way it is because of its oral nature despite the fact that we have a textual record of it. I am going to focus mainly on the verses that I had to recite/perform because these are the ones I am most familiar with and I think these will be sufficient enough to get my point across.

It lives! - The Latin language

So I had a little difficulty scheduling an interview for this week's post... I did, however, come up with a (slightly alternate) solution. Since the main reason for getting an interview was so that we would learn whatever we used for this post orally, I am using a different oral learning source for information for my post: mon professeur francais, Professeur Flood. In this post, I will focus on combining the elements of language preservation and acquisition and Latin by going into more detail about the ways that the Latin language has influenced the English that we speak today, especially through the French language (because really, how much cooler is it to talk about three or four languages instead of two?!).

In my last post, I had two maps that I really liked which showed the expansion of Latin-derived languages and the Latin alphabet across the globe. These maps really showed the extent to which Latin has spread. But how has it spread for us English speakers specifically?

Language affecting us

I happ'd across this link about language from dictionary.com. It kind of relates to what we talked about in class.

Enjoy :)

A Dead Language (?)

Latin is often seen as the epitome of language failing to endure through the ages. The phrase "dead language" in English refers primarily to Latin even though English isn't a Latinate language. Observing and analyzing the Roman Empire's preservation and acquisition of language is therefore very different from doing the same for some other languages which are still spoken today relatively similar to how they were spoken in the past, such as Hebrew or Chinese, because there is no general Latin speaking population anywhere in the world today and nobody on the entire planet will tell you that their first language is Latin. So because Latin is the poster child for "dead languages," I'm going to take a slightly different approach on my post...