In the course of the vicious Gothic Wars of the mid-sixth century and their still more miserable aftermath, the last commercial workshops of book production folded, and the vestiges of the book market...
ITALIANS HAD BEEN book-hunting for the better part of a century, ever since the poet and scholar Petrarch brought glory on himself in the 1330s by piecing together Livy’s monumental History of Rome an...
Everyone understood that Latin learning was inseparable from whipping. One educational theorist of the time speculated that the buttocks were created in order to facilitate the learning of Latin.
Although insecurity, overconfidence, and murderous rage are strange bedfellows, they all coexist in the tyrant’s soul. He has servants and associates, but in effect he is alone. Institutional restrain...
Acediosus, sometimes translated as apathetic, refers to an illness, specific to monastic communities, which had already been brilliantly diagnosed in the late fourth century by the Desert Father John...
This man, remarked a contemporary, dismayed at the wanton damage, knew as much of antiquities as the moon does of lobsters.)
Our sense that a library is a public good and our idea of what such a place should look like derived precisely from a model created in Rome several thousand years ago.
Progress—like those cartoons that begin with an ape and end with a man sitting at a computer—now gets lost in a hundred detours and false starts, intersecting paths and dead ends. It is difficult to f...
And in the margins of surviving monastic manuscripts there are occasional outbursts of distress: The parchment is hairy19 … Thin ink, bad parchment, difficult text … Thank God, it will soon be dark.
Always penetrates the particular fissures in one’s psychic life.
You call me misbeliever, cut-throat, dog, And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine,
What is honour? A word. What is in that word honour?
What began as downsizing went on to wholesale abandonment. Schools closed, libraries and academies shut their doors, professional grammarians and teachers of rhetoric found themselves out of work. The...
Virtually the entire output of many other writers, famous in antiquity, has disappeared without a trace.
Tyrannical power is more easily exercised when it appears that the old order continues to exist. The reassuring consensual structures may now be hollowed out and merely decorative, but they are all st...
Thou wilt not utter what thou dost not know. And so far will I trust thee,
The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion.
The early founders of monastic orders did not regard copying manuscripts as an exalted activity; on the contrary, as they were highly aware, most of the copying in the ancient world had been done by e...
It was better that monastic scribes had been forced to copy everything exactly at it appeared before their eyes, even those things that made no sense at all.
I am, Jefferson wrote to a correspondent who wanted to know his philosophy of life, an Epicurean.