Paper did not come into general use until the fourteenth century, for more than a thousand years the chief writing material used for books was made from the skins of animals—
Any question, however innocuous, could raise the prospect of a discussion, a discussion that would imply that religious doctrines were open to inquiry and argument.
Affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is?
There is no single explanation for the emergence of the Renaissance and the release of the forces that have shaped our own world.
The transformation was not sudden or once-for-all, but it became increasingly possible to turn away from a preoccupation with angels and demons and immaterial causes and to focus instead on things in...
The discussion itself is what most matters, the fact that we can reason together easily, with a blend of wit and seriousness, never descending into gossip or slander and always allowing room for alter...
The bookworm—one of the teeth of time, as Hooke put it—is no longer familiar to ordinary readers, but the ancients knew it very well.
Still have I borne it with a patient shrug, For suff ’rance is the badge of all our tribe. (1.3.105–6)
It reflects as well something extraordinary about the mental or spiritual world they inhabited, something noted in one of his letters by the French novelist Gustave Flaubert: Just when the gods had ce...
It is an heretic that makes the fire, Not she which burns in’t. (2.3.114–15)
He that died o’Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. ’Tis insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll...
APART FROM THE charred papyrus fragments recovered in Herculaneum, there are no surviving contemporary manuscripts from the ancient Greek and Roman world. Everything that has reached us is a copy,
Without prizing either learning or debate, monks nonetheless became the principal readers, librarians, book preservers, and book producers of the Western world.
All monks were expected to know how to read. In a world increasingly dominated by illiterate warlords, that expectation, formulated early in the history of monasticism, was of incalculable importance.
We have only to look attentively at the world around us to grasp that many of the most intense and poignant experiences of our lives are not exclusive to our species.
To spend your existence in the grip of anxiety about death, he wrote, is mere folly. It is a sure way to let your life slip from you incomplete and unenjoyed. He gave voice as well to a thought I had...
The weariest and most loathèd worldly life That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment Can lay on nature is a paradise To what we fear of death.
The monk in the grip of acedia would find it difficult or impossible to read. Looking away from his book, he might try to distract himself with gossip but would more likely glance in disgust at his su...
Jaques’ vision in the same comedy of the whining schoolboy with his satchel / And shining morning face, creeping like snail / Unwillingly to school
In . . . Menenius Agrippa, Shakespeare draws a deft portrait of a successful conservative politician, altogether in the camp of the rich but adept at presenting himself as the people's friend.