No. 1039:
AN ARMOR OF COMMENTARY
by John H. Lienhard
Click here for audio of Episode 1039.
Today, we remove the protective shell from an
ancient text. The University of Houston's College
of Engineering presents this series about the
machines that make our civilization run, and the
people whose ingenuity created them.
The handwritten books of the
high middle ages used a distinctive trick to teach
science, religion, and logic. Those subjects were
all based on ancient authority -- on Vitruvius,
Augustine, or Plato. An Aristotle text would be
laid out in a small square of words, centered on a
page. Around that kernel of text, and sometimes to
the page beyond, flowed commentary.
So the medium became the message. The layout said
the ancient text was infallible. You find that
layout in Bibles today -- still asserting
infallibility. The text lies there like a peach
pit, hard and indestructible. But historian Anthony
Grafton reminds us that the old texts themselves
were soft and vulnerable. "Imprisoned in its armor
of commentary," he says. They were more like an egg
in a shell than a pit in a peach.
The 14th-century Biblical scholar Nicholas of Lyra
produced 50 handwritten volumes of commentary on
the Latin Bible. Little islands of Bible text swam
in that great ocean of words. He used mystical
allegory to shield the down-to-earth text of The
Song of Solomon against salacious readers.
150 years later, Nicholas's commentaries had been
set in the new medium of print, and Martin Luther
was reading them. By then, the old iconographic
armor-plate was breaking down. Luther spent years
making his own translation of the Bible. He warned
that all translations were the work of human minds,
and were flawed.
And so, in Luther's time, a new page layout came
into being. The so-called polyglot Bibles displayed
parallel columns of the same text in two or more
languages. Not only the interpretation, but the
translation itself, was now free to breathe. Of
course, when that happened, the Protestant
Reformation followed.
Once the old science texts were freed from those
cases of commentary, a scientific reformation also
took place. Science had to be rebuilt. Aristotle or
Galen would be judged by new standards. No longer
frozen authorities, they became the human authors
of imperfect early sciences that others could build
upon. After 1500, knowledge would have a living
human center.
It would be silly to claim that renaissance
humanism came about because we changed the layout
of books. That's not how technology works. The
things we make and the thoughts we think are all of
a piece. The way we make a book -- or an engine --
reflects who we are. Once we'd made millions of new
printed books we began reading the old texts with
an easy familiarity. And, as we read books
differently -- well, we began making books
differently as well.
I'm John Lienhard at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
Grafton, A., New Worlds, Ancient Texts
(with April Shelford and Nancy Siraisi). Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.
I am grateful to Jeffery Scoggins, Detering Book
Gallery, for spotting the Grafton source for
me.
Click on the image
for an enlargement.
Image Courtesy of Special
Collections, UH Library
An example of armored
text from Biblia Latina / cum postillis
Nicolai de Lyra et additionibus Pauli
Burgensis... Nuremberg: Anton Koberger,
1485.
Click on the image
for an enlargement.
Image Courtesy of Special
Collections, UH Library
This image shows the dual columns of a polyglot Bible.
Bible. Polyglot. 1496.
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-1997 by John H.
Lienhard.