In lieu of my usual Philosopher Fridays post, this week I’m sharing medievalbooks.nl ‘s post on the tricky business of reading Medieval texts. Have a great weekend.
Reading a medieval book may not seem so different from reading a volume from your own bookshelf: just pick it up, flip to the first page, and start reading. However, apart from the fact that you cannot really hold the average medieval book in your hand – a single volume often weighs as much as a whole pile of today’s books – there is also a problem that occurs when you actually start to read. It turns out you need to decode quite a bit. The first round of decoding happens when your eyes meet the page. The letters on it are shaped very differently from what our brains usually process, so the CPU in our head starts to spin like mad, perhaps even encouraging us to give up. See what happens when you read this snippet from the famous Leiden Glossary (Fig. 1). When you’re done with that, try Thomas Aquinas’ autograph, written in what is appropriately called a ‘littera inintelligibilis’ –…
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2 thoughts on “Cracking Codes in Medieval Books”
Steve Morris
I suppose that even modern texts are full of slang, jargon, pop culture references and in-jokes, although not to the same degree as those medieval scholars.
Rchard E. Hennessey
Love it. Thanks.