Page 85 - Virtual Research Lab flip book
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kind of digital commonplace book, or figuratively as a set of commonplace books on different themes.
Another change in book usage as a result of printing that the Rouses observed was that after printing was well established major painters who had specialized in medieval manuscript illumination gradually turned their attention away from books to panel painting:
(1) With the growth of print as the normal medium of the page, the main medieval vehicle for relating new thought to inherit- ed tradition disappears—namely, the gloss and the practice of glossing. To be sure glossed books like the commentaries on the Decretum, the Liber sextus or Nicholas de Lyra on the scriptures are often printed; but the printed book is not itself an object in which one writes long glosses. Perusal of Chatelain, Paléographie des classiques latin (Paris, 1884-92), will uncover pages of Virgils, Lu- cans, Juvenals and Horaces, the set texts of the trivium, covered with interlinear and marginal glosses of all dates. The manu- script books had in fact been laid out to be glossed, namely, with the text in large letters down the center of the page, surrounded by white space. In contrast, one can think of only a handful of printed books in which the page has been set up in type to be glossed by hand. What effect this had on processes of thought, methods of instruction, and the structured comparison of new ideas to old, would be interesting to work out. (2) With the ad- vent of print the book becomes a monolithic unit, compared to its handwritten predecessor. Medieval books, particularly those individualistic owner-produced volumes of the fifteenth century, are frequently made up of numerous pieces varying from one to several quires in length, which were initially kept in loose wrap- pers and were bound together by the institution which inherited the volume. A person interested in a given text could copy out what he wanted and no more: thus, of the two hundred manu- scripts of the Lumen anime, only half can be classified according
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