How Old Is the Index?

Every good book should have an index. It’s a handy way to find topics, people, and places. We even have one in It’s a Feudal, Feudal World.

It’s an index!

The index is such a good idea that you wonder how books ever did without it. So when was the index invented? (And why is this post tagged as being about the middle ages?)

There was a part called the index in many ancient scrolls, but this was a list of topics in the order that they appeared in the book: more like a table of contents than an index of subjects. It was more than a thousand years after them that what we know as the subject index first appeared.

Its immediate parent was a list of words, rather than of ideas: the concordance. The first concordances listed all the places in a book that a particular word appeared. That was very handy for preachers, since they could use the concordance to find bible quotes that used a particular word. The concordance was also useful when interpreting the text, since it listed all the places in the bible a term appeared (in Hebrew, using one place a word appeared to explain the meaning of another place that same word appeared is known as a gezerah shavah).

The first biblical concordances were assembled early in the thirteenth century by the Dominican friars at Saint-Jacques, a community of preachers in Paris. Since every bible was handwritten, each had different page numbers, so the concordances located a word by its book and chapter, plus a letter between A to G to show how far into the chapter it was. (For convenience, the Dominicans marked A to G in the margin of the bible itself.)

From there, it was easy to start making true subject indexes, listing concepts instead of specific words.  By 1250 or so, there were indexes for books by Aristotle, Plato, Boethius, and others, many using the A–G marks the Dominicans invented.

In Paris and other major cities, you could get a set of ready-made indexes for these important works: MS lat. 16334 at the National Library of France is a combined index with 570 topics for books by several authors. If you couldn’t get a ready-made index, you could always index the book yourself once you added A–G in the margins. By the start of the fourteenth century, authors wee realizing that an index was useful enough that they should provide one in their book, rather than making the reader buy or create it.

Oddly enough, although France was where indexing was born, modern French books often don’t have an index. Instead, the back of the book has a detailed table of contents, like the ancient index. But indexes thrive in the rest of the world, even if computer keyword searches now give them a run for their money. And we owe them to medieval French preachers who wanted an easier way to look for bible verses.

---

It’s a Feudal, Feudal World: A Different Medieval History is available for pre-order from Amazon.ca and your local bookstore, to be released in July 2013.

Manuscripts on the Web

Illustrated manuscripts aren’t unique to the Middle Ages, but the era really does own the style. Many manuscripts are real works of art, embellished with gold leaf and paints with unusual ingredients. (You can see how scholars are using spectrometry to identify those materials at the MINIARE Project.)

Luckily, the internet means you can see many of these beautiful books without having to trek around the world.

The Parker Library at Corpus Christi, Cambridge has digital images of its collection at http://parkerweb.stanford.edu, including Ms 286, the sixth century evangeliary used in the enthronement of the Archbishop of Canterbury (I can’t link directly to it, but folio 129 verso is very nice), and Ms 61: a copy of Chaucer’s Troilus and Cressida whose frontispiece (fol. 1 verso) may show the poet himself reading the the poem (he’s the man in the center in the red box).

Oxford University has put up a collection of its medieval manuscripts at http://image.ox.ac.uk, including beast-headed evangelists like the dog-headed Mark in this collection of gospels (go to fol. 71v).

The British Library’s digitized manuscripts are at http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts, and include a drawing of the elephant Louis XI of France gave to Henry III of England as a gift. (The Parker has its own drawing of the same elephant.)

Those three sites are really only the tip of the iceberg. The Vatican Library has an ongoing digitization project and there’s an excellent digitized collection at the Bavarian State Library (English-language site here).

Of course, to do more than just enjoy the pictures you need to read Latin. But if you’re really keen the National Archives of the UK have both Latin and paleography (old handwriting) tutorials here.

---

It’s a Feudal, Feudal World: A Different Medieval History is available for pre-order from Amazon.ca and your local bookstore, to be released in July 2013.

Medieval Forests and Gardens

When you put the words forest and medieval together, you usually get visions of trackless wilderness and merry outlaws: Robin Hood in Sherwood Forest, or King Arthur and the Knights Who Say Ni. In fact, a lot of medieval forests were carefully managed to generate a steady stream of useful timber. Techniques like coppicing and pollarding let people harvest wood without killing the trees. Good forest management was complemented by all sorts of other efforts to control the landscape, including crop rotation, artificial habitats for food animals like rabbits, and dikes and sluices to drain marshlands (especially in the Low Countries from the eleventh century on).

Medieval gardens came in all sizes, offering not just pleasant views but also herbs, fruits, vegetables, and sometimes even fish (from specially designed ponds). In the late thirteenth century, Pietro de’ Crescendi wrote a guide to garden design. He suggested a well-ordered arrangement of fruit trees, complemented by vines and grassy open spaces:

Plant lines of pears and applies in [the garden], and, in warm places, lines of palms and lemons. Or plant lines of mulberries, cherries, plums, and lines of noble trees as figs, nuts, almonds, quinces, and pomegranates … The lines or rows should be spaced twenty feet apart, more or less … Noble vines of different types that provide delight and utility may be planted between the trees. Hoe the lines of trees so that the trees and vines grow stronger, and treat the intervals as meadows and weed them often. Mow the meadows of the garden twice a year, so that they may remain beautiful.

Resources

• The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s medieval gardens at the Cloisters have a blog with details on many of the plants there.
• The National Trust website includes a brief summary of medieval garden types, with links to sites they operate in Britain.

The quote from Pietro de’ Crescenzi is from Johanna Bauman’s translation, excerpted in The Glory of Gardens: 2,000 Years of Writing on Garden Design, ed. Scott J. Tilden (New York, 2006).

---

It’s a Feudal, Feudal World: A Different Medieval History is available for pre-order from Amazon.ca and your local bookstore, to be released in July 2013.

A Changing Planet

On Twitter, Charles C. Mann points to an interesting blog post at The Archaeobotanist, covering recent research that shows large-scale human influence on the environment as far back as 6,000–3,000 BC. It’s interesting research, and it crystallizes something I felt this weekend when I visited the “Genesis” exhibit at the ROM.

Photographer Sebastião Salgado went all around the world in search of pristine wilderness and the people and animals that live there. But what exactly does “pristine” really mean, if humans have been around and changing the environment for so long? The photographs are simply spectacular, but the exhibit makes the assumption that whatever was the state of nature when we first arrived must have been the situation since time immemorial. In a changing world, that’s a bad assumption to make. (Mann’s book 1491 is full of examples of such changes.)

And if you’re in Toronto in the next four months, go to the ROM to see “Genesis.”

Illustrating Annihiliation

When it came to trying to illustrate the complexities of nuclear war, there were many possible approaches. On the one hand, there was the abstract approach – seeking universal symbols to express the horrifying particulars. That was the way Martyl Langsdorf created the cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and how Erik Nitsche used the cornucopia to sell the nuclear submarine.

On the other, there was the deeply detailed. Since 1965, illustrators at the Defense Intelligence Agency produced art for official reports illustrating new Soviet technologies, including Soviet Military Power, an annual publication about the Soviet threat published by the DIA in the 1980s for public consumption.

 

What the DIA illustrators did for Soviet Military Power was somewhere between weapon portraiture and techno-thriller story-boarding. While paintings like “Soviet Artillery Supporting River Crossing” by Richard J. Terry (above left; 1982) could follow well-known facts, paintings like Edward L. Cooper’s “Soviet Mobile Laser in Afghanistan” (above center, 1985) had to be little more than rough guesstimates. The precision of the art made up for the fact that much was not known, and what was known could not be published in a public source like Soviet Military Power.

What killed the DIA’s Illustration Department was, ironically enough, American technology, with computer-generated graphics supplanted the lush artwork. The last “visual information specialist” retired in 2000.

You can see a selection of 40 of the works at the DIA’s website here..

Two Cold War Technology Links

I ran across two interesting things this week. Slate has an excerpt from J.D. Hamblin’s new book, Arming Mother Nature, called “We tried to weaponize the weather.” Meanwhile, at The Space Review there’s a review of what looks like a fascinating new book: Implosion: Lessons from National Security, High Reliability Spacecraft, Electronics, and the Forces Which Changed Them.

Though they sit pretty much at opposite poles of Cold War science, sober, serious engineering and mind-blowing insanity, both stories are evidence of the unpredictable nature of technological development. Everything in “We tried to weaponize the weather” looks harebrained today, but in the 50 and 60s they looked far more plausible than the idea that anyone in a First World country could own a pocket-sized supercomputer. And, with all respect to Silicon Valley, those computers are the unpredicted spinoff of a series of military investments in technology that never quite did what it was supposed to: like the Army Signal Corps’ germanium transistors or DARPA Strategic Computing’s AI systems.