HU520: A Review of Deibert's Chapter 2

Deibert, Ronald J. (1997). Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia:

Communication in World Order Transformation, New York: Columbia U. P., pp. 47-66.

Go to review of Chapter 3.

From the Parchment codex to the Printing Press: The Sacred Word and the Rise and Fall of Medieval Theocracy

What are the Medium's Multiple Messages?

• Starts with illustrations of the "power of Roman Catholic church over, and penetration into secular authority during ... the zenith of High Middle Ages" (48).

The Sanctity of the Written Word

• "Thus for most of its time on Earth the modern human species was characterized by primitive orality." 3000 years ago we start seeing cuneiform ("wedge-shaped orthography for the Sumerians around 3100 B.C.--the earliest known system of writing" (49).

Seems quite arrogant to me. I assume that there are aspects of oral traditions that are as sophisticated and humanly complex that we can't even appreciate them in our modern age. My question is "What have we lost that the ages of orality knew intimately?" Ong is more respectful of this age.

• Development o writing: economic & urban impetus AND associated with the spiritual elite.
• The "Word" is awe inspiring and mystical: manuscripts valued beyond the words they contain (50). (Quoting Anderson) The astonishing power of the papacy in its noonday is only comprehensible in terms of a trans-European Latin-writing clerisy and a conception of the world, shared by virtually everyone, that the bilingual intelligentsia, by mediating between vernacular and Latin, mediated between earth and heaven'" (50). Feverish patients should "wear strips of parchment around necks" (51). 1022--Heretics burned at stake for "referring to clergy's knowledge as human fabrications 'written on the skins of animals'."(53).

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Prestige of the written word on which the entire institution (like a university) is based. What languages do we command to our institutional benefit: standard English, science genre, techno-Babel.?

• Mode of communication followed through the rise and fall of Church.
  • Papyrus primary medium for comm. in Roman times. As that fails, cut off from Egyptian supply they move to parchment. (54) The medium of parchment codex: Christianity alone in favoring it. Materials abundant and local (55). parchment was suited to the spread of monastic life in Europe.
  • St. Leo I negotiates with Huns and Vandals to save Rome and move church into vacuum left from Roman secular administration.
  • Literate monastic network begins with St. Benedict and Cassiodorus in 5th century.
  • "Word" had not been cheapened by electronic code and copies that are cheap and plentiful"

Do we believe that cheap printing process and electronic printing has cheapened the power of the "word"? _Avatar of the Word_ talks more about the growth of the monastic life and scriptoriums.

• Norm of western culture: life was violent and chaotic--the spoken word dominates. "the Church an island of literacy in an otherwise oral culture" (53).
• Exclusivity is an important component to Church's success. But how did the pay for themselves? (my question).
• Censorship not active but a matter of interest and indifference: selective preservation of texts. "Ancient pagan works had no autonomy in the official Church cosmology" (56). They we of secondary interest so some survived. 6th-8th centuries no classical texts copied.

How does this happen in a digital world? (selective reproduction?) To what are we indifferent in our own culture? What are we in danger of loosing? (i.e., Is our emphasis of youth-oriented materials--technology innovation in particular--distracting us from our local histories that are passing with the older generations we ignore? Probably. Is there a project in this: folklore?

• NOT Big Brother (or Big Father)? But Church educates 90% of literate men between 600 -1100 B.C.; bent on converting; Mass is multimedia event witnessed by more people than those who now read newspapers.
• Huge Papal archives, forgeries (The Donation of Constantine)
• Aristocracy generally illiterate, depended on interposition of clergy to help carry out various administrative functions" (58). William of Normandy turns to monks.

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One of the medium's messages: monks' reputations for introspective wisdom and a power of analysis a capacity for detached realism" (58)

• Church become reliant on formal documentation, papal-monastic information network: dissemination via a medieval multimedia experience: Mass and cathedrals. Visual symbolism important, imagery of macabre torture of hell and visual narratives of Christ's teachings.

One of the medium's messages: medieval mentality "did not share the cognitive boundaries ... between the 'real' and the 'imaginary,' or the 'natural' and the 'metaphysical' (59).

• Other factors besides media: coherent moral vision strongly resonated in chaotic and brutal living conditions. Also conform quasi-magical rituals of church to pagan rituals of Germanic and Frankish peoples.
• Summary of points on 60-61.

Counter-Hegemonic Forces and the Decline of the Church

• 13th & 14th centuries forces begin to surface to more bureaucratic and legalistic papacy which looses touch with local spiritual needs and attitudes of people: sudden ignition of popular heresies: 11th century--fundamentalist, back-to-basics

Sounds VERY familiar: Current academia is in the same boat: with trends of emotional politics & heretical urban cultures. The church of our age are educational institutions: and so we are

• (Roman Catholic Church) is "being challenged . . . in the sphere of knowledge reproduction" (62). 12th cent. onward secular literacy on the rise in urban populations; strains on the functional capacity of the monastic network. New centers for knowledge reproduction emerge: universities, book centers, professional craftsmen, Guilds of Scriveners or Stationers, urban literate bourgeois class, the Word in the vernacular, rise of nonmonastic government bureaucracies, "supercession of law over theology" (63)., advent of paper and printing process to fill the gap in production
• Paper use slow in catching on: its fragility, craftsmen's inertia, religious bigotry.
• printing overcomes inertia because of demand: independent of Chinese and Korean technologies. Johann Gensfleisch zur Laden, or Gutenberg. (Johnson book does more with this in some detail).
• Printing mimics manuscript culture for a good while: medium theory would predict this.
• It was the revolution in quantity (and reliability for science, Eisenstein) that made the diff. 20 million books printed before 1500. Eclipsed the entire estimated product of the previous thousand years (65).
• "convergence with the early printers' commercial ethos and an available market across Europe hungry for printed material" (65).

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Go to review of Chapter 3.