… from the 13th Century onwards, new organisations made it possible to satisfy, more or less, the new requirements for books expressed by a steadily growing number of clients p.16 Manuscripts my emphasis
A real sense of growth for a new technology, and the new organisational element is critical. What changes so that everything can change, given the relative lack of clear value differentiation of paper at that point in history?
As far as the manuscript goes, paper did not offer advantages over parchment apart from its lower price and the possibility of producing it in unlimited quantity, in theory at least. Medieval paper was more fragile than parchment, had a rougher surface, and was less impervious to ink and less amendable to the pigments used by the illuminators. On the other hand it was lighter in weight. But less than might be imagined, since parchment of great delicacy was being produced in the 13th century, even thinner than the paper of the same period. Admittedly it requires keen eyesight to read them now… … While the difference (in price) is certainly appreciable it is far from attaining the importance once assigned to it. In fact until the 15th century paper did not seem to possess sufficient advantages, or perhaps was not marketed in large enough quantities, to supplant parchment. pp16-18
rather a ‘and this is how it relates to today’ linkedin sorta point, but it does remind me both of the answer given at an AWS session on agentic AI ‘we know it’s important, but it’s not clear how the business case stacks up’ and what CFOs said at NAB – everyone said we had to get to cloud, but you had to squint and include a load of fairly soft transformational assumptions to make the business case stacked up.
it does change things over time, and you fall behind if you don’t do it, but the cost-benefit of change is rarely clear for established technologies.
update: so i was being a bit dumb here. the chapter concerns the secular age and the “new organisations” are the institutions and entities outside the monastic responsible for the creation of manuscripts and books. donc, les questions sont quelles organisations produisaient les livres et d’où sont-il apparu ? et pourquoi ? pour quelle raison ?
la réponse :
- les universités et l’institutions de loi.
- les aristocrates n’achetaient plus des manuscrits des monastères
- l’apparition d’une bourgeoisie avec une augmentation de demande pour les romances, la littérature, les traités de morale et cetera, qui a généré les affaires pour les libraires
the importance of preventing the transmission of errors and what about the “laundered” errors that AI introduces?
perhaps the new media of our age, broadcasting and the cinema, may help us grasp how ideas and works can be transmitted without passing through the medium of print p 23