Books Before Typography a Primer of Information about the Invention of the Alphabet and the History of Book-Making Up to the Invention of Movable Type

by Frederick William Hamilton

Excerpt: ...administration, conducted the legal business of the community, served as its physicians and, in short, discharged nearly all those functions which required education and literary training. The mercantile Pg 30 class knew only enough to keep track of their business by the help of mechanical contrivances and the rudest methods of accounting. The great mass of mechanics and agricultural laborers were entirely illiterate. King and peasant alike depended upon the clergy for their knowledge of past transactions, national records, and the teachings of religion. Under these circumstances the monasteries naturally built up libraries. Originally these libraries began with copies of the scriptures or of books containing portions of them, such as the Gospels and the Psalms. To these were added Mass books, collections of the writings of the fathers of the church and the sermons of famous preachers, volumes of commentaries on the scriptures and the works of the fathers, and lives of the saints, and, in course of time, treatises on theological subjects. Even the life of a monastic community, however, is not all religious. Consequently we find the monks writing chronicles which were the beginnings of history. These chronicles originally were merely dry statements of the events which happened in the monastery, the community in which it was located, or even the country. At first dry notebooks without historical perspective and with very little detail, they gradually developed into something like a historical narrative of occurrences with estimates of character and statements as to the causes and effects, as well as the mere occurrence, of events. Then came works on natural history, medicine, music, grammar, in fact all the matters in which men are interested. Poetry struggled for expression and the romantic adventures of the real men and women of the time stimulated imagination to the production of tales and romances. For historical information and for literary...

22 pages, Paperback

First published December 30, 2009

About the author

There is more than one author in the Goodreads catalog with this name. This entry is for Frederick ^3 William Hamilton.