THE WELCH COMPANY
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rodwelch@pacbell.net


S U M M A R Y


DIARY: April 5, 2005 07:42 AM Tuesday; Rod Welch

SDS foundational documents update on NKM and Presencing.

1...Summary/Objective
2...Spirituality Add to Religion in NWO, and Presencing to KM in POIMS
3...Meditation Prayer Religion in NWO Expanded to Explain
4...Religion in NWO Expanded to Explain Meditation and Prayer
........What is meditation?
........Information Overload Solve Meditation Limits Sensory Input
........Sensory Perception Limited Meditation Concentrates Understand
........Meditation Pauses Sensory Perception So Mind Constructs Meaning
........Routinize Good Practices Helps Solve Cognitive Overhead
........Meditation Regular Use Like SDS Overcomes Cognitive Overhead
.....Prayer and Reading the Bible....
.....Meditation Understanding Integrated with Literacy Reading the Word
5...Presencing Enables Faith for Transformation Knowledge Management
6...Transformation NWO Add Knowledge Management and Presencing
7...NWO Add Knowledge Management and Presencing for Transformation
8...Standing on the Shoulders of Giants Newton's Great Quote
9...Galileo Mathematician Astronomy Telescope Gravity Coppernicus
10...Keeper of Flame Religion Maintain Practice of Literacy
11...Literacy Declines with Fall of Roman Empire Chruch Keeper of the Flame
....Writing Sustained Religion through Accuracy Church Doctrine
....Writing Critical to Religion Authority of Church Christianity
....Accuracy Enabled Integrity Written Text Sustained Church Authority
12...Transformation to Language Enabled Communication through Orality
13...Writing Mediums Made Transformation Difficult
14...Writing Instruments Enabling Forces Along with Demand for Writing
....History of Pens & Writing Instruments
15...Alphabetic Mind Constructs Meaning from Small Organic Structures
16...Popular Literature in Ancient Greece
.....Paper Expensive Until 200 AD Papyrus Egypt Monopoly
17...Printing Press Invented 1455 Gutenberg
18...Literacy Early-modern Era Printing Press Invented
19...Books Created by Monastic Scribes for Religion During Middle Ages
20...Orality Remained Dominate Literates Read Aloud to Illiterates


..............
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CONTACTS 

SUBJECTS
KM Movement Added Dichotomy Talent Tools Orality Literacy Reflects D
Presencing KM Focus on Spirituality and Commitment Applies Covey's I

0504 -
0504 -    ..
0505 - Summary/Objective
0506 -
050601 - Follow up ref SDS 14 0000, ref SDS 13 0000.
050602 -
050603 -
050604 -
050605 -
050606 -
050607 -
050608 -
050609 -
050610 -
050612 -  ..
0507 -
0508 -
0509 - Progress
0510 -
051001 - Spirituality Add to Religion in NWO, and Presencing to KM in POIMS
051002 -
051003 - Several trends have emerged the last 10 years or so that need to be
051004 - incorporated into SDS foundational documents to address calls for
051005 - spirituality to play a role in Knowledge Mangement, discussed in
051006 - connection with Presencing on 050322. ref SDS 13 XL30  John Maloney's
051007 - letter on 050325 reporting that Presencing is the basis of his work in
051008 - Knowledge Management (KM) opens the question of how this relationship
051009 - might be supported. ref SDS 14 645H
051011 -  ..
051012 - At first blush, the notion of "spirituality" and "management" seem at
051013 - odds; however, there may be an important role for spirituality based
051014 - on the tradition of prayer that fosters meditation in knowledge
051015 - formation by constructing hunches and clues that lead to breakthroughs
051016 - when externalized in writing, developed, tested, and refined by
051017 - experience.
051019 -  ..
051020 - The KM section in POIMS, ref OF 4 O87L, needs expansion...
051022 -     ..
051023 -    Communication is primary task of management shown by people
051024 -    spending 80% - 90% of their time talking in meetings, reported on
051025 -    890809. ref SDS 2 8211  The practice of communication gives orders
051026 -    following the model of military command and control. ref OF 4 G5RF
051027 -    Drucker maintains the best tool system for management is
051028 -    accounting, reported on 980101. ref SDS 6 0627  Spreadsheet
051029 -    technology empowers a greater share of people to perform effective
051030 -    accounting, but people hate accountability and disparage
051031 -    accountants as "bean counters."
051033 -     ..
051034 -    Communication is complex and so is hard to improve, noted by
051035 -    Drucker on 931130, ref SDS 4 3851, and cited in POIMS, ref OF 4
051036 -    G5RF, because knowledge management is a lot of hard work, reported
051037 -    on 000307. ref SDS 10 5182  Analysis emerged in about 400 BC for
051038 -    making sense by "connecting the dots" between new information and
051039 -    relevant history to construct knowledge that makes communication
051040 -    effective.  However, beginning in the 19th century and accelerating
051041 -    in the 20th century technology that aids sensory perception to
051042 -    increase information, without a "spreadsheet for knowledge," causes
051043 -    people to give up on improving communication, noted by Drucker
051044 -    reviewed on 931130, ref SDS 4 3851, because writing everything down
051045 -    and "linking everything up" to "connect the dots" seems beyond
051046 -    reach, reported on 890809. ref SDS 1 3S6H  The disconnect between
051047 -    the ease of talking in meetings, calls, and documents that crowds
051048 -    out time to think, related in the Typical Day Scenario, ref OF 9
051049 -    YE4G, causes information to pile up in the mind, in filing
051050 -    cabinets, folders and computers that is disconnected from daily
051051 -    work.  Indeed, people lose interest in history, and deny the role
051052 -    of intelligence for converting information into knowledge.  In the
051053 -    extreme a Ludite rejection of tools altogether permeates the
051054 -    culture because people fear investing time for learning to push a
051055 -    few buttons, since this would detract from attending the next
051056 -    meeting, making the next phone call, and sending the next email,
051057 -    which are tasks that are fast and easy using existing skills for
051058 -    acting on impulse talking and hearing, illustrated by the record on
051059 -    010114, ref SDS 12 EK3I, and previously on 001122. ref SDS 11 UO6G
051061 -     ..
051062 -    Project management helps improve communication by narrowing the
051063 -    focus of dedicated staff, and traditionally uses tool-based systems
051064 -    for cost and schedule control; about 15 years ago modern project
051065 -    management (MPM) began emphasizing leadership and change using
051066 -    common solutions advocated by Dale Carnege for better communication
051067 -    on "How to Win Friends and Influence People." ref OF 4 ST8M
051068 -    Knowledge Management has taken a similar path in recent years with
051069 -    the phrase "New Knowledge Management" (NKM), reported on 050322.
051070 -    ref SDS 13 OY5O
051072 -     ..
051073 -    In both cases, the age old challenge of leadership helping people
051074 -    accomplish transformation by overcoming ignorance, fear and denial
051075 -    which requires courage to position people to gain experience long
051076 -    enough to discover benefits out weigh costs, which gives people
051077 -    faith and commitment to work intelligently, reviewed recently on
051078 -    050322, ref SDS 13 KK3M, yet, in practice focuses primarily "change
051079 -    management" that emphasizes sales practices for getting people to
051080 -    say yes.  Toward this end, a notion of "authentic conversation"
051081 -    emerges that departs from the role of accuracy required by
051082 -    management standards, reported on 950721, ref SDS 5 1740, and
051083 -    instead emerges turns the concept of diplomacy and respect for
051084 -    others and self-control upside down with a practice of exposing raw
051085 -    feelings.
051087 -     ..
051088 -    USAFIT reported management big projects still degrades to entropy,
051089 -    which has intensified a search for a solution.
051091 -     ..
051092 -    AI failed, e.g., mediators.
051094 -     ..
051095 -    Learning Organization proposed by Senge and MIT, and Organizational
051096 -    Memory advocated by Conklin are serious efforts aimed at turning
051097 -    information into useful knowledge, but are not implemented,
051098 -    because Knowledge Management is a lot of hard work.
051100 -     ..
051101 -    Knowledge management replaced project management as the locus of
051102 -    intellectual and technology development, which failed to yield
051103 -    results because Knowledge Management is a lot of hard work.  About
051104 -    5 years ago new knowledge management (NKM) began emphasizing
051105 -    leadership and change that attempts common solutions for better
051106 -    communication, because tool based systems failed.
051108 -     ..
051109 -    Presencing illustrates movement toward NKM that emphasizes
051110 -    spirituality to give people commitment fueld by faith to change and
051111 -    realize future possibililities without investing effort in study
051112 -    and analysis of past experience and history, reported on 050322.
051113 -    ref SDS 13 MX5I  Just talking about Knowledge Management is all the
051114 -    commitment required to do Knowlege Mangaement that yields fantastic
051115 -    social relationships.
051117 -     ..
051118 -    Parellels between project and knowledge management moving from
051119 -    tools to communication, and giving up on mechanistic solutions
051120 -    seems striking.
051122 -  ..
051123 - Medititation explained in POIMS as combining the 2-tiers of conscious
051124 - and subconscious processing. ref OF 4 KN5L
051125 -
051126 -
051127 -
051128 -
0512 -

SUBJECTS
Religion Meditation Theory of Knowledge Prayer Spirituality Enlighte

1203 -
120401 -  ..
120402 - Meditation Prayer Religion in NWO Expanded to Explain
120403 - Religion in NWO Expanded to Explain Meditation and Prayer
120404 -
120405 - Spirituality offers an interesting opportunity to expand the
120406 - section in NWO on religion. ref OF 12 4723  A concept might be
120407 - developed based on the 2-tier model of cognition and enlightenment.
120408 - ref OF 12 LA9O
120410 -  ..
120411 - Meditation might be an appropriate name for concentrated internal
120412 - attention (thinking, pondering) on a particular subject that occurs
120413 - with eyes shut, and without other sensory stimulous. ref OF 12 OR6J
120414 - One authority describes this practice of allowing the mind to think
120415 - without sensory input, per below. ref SDS 0 YS33  The fact that the
120416 - brain is totally enclosed and is getting no data invites the model of
120417 - heightened synergy between conscious and subconscuous processing,
120418 - particularly since there is no bright line of separation, but rather
120419 - is itself a conceptual framework.
120420 -
120421 -     [On 050427 Gary Johnson peer review. ref SDS 15 4J7M
120423 -      ..
120424 -     [On 050526 letter to Ross linked to record on 050427 discussing
120425 -     religion flowing from work today. ref SDS 16 644T
120427 -  ..
120428 - Applied research on religion, meditation and cognitive science,
120429 - ref OF 12 XM4N, yields...
120431 -  ..
120432 - An article...
120433 -
120434 -        Pure Consciousness in Meditation and the Self
120435 -
120436 -        John G Taylor
120437 -        john.g.taylor@kcl.ac.uk
120439 -         ..
120440 -        Department of Mathematics, King's College, Strand, London
120441 -        WC2R2LS, UK
120442 -
120443 -              http://www.sci-con.org/news/articles/20020602.html
120445 -     ..
120446 -    The article relates testing with MRI and PET scan technology.  The
120447 -    article concludes...
120448 -
120449 -        These physiological study support the claim that PCE is a
120450 -        distinct state of consciousness, corresponding to one in which
120451 -        attention is attending to itself alone.
120452 -
120454 -     ..
120455 -    Another source found on the Internet and referenced in NWO,
120456 -    ref OF 12 OT3G, says....
120457 -
120458 -        Classified Abstracts
120459 -
120460 -        COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND PSYCHOLOGY
120461 -        3.1 Attention
120463 -               ..
120464 -              http://www.qedcorp.com/pcr/pcr/attentn.html
120466 -         ..
120467 -        Global neural ground state: coherent brain mechanisms
120468 -        associated with transcendental consciousness
120469 -
120471 -         ..
120472 -        A.T.Arenander (Maharishi Vedic School, 3878 Old Town Ave.
120473 -        Suite 200, San Diego, CA 92110, USA.)
120475 -         ..
120476 -        This paper seeks to provide a framework for discussing and
120477 -        understanding the brain state and attentional mechanisms that
120478 -        underlie the subjective experience and objective measurements
120479 -        of subjects practising the Transcendental Meditation (TM)
120480 -        technique.  During the TM technique, the mind effortlessly
120481 -        attends to a specific object and automatically transcends the
120482 -        normal boundaries of conscious perception: experiencing a shift
120483 -        from active, waking consciousness to one without boundaries,
120484 -        pure consciousness.  Past research suggests that the TM
120485 -        technique produces a state of profound rest and relaxation in
120486 -        subjects.  Objectively, measurements of blood chemistry, skin
120487 -        galvanic response, and EEG recordings while subjects are
120488 -        practising the technique indicate profound changes occur in the
120489 -        physiology.  Subjectively, subjects report the experience of
120490 -        awareness alone without an object of perception.  This
120491 -        experience has been described as `restful alertness.' This
120492 -        experience is also described in some of the oldest known
120493 -        written records.  The Vedas, more than 5000 years old, are the
120494 -        classic texts describing this fundamental human experience.
120495 -        The Vedas call this experience of awareness without an object
120496 -        of perception pure awareness.  According to the Vedas, this
120497 -        state of restful alertness or transcendental consciousness is
120498 -        considered to be the fundamental mode or ground state of human
120499 -        conscious experience.  Thought processes represent fluctuations
120500 -        of this underlying abstract, pure field of intelligence.
120501 -
120503 -     ..
120504 -    Meditation is often associated with spirituality that in some sense
120505 -    communes with other worldly forms, e.g., God, angels, spirits,
120506 -    etc., to achieve enlightement, which in is a form of making a
120507 -    breakthrough that was previously hidden in the darkeness of
120508 -    ignorance.  Decided not to breakdown the notion of "other wordly"
120509 -    for now, because for many this would be distracting. ref OF 12 OT8G
120511 -     ..
120512 -    Another source cited in NWO, ref OF 12 OT4M, says...
120513 -
120514 -        Indiatimes Spirituality
120515 -
120516 -              http://spirituality.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1846260671.cms
120517 -
120518 -        What is the real nature of meditation?
120520 -         ..
120521 -        Meditation means focusing the mind on some object. once the
120522 -        mind is concentrated, it can be focused on any desired object
120524 -         ..
120525 -        Meditation, in scriptures has been described as two types,
120527 -         ..
120528 -        Viz. 'object oriented meditation' and 'objectless meditation'.
120529 -        which of the two is the higher one?
120531 -         ..
120532 -        In the initial stages, meditation has to be practiced with
120533 -        some object. this helps in arresting the mind and develops
120534 -        concentration. the aim is to still the mind and make it
120535 -        functionless. but this can be possible only if the mind is
120536 -        absorbed in some object. gradually, the consciousness of that
120537 -        object vanishes and only pure awareness remains!
120538 -
120539 -
120540 -
120541 -
1206 -

SUBJECTS
Meditation Definition Sensory Perception Paused Concentrates Underst

1403 -
140401 -         ..
140402 -        What is meditation?
140403 -        Information Overload Solve Meditation Limits Sensory Input
140404 -        Sensory Perception Limited Meditation Concentrates Understand
140405 -        Meditation Pauses Sensory Perception So Mind Constructs Meaning
140406 -
140407 -
140408 - Indiatimes Spirituality continues...
140409 -
140410 -        What is meditation?
140412 -         ..
140413 -        The basic idea generally associated with why people meditate is
140414 -        that during our day we are constantly subjected to sensory
140415 -        input and our minds are always active in the process of
140416 -        thinking.
140418 -         ..
140419 -        We read the newspaper, study books, write reports, engage in
140420 -        conversation, solve problems, so on and so forth. typically, as
140421 -        we do these normal activities we engage in a constant mental
140422 -        commentary, sort of an inner 'the drama of me'. usually people
140423 -        aren't fully aware of all the mental thought activity that we
140424 -        are constantly engaged in.
140426 -         ..
140427 -        Meditation allows all this activity to settle down, and often
140428 -        results in the mind becoming more peaceful, calm and focused.
140429 -        in essence, meditation allows the awareness to become
140430 -        'rejuvenated'.
140432 -         ..
140433 -        Meditation can be considered a technique, or practice. it
140434 -        usually involves concentrating on an object, such as a flower,
140435 -        a candle, a sound or word, or the breath. over time, the number
140436 -        of random thoughts occurring diminishes. more importantly, your
140437 -        attachment to these thoughts, and your identification with
140438 -        them, progressively become less. the mediator may get caught up
140439 -        in a thought pattern, but once he/she becomes aware of this,
140440 -        attention is gently brought back to the object of
140441 -        concentration. meditation can also be objectless, for example
140442 -        consisting of just sitting. experiences during meditation
140443 -        probably vary significantly from one individual to another, or
140444 -        at least if different techniques are involved. relaxation,
140445 -        increased awareness, mental focus and clarity, and a sense of
140446 -        peace are the most common by-products of meditation. while much
140447 -        has been written about the benefits of meditation, the best
140448 -        attitude is not to have any expectations when practicing.
140449 -        having a sense of expectation of (positive) results is likely
140450 -        to create unnecessary strain in the practice.
140452 -  ..
140453 - Applied this explanation in part in NWO, per above. ref SDS 0 XM4N
140454 -
140455 -
140456 -
140457 -
1405 -

SUBJECTS
Meditation Definition Sensory Perception Paused Concentrates Underst
Routinize Good Practices Helps Solve Cognitive Overhead Meditation R

1604 -
160501 -         ..
160502 -        Routinize Good Practices Helps Solve Cognitive Overhead
160503 -        Meditation Regular Use Like SDS Overcomes Cognitive Overhead
160504 -
160505 -
160506 - Indiatimes Spirituality continues...
160507 -
160508 -        Since meditation involves becoming more aware and more
160509 -        sensitive to what is within you, facing unpleasant parts of
160510 -        oneself may well be part of meditation. regardless of the
160511 -        experience, the meditator should try to be aware of the
160512 -        experience and of any attachment to it.
160514 -         ..
160515 -        Failure to experience silence, peace of mind, mental clarity,
160516 -        bliss, or other promoted benefit of meditation is not in itself
160517 -        a sign of incorrect practice or that one can't concentrate
160518 -        properly or concentrate enough to be good at meditation.
160519 -        whether one experiences peace or bliss is not what is
160520 -        important. what is generally considered important in meditation
160521 -        is that one is regular with their meditation - every day - and
160522 -        that one make a reasonable effort, but not strain, to remain
160523 -        with the object of concentration during the practice. with
160524 -        regular practice one inevitably acquires an increased
160525 -        understanding of and proficiency with the particular meditation
160526 -        technique.
160528 -  ..
160529 - Regular use of SDS fits the model described for effective meditation
160530 - that does not demand particular results, but rather results come from
160531 - routine use of good practice.  NWO explains the burden of cognitive
160532 - overhead drives resistance to study for discovering accurate
160533 - understanding, and instead reacting on impulse based impressions from
160534 - sight and sound. ref OF 13 TF5M
160536 -  ..
160537 - Drucker calls for technology to routinize support for cognitive
160538 - overhead, i.e., thinking, based on findings from cognitive science,
160539 - reported on 991025. ref SDS 8 0785
160541 -  ..
160542 - Covey makes a similar point about making good practice into habits for
160543 - success, reviewed on 921205. ref SDS 3 4803
160545 -  ..
160546 - Indiatimes Spirituality continues...
160547 -
160548 -        Some people use the formal concentrative meditation as a
160549 -        preliminary step to practicing a mindfulness meditation during
160550 -        the day where one tries to maintain a calm but increased
160551 -        awareness of one's thoughts and actions throughout the day. for
160552 -        some people, meditation is primarily a spiritual practice, and
160553 -        in some cases the meditation practice may be closely tied to
160554 -        the practice of a religion such as, for example, hinduism or
160555 -        buddhism
160556 -
160558 -         ..
160559 -        Is there any religious implication or affiliation with
160560 -        meditation?
160562 -         ..
160563 -        Meditation has been and still is a central practice in eastern
160564 -        religions, for contacting 'god' or one's higher self.
160566 -         ..
160567 -        Christianity also has semblances of meditation, such as the
160568 -        biblical statement - "the kingdom of heaven is within you."
160569 -        churches have a meditative atmosphere.
160571 -         ..
160572 -        Meditation deals with contacting something within us that is
160573 -        peaceful, calm, rejuvenating, and meaningful. whether one
160574 -        calls this something 'god' or 'soul' or 'the inner child' or
160575 -        'theta-wave activity' or 'peace' or 'silence' is not
160576 -        important. it is there and anyone can benefit from it
160577 -        regardless of what they believe.
160579 -         ..
160580 -        Most people in the world have already meditated. if you have
160581 -        relaxed looking at a beautiful sunset, allowing your thoughts
160582 -        to quiet down, this is close to meditation. if you have been
160583 -        reading a book for a while then put it down to take a break and
160584 -        just sat there quietly and peacefully for a few minutes without
160585 -        thinking, this is close to meditation.
160586 -
160587 -
160588 -
160589 -
1606 -

SUBJECTS
Default Null Subject Account for Blank Record

1703 -
170401 -      ..
170402 -     Prayer and Reading the Bible....
170403 -
170404 -
170405 -              http://www.prayerguide.org.uk/bible.htm
170406 -
170407 -        As Christians we know we should pray and that we should read
170408 -        our Bibles. What is less well understood is that the two go
170409 -        together - hand in hand. We should come to expect that we may
170410 -        need our Bible during our prayer time, and can pray as we
170411 -        read!
170413 -         ..
170414 -        Meditation. Jeremiah speaks of eating God's words ("When your
170415 -        words came, I ate them; they were my joy and my heart's
170416 -        delight, for I bear your name, O Lord God Almighty." Jer
170417 -        15:16), and meditation gives us the chance to slowly chew over
170418 -        portions of scripture. Unlike other forms of meditation where
170419 -        we seek to empty our minds, Christians seek to fill our mind
170420 -        and heart with the presence and Word of God.
170422 -         ..
170423 -        Unlike academic study, meditation seeks to repeate words and
170424 -        phrases, to go over the same words and thoughts. The word
170425 -        "meditate" means to "murmur persistently". The psalmist writes
170426 -        "I meditate on your precepts and consider your ways." (Ps
170427 -        119:15); and in v48 "I lift up my hands to your commands which
170428 -        I love, and I meditate on your decrees."  In meditation, we
170429 -        ponder on key scriptures, and as we do so, we allow the living
170430 -        Word of God to penetrate our hearts as well as our minds.
170431 -
170432 -
170433 -
170434 -
1705 -

SUBJECTS
Default Null Subject Account for Blank Record

1803 -
180401 -      ..
180402 -     Meditation Understanding Integrated with Literacy Reading the Word
180403 -
180404 -     Bible.org says in part on the matter of correlating meditation
180405 -     (the "inner man") with literacy, ref OF 12 UE9G, in this case,
180406 -     reading the Bible...
180407 -
180408 -        ABCs for Christian Growth--Laying the Foundation
180409 -        Appendix 8: Soul Nourishment First
180410 -        George  Mller
180411 -
180412 -              http://www.bible.org/page.asp?page_id=1419
180414 -         ..
180415 -        It has pleased the Lord to teach me a truth, the benefit of
180416 -        which I have not lost, for more than fourteen years. The point
180417 -        is this: I saw more clearly than ever that the first great and
180418 -        primary business to which I ought to attend every day was, to
180419 -        have my soul happy in the Lord. The first thing to be
180420 -        concerned about was not how much I might serve the Lord, or
180421 -        how I might glorify the Lord; but how I might get my soul into
180422 -        a happy state, and how my inner man might be nourished. For I
180423 -        might seek to set the truth before the unconverted, I might
180424 -        seek to benefit believers, I might seek to relieve the
180425 -        distressed, I might in other ways seek to behave myself as it
180426 -        becomes a child of God in this world; and yet, not being happy
180427 -        in the Lord, and not being nourished and strengthened in my
180428 -        inner man day by day, all this might not be attended to in a
180429 -        right spirit. Before this time my practice had been, at least
180430 -        for ten years previously, as an habitual thing, to give myself
180431 -        to prayer, after having dressed myself in the morning. Now, I
180432 -        saw that the most important thing I had to do was to give
180433 -        myself to the reading of the Word of God, and to meditation on
180434 -        it, that thus my heart might be comforted, encouraged, warned,
180435 -        reproved, instructed; and that thus, by means of the Word of
180436 -        God, while meditating on it, my heart might be brought into
180437 -        experiential communion with the Lord.
180438 -
180440 -  ..
180441 - Would like to move the the discussion of Knowledge Mangaement from
180442 - POIMS, ref OF 4 O87L, into NWO.  Might be able to do this at the
180443 - location in NWO that explains the history of "intelligence" support.
180444 - ref OF 10 4099
180446 -  ..
180447 - Actually, decided against this.  With the explanation of meditation
180448 - added to the section on religion, we can cite this to make the points
180449 - in POIMS on KM.
180450 -
180451 -
180452 -
180453 -
1805 -

SUBJECTS
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants Isaaic Newton Illustrates Organi

2503 -
250401 -  ..
250402 - Presencing Enables Faith for Transformation Knowledge Management
250403 - Transformation NWO Add Knowledge Management and Presencing
250404 - NWO Add Knowledge Management and Presencing for Transformation
250405 - Standing on the Shoulders of Giants Newton's Great Quote
250406 -
250407 - History resource on the Internet...
250408 -
250409 -              http://www.ucalgary.ca/applied_history/tutor/
250411 -  ..
250412 - Decided to go ahead and add an explanation of KM, ref OF 14 PI7F,
250413 - under a new chapter in NWO for Transformation, ref OF 14 O87L, that
250414 - will also explain Presencing to enable Knowledge Management,
250415 - ref OF 14 3A6J, which requires faith to sustain impelmentation through
250416 - a long period of transformation.  The need for faith to sustain
250417 - transformation from information to knowledge, reflects human history
250418 - that required religion to be the "keeper of the flame" that sustained
250419 - transformation from orality to literacy, per below. ref SDS 0 6P7R
250421 -  ..
250422 - Transformation should apply the centuries old concept...
250423 -
250424 -            Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
250425 -
250426 - ...most prominently attributed to Newton in the 17th century, but
250427 - possibly going back further to the 12th century, and currently
250428 - inscribed on British coins....
250429 -
250430 -              http://www.24carat.co.uk/standingontheshouldersofgiants.html
250431 -
250432 - ...further...
250433 -
250434 -              http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/history/q0162b.shtml
250435 -
250437 -  ..
250438 - Cultivate Interactive is a Knowledge Management effort funded by the
250439 - government to develop a common source for sharing cultural history and
250440 - enabling synergy in scientfic inquiry applies the notion of "standing
250441 - on the shoulders of giants."
250442 -
250443 -              http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue5/giants/
250445 -  ..
250446 - Alphabetic mind promulgated by Havel, reviewed on 991108 manufactured
250447 - commitment through experience of practitioners. ref SDS 9 5151
250448 -
250449 -
250450 -
250451 -
250452 -
250453 -
2505 -

SUBJECTS
Galileo Galilei 1564 1642 Mathematician Invented Telescope Astronome

2903 -
290401 -  ..
290402 - Galileo Mathematician Astronomy Telescope Gravity Coppernicus
290403 -
290404 - Background on Galileo....
290405 -
290406 -              http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Galileo.html
290407 -
290408 - ...began to study medicine, but preferred mathematics, ref OF 21 KQPX
290409 - He eventually taught mathematics at the university level. ref OF 21
290410 - K131  This led to interest in astronomy, ref OF 21 KQXP, and
290411 - evenutally to improvements in the telescope, ref OF 21 K230, which he
290412 - used to significantly expand understanding of the universe.
290413 - ref OF 21 KSPS
290415 -  ..
290416 - The church initially accomodated Galileo's discoveries, ref OF 21
290417 - K358, but in 1616 Galileo wrote a letter strongly endorsing the
290418 - Copernician theory of the universe, ref OF 21 K369, and subsequently
290419 - Galileo was ruled guilty by an inquisition of church for publishing an
290420 - assertion that the planets circle the sun, as the center of the
290421 - universe, which conflicts with scripture. ref OF 21 K392  Over some
290422 - years Galileo did not suffer from the inquisition findings.
290423 - ref OF 21 K416  However, in 1633 he was found guilty of violating
290424 - conditions of the findings in 1616.  He was condemed to heresy and
290425 - punished by lifelong imprisonment, which was enforced as house arrest,
290426 - where his work continued. ref OF 21 L551
290427 -
290428 -
290429 -
290430 -
290431 -
2905 -

SUBJECTS
Default Null Subject Account for Blank Record

3003 -
300401 -  ..
300402 - Keeper of Flame Religion Maintain Practice of Literacy
300403 - Literacy Declines with Fall of Roman Empire Chruch Keeper of the Flame
300404 -
300405 - Language literacy antiquity....
300406 -
300407 -       http://www.gprep.org/~music/musikbok/chap11.html
300408 -
300409 -    First, the key word in the above statement is survives. In
300410 -    European civilization following the collapse of the Roman empire,
300411 -    literacy fell to an all time low during the Middle Ages. Even
300412 -    though modern scholars are revising their opinions of culture in
300413 -    the Medieval times upward, the average peasant simply couldn't
300414 -    read or write. That special talent was passed along by the church
300415 -    through its religious orders.
300416 -
300418 -  ..
300419 - Dianne Tilloston, PhD (tillos@bigpond.com) explains the fall and rise
300420 - of literacy during the middle ages in Europe...
300421 -
300422 -              http://medievalwriting.50megs.com/literacy/church.htm
300424 -  ..
300425 - Tilloston says in part...
300426 -
300427 -    After the fall of the Roman Empire certain regions, namely Italy
300428 -    itself, southern France and Spain, retained a tradition of literacy
300429 -    in government, commerce, law and religion.  Further north across
300430 -    Germany and France to England the mobile barbarian peoples who
300431 -    gained supremacy were both pagan and illiterate.  Those two words
300432 -    can have a negative connotation, but in an absence of emotive
300433 -    association they simply mean they were not Christian and they had
300434 -    other ways of conducting their affairs or entertaining themselves
300435 -    than through the written word.
300437 -     ..
300438 -    Literate culture was reintroduced along with the Christian religion
300439 -    through the establishment of monastic missions across northwestern
300440 -    Europe.  These efforts came from different directions, which
300441 -    affected the nature of literate culture and writing.  Efforts from
300442 -    Rome itself had resulted in the baptism of the Merovingian king
300443 -    Clovis, a symbolically significant event in the triumph of
300444 -    religious orthodoxy in the face of competition from the Arian
300445 -    heresy, and the establishment of bishoprics across France and into
300446 -    Kent.
300448 -               ..
300449 -              http://medievalwriting.50megs.com/literacy/church2.htm
300450 -
300451 -
300452 -
300453 -
3005 -

SUBJECTS
Default Null Subject Account for Blank Record

3103 -
310401 -     ..
310402 -    Writing Sustained Religion through Accuracy Church Doctrine
310403 -    Writing Critical to Religion Authority of Church Christianity
310404 -    Accuracy Enabled Integrity Written Text Sustained Church Authority
310405 -
310406 -
310407 - Doctor Dianne Tolloston continues...
310408 -
310409 -    The oral tradition of Christianity was not the same as oral
310410 -    traditions in the field of arts or entertainment.  Christianity was
310411 -    a religion of authority and the authority was maintained through
310412 -    the integrity of written texts.  Oral teaching had to constantly
310413 -    refer back to those written texts.  It was a religion of the book.
310414 -    The didactic visual imagery in the churches and the oral ritual and
310415 -    teaching were all derived from specified written texts.  No matter
310416 -    how much of their work the clergy learned by oral processes, and it
310417 -    was probably much more than we can imagine with our utter
310418 -    dependence on the written word for learning, literacy was essential
310419 -    to maintaining the accuracy and orthodoxy of practice.  Reading
310420 -    literacy in Latin became essential to all clergy.
310421 -
310422 -              http://medievalwriting.50megs.com/literacy/church3.htm
310424 -     ..
310425 -    Until around the 12th century most books were produced in monastic
310426 -    scriptoria. The need to build up increasing numbers of monastic
310427 -    libraries entailed much lending of books for copying. The work was
310428 -    undoubtedly laborious. Many scribe's colophons confirm this. Was
310429 -    the scribe a truly literate person, or a highly technically
310430 -    skilled craftsman with developed visual and motor skills?
310432 -  ..
310433 - Another paper by Robert N St Clair and John A Busch, University of
310434 - Louisville, describes Transmission of Values in the middle ages.
310435 - ref OF 20 0001
310436 -
310437 -        Robert N St Clair has background at...
310438 -
310439 -              http://coldfusion.louisville.edu/webs/a-s/english/people_2.cfm?id=25
310441 -  ..
310442 - Added explanation of link between religion and literacy to NWO.
310443 - ref OF 14 JW5L
310444 -
310445 -
310446 -
310447 -
310448 -
3105 -

SUBJECTS
Default Null Subject Account for Blank Record

3203 -
320401 -  ..
320402 - Transformation to Language Enabled Communication through Orality
320403 -
320404 -
320405 -              http://www.historian.net/hxwrite.htm
320406 -
320407 -    Language existed long before writing, emerging probably
320408 -    simultaneously with sapience, abstract thought and the Genus Homo.
320409 -    In my opinion, the signature event that separated the emergence of
320410 -    palaeohumans from their anthropoid progenitors was not tool-making
320411 -    but a rudimentary oral communication that replaced the hoots and
320412 -    gestures still used by lower primates.  The transfer of more
320413 -    complex information, ideas and concepts from one individual to
320414 -    another, or to a group, was the single most advantageous
320415 -    evolutionary adaptation for species preservation.  As long ago as
320416 -    25,000-30,000 years BP, humans were painting pictures on cave
320417 -    walls.  Whether these pictures were telling a "story" or
320418 -    represented some type of "spirit house" or ritual exercise is not
320419 -    known.
320421 -     ..
320422 -    The advent of a writing system, however, seems to coincide with
320423 -    the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to more permanent
320424 -    agrarian encampments when it became necessary to count ones
320425 -    property, whether it be parcels of land, animals or measures of
320426 -    grain or to transfer that property to another individual or
320427 -    another settlement.  We see the first evidence for this with
320428 -    incised "counting tokens" about 9,000 years ago in the neolithic
320429 -    fertile crescent.
320430 -
320431 -
320432 -
320433 -
3205 -

SUBJECTS
Default Null Subject Account for Blank Record

3303 -
330401 -  ..
330402 - Writing Mediums Made Transformation Difficult
330403 -
330404 -
330405 -              http://www.delmar.edu/engl/instruct/stomlin/1301int/lessons/language/history.htm
330406 -
330407 -    Materials and Methods of Writing
330409 -     ..
330410 -    Stone was the first writing surface and sharper, harder stones the
330411 -    first marking instruments. People gradually discovered natural
330412 -    dyes and inks to stain the stone cave walls and roofs they wrote
330413 -    on (see the cave painting of bison above from Altamira in Spain).
330414 -    The Egyptians incised plaster on walls with their sophisticated
330415 -    hieroglyphs. For everyday purposes, the Egyptians developed the
330416 -    first pre-cursor of paper. They glued together many layers of a
330417 -    reed called papyrus (which gives us the base of the word paper) to
330418 -    get a delicate sheet of material which would take ink. Other
330419 -    cultures learned to use leather or the broad leaves of plants.
330420 -    Eventually Europeans discovered that the treated skin of calves or
330421 -    sheep would yield a precious, smooth, white surface for writing
330422 -    called, respectively, vellum and parchment. Both vellum and
330423 -    parchment took about three weeks of intense hand labor to make,
330424 -    and both were very expensive.
330426 -     ..
330427 -    In about 1400, the Italians discovered a way to break down old
330428 -    cloth into its individual fibers. Using a fine screen, they caught
330429 -    the fibers and pressed the water out. When the fiber was dry, they
330430 -    had a sheet of paper. Paper turned out to be quick and inexpensive
330431 -    to make, and the secret of paper-making spread north throughout
330432 -    Europe very quickly. (The Chinese had invented paper independently
330433 -    centuries earlier.) Suddenly it became cost-effective to write
330434 -    things down instead of laboriously memorizing them.
330436 -     ..
330437 -    Later this same century, Johannes Gutenberg expanded on the idea
330438 -    of printing and made it feasible to print mass quantities of
330439 -    ordinary things. Before him, people hand-carved wooden figures and
330440 -    inked them in order to stamp them onto paper. Such plates were
330441 -    used mostly for pictures which were then hand-colored. The trouble
330442 -    with using wooden blocks for printing was that they took a long
330443 -    time and great skill to carve but only lasted for about a hundred
330444 -    impressions before the wood fibers broke down from pressure and
330445 -    ink. Gutenberg's contribution was making moveable type out of
330446 -    relatively inexpensive and long-lasting metal. Within fifty years,
330447 -    the intellectual face of Europe changed because of the sudden
330448 -    availability of books and other publications. It is not too much
330449 -    to say that democracy would never have developed without the
330450 -    printing press and cheap paper.
330451 -
330452 -        [...see below for more on Gutenberg. ref SDS 0 YS7H
330453 -
330454 -
330455 -
330456 -
3305 -

SUBJECTS
Default Null Subject Account for Blank Record

3403 -
340401 -  ..
340402 - Writing Instruments Enabling Forces Along with Demand for Writing
340403 -
340404 - An Internet location for inventors has an article that is not dated,
340405 - with the description...
340406 -
340407 -    A Brief History of Writing Instruments
340408 -    Part 1: From cave paintings to the quill pen -- how ink, paper and
340409 -    pens were all were invented.
340410 -
340411 -              http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa100197.htm
340413 -     ..
340414 -    By Mary Bellis
340415 -
340416 -              http://inventors.about.com/mbiopage.htm
340417 -
340418 -        Mary has her own web site explaining a career
340419 -
340420 -        Mary Bellis is an inventor who works in digital film
340421 -        production and also curates an electronic art gallery.
340423 -         ..
340424 -        Professional Experience: Mary has produced and directed a
340425 -        number of short films, including a documentary on Alexander
340426 -        Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone. She is working on
340427 -        an invention to bring about world peace.
340429 -  ..
340430 - Mary's paper continues...
340431 -
340432 -    The history of writing instruments by which humans have recorded
340433 -    and conveyed thoughts, feelings and grocery lists, is the history
340434 -    of civilization itself. This is how we know the story of us, by
340435 -    the drawings, signs and words we have recorded.
340437 -     ..
340438 -    The cave man's first inventions were the hunting club (not the
340439 -    auto security device) and the handy sharpened-stone, the
340440 -    all-purpose skinning and killing tool. The latter was adapted into
340441 -    the first writing instrument. The cave man scratched pictures with
340442 -    the sharpened-stone tool onto the walls of his cave dwelling. The
340443 -    cave drawings represented events in daily life such as the
340444 -    planting of crops or hunting victories.
340446 -     ..
340447 -    With time, the record-keepers developed systematized symbols from
340448 -    their drawings. These symbols represented words and sentences, but
340449 -    were easier and faster to draw and universally recognized for
340450 -    meaning. The discovery of clay made portable records possible (you
340451 -    can't carry a cave wall around with you). Early merchants used
340452 -    clay tokens with pictographs to record the quantities of materials
340453 -    traded or shipped. These tokens date back to about 8,500 B.C. With
340454 -    the high volume of and the repetition inherent in record keeping,
340455 -    pictographs evolved and slowly lost their picture detail. They
340456 -    became abstract-figures representing sounds in spoken
340457 -    communication. The alphabet replaced pictographs between 1700 and
340458 -    1500 B.C. in the Sinaitic world. The current Hebrew alphabet and
340459 -    writing became popular around 600 B.C. About 400 B.C. the Greek
340460 -    alphabet was developed. Greek was the first script written from
340461 -    left to right. From Greek followed the Byzantine and the Roman
340462 -    (later Latin) writings. In the beginning, all writing systems had
340463 -    only uppercase letters, when the writing instruments were refined
340464 -    enough for detailed faces, lowercase was used as well (around 600
340465 -    A.D.)
340467 -     ..
340468 -    The earliest means of writing that approached pen and paper as we
340469 -    know them today was developed by the Greeks. They employed a
340470 -    writing stylus, made of metal, bone or ivory, to place marks upon
340471 -    wax-coated tablets. The tablets made in hinged pairs, closed to
340472 -    protect the scribe's notes. The first examples of handwriting
340473 -    (purely text messages made by hand) originated in Greece. The
340474 -    Grecian scholar, Cadmus invented the written letter - text
340475 -    messages on paper sent from one individual to another.
340477 -     ..
340478 -    Writing was advancing beyond chiseling pictures into stone or
340479 -    wedging pictographs into wet clay. The Chinese invented and
340480 -    perfected 'Indian Ink'. Originally designed for blacking the
340481 -    surfaces of raised stone-carved hieroglyphics, the ink was a
340482 -    mixture of soot from pine smoke and lamp oil mixed with the
340483 -    gelatin of donkey skin and musk. The ink invented by the Chinese
340484 -    philosopher, Tien-Lcheu (2697 B.C.), became common by the year
340485 -    1200 B.C. Other cultures developed inks using the natural dyes and
340486 -    colors derived from berries, plants and minerals. In early
340487 -    writings, different colored inks had ritual meaning attached to
340488 -    each color.
340490 -     ..
340491 -    The invention of inks paralleled the introduction of paper. The
340492 -    early Egyptians, Romans, Greeks and Hebrews, used papyrus and
340493 -    parchment papers. One of the oldest pieces of writing on papyrus
340494 -    known to us today is the Egyptian "Prisse Papyrus" which dates
340495 -    back to 2000 B.C. The Romans created a reed-pen perfect for
340496 -    parchment and ink, from the hollow tubular-stems of marsh grasses,
340497 -    especially from the jointed bamboo plant. They converted bamboo
340498 -    stems into a primitive form of fountain pen. They cut one end into
340499 -    the form of a pen nib or point. A writing fluid or ink filled the
340500 -    stem, squeezing the reed forced fluid to the nib.
340502 -     ..
340503 -    By 400 A.D. a stable form of ink developed, a composite of
340504 -    iron-salts, nutgalls and gum, the basic formula, which was to
340505 -    remain in use for centuries. Its color when first applied to paper
340506 -    was a bluish-black, rapidly turning into a darker black and then
340507 -    over the years fading to the familiar dull brown color commonly
340508 -    seen in old documents. Wood-fiber paper was invented in China in
340509 -    105 A.D. but it only became known about (due to Chinese secrecy)
340510 -    in Japan around 700 A.D. and brought to Spain by the Arabs in 711
340511 -    A.D. Paper was not widely used throughout Europe until paper mills
340512 -    were built in the late 14th century.
340514 -     ..
340515 -    The writing instrument that dominated for the longest period in
340516 -    history (over one-thousand years) was the quill pen. Introduced
340517 -    around 700 A.D., the quill is a pen made from a bird feather. The
340518 -    strongest quills were those taken from living birds in the spring
340519 -    from the five outer left wing feathers. The left wing was favored
340520 -    because the feathers curved outward and away when used by a
340521 -    right-handed writer. Goose feathers were most common; swan
340522 -    feathers were of a premium grade being scarcer and more expensive.
340523 -    For making fine lines, crow feathers were the best, and then came
340524 -    the feathers of the eagle, owl, hawk and turkey.
340526 -     ..
340527 -    Quill pens lasted for only a week before it was necessary to
340528 -    replace them. There were other disadvantages associated with their
340529 -    use, including a lengthy preparation time. The early European
340530 -    writing parchments made from animal skins, required much scraping
340531 -    and cleaning. A lead and a ruler made margins. To sharpen the
340532 -    quill, the writer needed a special knife (origins of the term
340533 -    "pen-knife".) Beneath the writer's high-top desk was a coal stove,
340534 -    used to dry the ink as fast as possible.
340536 -     ..
340537 -    Plant-fiber paper became the primary medium for writing after
340538 -    another dramatic invention took place: Johannes Gutenberg invented
340539 -    the printing press with replaceable wooden or metal letters in
340540 -    1436. Simpler kinds of printing e.g. stamps with names, used much
340541 -    earlier in China, did not find their way to Europe. During the
340542 -    centuries, many newer printing technologies were developed based
340543 -    on Gutenberg's printing machine e.g. offset printing.
340545 -     ..
340546 -    Articles written by hand had resembled printed letters until
340547 -    scholars began to change the form of writing, using capitals and
340548 -    small letters, writing with more of a slant and connecting
340549 -    letters. Gradually writing became more suitable to the speed the
340550 -    new writing instruments permitted. The credit of inventing Italian
340551 -    'running hand' or cursive handwriting with its Roman capitals and
340552 -    small letters, goes to Aldus Manutius of Venice, who departed from
340553 -    the old set forms in 1495 A.D. By the end of the 16th century, the
340554 -    old Roman capitals and Greek letterforms transformed into the
340555 -    twenty-six alphabet letters we know today, both for upper and
340556 -    lower-case letters.
340558 -     ..
340559 -    When writers had both better inks and paper, and handwriting had
340560 -    developed into both an art form and an everyday occurrence, man's
340561 -    inventive nature once again turned to improving the writing
340562 -    instrument, leading to the development of the modern fountain pen.
340563 -
340564 -
340565 -
340566 -
3406 -

SUBJECTS
Default Null Subject Account for Blank Record

3503 -
350401 -     ..
350402 -    History of Pens & Writing Instruments
350403 -
350404 -    Pencil and Eraser Trivia
350405 -
350406 -              http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blpen.htm
350407 -
350408 -    Graphite is a form of carbon, first discovered in the Seathwaite
350409 -    Valley on the side of the mountain Seathwaite Fell in Borrowdale,
350410 -    near Keswick, England, about 1564 by an unknown person. Shortly
350411 -    after this the first pencils were made in the same area.
350413 -     ..
350414 -    The breakthrough in pencil technology came when French chemist
350415 -    Nicolas Conte developed and patented the process used to make
350416 -    pencils in 1795. He used a mixture of clay and graphite that was
350417 -    fired before it was put in a wooden case. The pencils he made were
350418 -    cylindrical with a slot. The square lead was glued into the slot
350419 -    and a thin strip of wood was used to fill the rest of the slot.
350420 -    Pencils got their name from the old English word meaning 'brush'.
350421 -    Conte's method of kiln firing powdered graphite and clay allowed
350422 -    pencils to be made to any hardness or softness - very important to
350423 -    artists and draftsmen.
350425 -     ..
350426 -    Charles Marie de la Condamine, a French scientist and explorer,
350427 -    was the first European to bring back the natural substance called
350428 -    "India" rubber. He brought a sample to the Institute de France in
350429 -    Paris in 1736. South American Indian tribes used rubber to making
350430 -    bouncing playing balls and as an adhesive for attaching feathers
350431 -    and other objects to their bodies.
350433 -     ..
350434 -    In 1770, the noted scientist Sir Joseph Priestley (discoverer of
350435 -    oxygen) recorded the following, "I have seen a substance
350436 -    excellently adapted to the purpose of wiping from paper the mark
350437 -    of black lead pencil." Europeans were rubbing out pencil marks
350438 -    with the small cubes of rubber, the substance that Condamine had
350439 -    brought to Europe from South America. They called their erasers
350440 -    "peaux de negres". However, rubber was not an easy substance to
350441 -    work with because it went bad very easily -- just like food,
350442 -    rubber would rot. English engineer, Edward Naime is also credited
350443 -    with the creation of the first eraser in 1770. Before rubber,
350444 -    breadcrumbs had been used to erase pencil marks. Naime claims he
350445 -    accidentally picked up a piece of rubber instead of his lump of
350446 -    bread and discovered the possibilities, he went on to sell the new
350447 -    rubbing out devices or rubbers.
350449 -     ..
350450 -    In 1839, Charles Goodyear discovered a way to cure rubber and make
350451 -    it a lasting and useable material. He called his process
350452 -    vulcanization, after Vulcan, the Roman god of fire. In 1844,
350453 -    Goodyear patented his process. With the better rubber available,
350454 -    erasers became quite common.
350456 -     ..
350457 -    The first patent for attaching an eraser to a pencil was issued in
350458 -    1858 to a man from Philadelphia named Hyman Lipman. This patent
350459 -    was later held to be invalid because it was merely the combination
350460 -    of two things, without a new use.
350462 -     ..
350463 -    At first penknives were used to sharpen pencils. They got their
350464 -    name from the fact that they were first used to shape feather
350465 -    quills used as early pens. In 1828, Bernard Lassimone, a French
350466 -    mathematician applied for a patent (French patent #2444) on an
350467 -    invention to sharpen pencils. However, it was not until 1847 that
350468 -    Therry des Estwaux first invented the manual pencil sharpener, as
350469 -    we know it.
350471 -     ..
350472 -    John Lee Love of Fall River, MA designed the "Love Sharpener."
350473 -    Love's invention was the very simple, portable pencil sharpener
350474 -    that many artists use. The pencil is put into the opening of the
350475 -    sharpener and rotated by hand, and the shavings stay inside the
350476 -    sharpener. Love's sharpener was patented on November 23, 1897
350477 -    (U.S. Patent # 594,114). Four years earlier, Love created and
350478 -    patented his first invention, the "Plasterer's Hawk." This device,
350479 -    which is still used today, is a flat square piece of board made of
350480 -    wood or metal, upon which plaster or mortar was placed and then
350481 -    spread by plasterers or masons. This was patented on July 9, 1895.
350482 -
350484 -     ..
350485 -    One source claims that the Hammacher Schlemmer Company of New York
350486 -    offered the world's first electric pencil sharpener designed by
350487 -    Raymond Loewy, sometime in the early 1940s.
350489 -     ..
350490 -    In 1861, Eberhard Faber built the first pencil factory in the
350491 -    United States in New York City.
350492 -
350493 -
350494 -
350495 -
3505 -

SUBJECTS
Default Null Subject Account for Blank Record

3603 -
360401 -  ..
360402 - Alphabetic Mind Constructs Meaning from Small Organic Structures
360403 -
360404 -
360405 -    The Alphabetic Principle is More Suited to the Human Mind
360406 -
360407 -              http://www.ashbrook.org/publicat/oped/moore/04/alphabet.html
360409 -     ..
360410 -    Editorial January 2004
360412 -     ..
360413 -    by: Terrence Moore  tmoore@ashbrook.org
360414 -
360415 -              http://www.ashbrook.org/about/staff/moore.html
360417 -     ..
360418 -    This is the third article of a three-part series.
360419 -    When Rudolf Flesch published his mini-classic on phonics, Why
360420 -    Johnny Can't Read (1955), he was worried by the decline in
360421 -    students' reading abilities. He was disgusted with the
360422 -    mind-numbing Dick and Jane readers that had begun to creep into
360423 -    American classrooms. He was alarmed by the "foolproof system" that
360424 -    promulgated non-phonetic methods of reading instruction, namely,
360425 -    the interlocking directorate of education schools, school systems,
360426 -    and textbook companies.
360428 -     ..
360429 -    Yet what bothered him most was the wholesale abandonment of one of
360430 -    the great achievements and inventions of mankind. That achievement
360431 -    is the alphabet. "We have decided to forget that we write with
360432 -    letters and learn to read English as if it were Chinese. One word
360433 -    after another after another after another. If we want to read
360434 -    materials with a vocabulary of 10,000 words, then we have to
360435 -    memorize 10,000 words. and so on. We have thrown 3,500 years of
360436 -    civilization out the window and have gone back to the Age of
360437 -    Hammurabi."
360439 -     ..
360440 -    As Flesch pointed out, and as the Core Knowledge sequence teaches
360441 -    in the first grade, alphabetic systems of writing replaced
360442 -    pictographic writing around 1500 B.C. In the pictographic system,
360443 -    each word had a corresponding picture. To read a text with a
360444 -    vocabulary range of 10,000 words, one would have to have 10,000
360445 -    pictures committed to memory. By way of comparison, a good
360446 -    collegiate dictionary contains around 150,000 words. Any way you
360447 -    count it, that is a lot of pictures. The alphabet tremendously
360448 -    simplified language. Readers in alphabetic systems only had to
360449 -    know twenty-six or so symbols and a slightly larger number of
360450 -    sounds, or phonemes. These letters mapped the sounds people made
360451 -    when saying various words. Rather than drawing a picture of a
360452 -    house or a dog or a child, the writer now only had to use letters
360453 -    to approximate what the voice uttered. Modern whole-language
360454 -    teachers have taken a massive leap backwards by treating each
360455 -    single word as a distinct picture. Their recourse to pictures in
360456 -    whole-language primers to help children guess at the text is a
360457 -    further barbarization. Insofar as whole-language teachers neglect
360458 -    the alphabet and phonemes of our unmistakably alphabetic language,
360459 -    they ask children to make bricks without straw.
360461 -     ..
360462 -    We have learned a great deal about reading since the publication
360463 -    of Flesch's prophetic book. Neuro-linguistic and eye-movement
360464 -    researchers (those who figure out what the brain and eyes do while
360465 -    reading) have disproved one of the fundamental axioms of
360466 -    whole-language theory. Whole-language advocates have always
360467 -    asserted that mature readers do not read a letter at a time but
360468 -    instead digest whole words. Neuroimaging studies reveal to the
360469 -    contrary that people with reading difficulties (40% of our
360470 -    population) lack the ability to work with the phonemes of the
360471 -    language. At the same time, even accomplished readers mentally
360472 -    sound out words as they read, though the process is so automatic
360473 -    one does not notice it. A good reader goes through the word
360474 -    "reading" that he has seen thousands of times in a micro-second
360475 -    but still might have to slow down for "neuro-linguistic" or
360476 -    "extra-parliamentary." The icing on the cake is that the Chinese,
360477 -    one of the few peoples left with a language in which characters
360478 -    correspond to whole words, have been using the Roman alphabet for
360479 -    the last half-century to teach their children to read.
360481 -     ..
360482 -    Parents worried about their children's ability to read should do
360483 -    two things. First, they should ask their children's teachers what
360484 -    method of reading instruction they use. One must be cautious of
360485 -    so-called combined approaches, since these are attempts to throw
360486 -    phonics-minded parents off the track of solid literacy. Second,
360487 -    and this is particularly important for parents of older children,
360488 -    they should ask their children to read aloud several pages from an
360489 -    age-appropriate work of literature. They may be shocked to find,
360490 -    as I have been by listening even to college students, that their
360491 -    children have only a halting familiarity with their native
360492 -    language. That "long talk" parents have put off having about the
360493 -    ways of the world might need to be an introduction to the facts of
360494 -    the English alphabet.
360496 -     ..
360497 -    Terrence Moore is an Adjunct Fellow of the Ashbrook Center and is
360498 -    the Principal of Ridgeview Classical Schools in Fort Collins,
360499 -    Colorado.
360500 -
360501 -
360502 -
360503 -
3606 -

SUBJECTS
Popular Literature in Ancient Greece

3703 -
370401 -  ..
370402 - Popular Literature in Ancient Greece
370403 -
370404 -
370405 -              http://www.ucalgary.ca/applied_history/tutor/popculture/PthreeA.html
370406 -
370407 -    The Homeric epics represent only a small portion of all the genres
370408 -    of poetry, not to mention other genres of literature.  Poetry is
370409 -    particularly interesting for the discussion of popular culture,
370410 -    however.  Unlike modern poets, who usually create "art for art's
370411 -    sake", much ancient poetry had more practical goals.  All types of
370412 -    poetry were initially accompanied by music, and each genre was
370413 -    marked by a particular meter formula.  Epic poetry, composed in
370414 -    hexameter verse, was used to tell heroic legends of men or gods,
370415 -    such as the tale of the Trojan War in the Iliad.  Lyric poetry
370416 -    consisted of two different types of songs: solo and choral, and of
370417 -    these there were many subtypes with varying meters that were
370418 -    composed and performed for particular functions.  Lyric subtypes
370419 -    included drinking songs (scolia), wedding songs (hymenaios and
370420 -    epithalamion), hymns that celebrated a worthy person, like a
370421 -    winning athelete (encomium), and songs to particular gods, like
370422 -    Dionysus or Apollo (dithyramb and paean).  The Dionysus poems in
370423 -    particular, an example of choral lyric, were perfomed at Dionysus
370424 -    festivals in large competitions that took place in the
370425 -    amphitheatres.  Eventually this type of choral lyric evolved into
370426 -    the Chorus (a group of singers who more or less narrated in between
370427 -    dialogue) of ancient Greek tradegies.  Elegiac poetry in alternate
370428 -    hexameter and pentameter verse was used for more personal topics:
370429 -    love, laments, and poems to commemorate the dead.  Finally iambic
370430 -    and bucolic poetry were for political satire and praise of
370431 -    labourers and herdsmen respectively.  This list of poetry types is
370432 -    not meant to be extensive yet it is still clear that poetry was
370433 -    essential in many aspects of Greek culture, being used for
370434 -    entertainment, as well as the perpetuation and reaffirmation of
370435 -    cultural beliefs and values.  These are goals in common with much
370436 -    popular culture today.  Certainly a mode of communication so
370437 -    pervasive through society would have specialized forms that we
370438 -    might classify as high culture, or as folk culture, but in speaking
370439 -    of poetry in general a good case could be made for its inclusion in
370440 -    a popular culture study.
370442 -     ..
370443 -    While the popular aspect of ancient greek literature has been
370444 -    largely overlooked, there is one genre which has received some
370445 -    attention: the ancient romance.  The Greeks did not begin writing
370446 -    romance novels (romances, that is, adventurous love stories, were
370447 -    the only type of novels the ancient Greeks wrote as far as we know)
370448 -    until quite late, between the first century BC and the sixth
370449 -    century AD, its peak coming in the second century AD.  Of these six
370450 -    centuries of writing only five complete novels and individual
370451 -    manuscript fragments of up to 42 others exist, nonetheless, the
370452 -    novels are believed by a number of scholars to have been a popular
370453 -    genre of literature, an ancient pulp fiction if you will.  The
370454 -    reasons behind the belief that the romances were popular reveal the
370455 -    sometimes negative sentiments that are associated with popular
370456 -    culture in general, and susequently the problems that arise from
370457 -    these sentiments.  There are basically two reasons given for
370458 -    assuming a popular audience for these novels: they were inferior
370459 -    pieces of literature, and there was no ancient Greek word for the
370460 -    genre - where the novels were referred to at all, they were
370461 -    summarily dismissed.  Therefore inferior culture equals popular
370462 -    culture, and the educated ancient Greeks must have had the same
370463 -    disdain for popular culture that modern elitists do.  The problems
370464 -    with this should be immediately obvious.  The novels may well have
370465 -    been popular, but modern ideas of inferiority are insufficient
370466 -    evidence to base this assumption on.
370468 -     ..
370469 -    The five extant novels, and from what can be discerned of the
370470 -    fragments of others, seem to follow a formulaic plot.  The plot for
370471 -    all of them, with considerable individual variation in details,
370472 -    consists of two incredibly beautiful young people who fall
370473 -    passionately in love, but are separated before they are either able
370474 -    to marry or to consummate their marriage; the separation then
370475 -    begins a series of exciting and dangerous adventures all over the
370476 -    Mediterranean world, spiced with kidnappings, pirates, thieves,
370477 -    unsolicited attacks on their fidelity, and rumours about the other
370478 -    lover's death, but invariably, the stories all end happily with the
370479 -    couple reunited.  They often include a bit of debauchery, some
370480 -    bawdy language, and freakish animals.  Likewise, most of the novels
370481 -    are set at some time in the distant past, and are usually based on
370482 -    a local legends, or actual historical figures.  The repitition of
370483 -    the same type of storyline has lead some to conclude that it must
370484 -    have been a successful format initially and this success explains
370485 -    its continuation for the next couple of centuries.  But it is
370486 -    unknown what the authors intentions were when they wrote a romance.
370487 -    There is much discussion on how exactly the Greeks viewed the
370488 -    continuum of truth and fiction, as it appears that their historical
370489 -    writing contains much that is creative, while the novels are based
370490 -    on real historical figures, though not necessarily facts.  What is
370491 -    more, no one is quite sure why the ancient novel came into being in
370492 -    the first place, nor whether it evolved out of another genre
370493 -    entirely; there are characteristics (if not entire word for word
370494 -    quotations from) other genres and well known ancient literature.
370495 -    In short the writers may not have been aware that they were
370496 -    creating a new genre of literature, especially as there was no new
370497 -    word for what they were doing.
370499 -     ..
370500 -    Formula is a key component in much popular culture, and I would
370501 -    hazard the assumption that writers, of books, radio shows,
370502 -    television programs, and films, are aware when they are using
370503 -    formula, and use consciously.  In order to fulfill their contract
370504 -    with their audience they have to follow the conventions of the
370505 -    established genre (or subvert them as in Clint Eastwood's
370506 -    deconstructed Western film Unforgiven (1992)).  In the case of the
370507 -    ancient Greek romances the fact that they were formulaic was more
370508 -    of a coincidence, rather than the author's intent.  This said, the
370509 -    fact that they were formulaic is usually a reason to consider them
370510 -    as inferior pieces of literature, along with their sentimental
370511 -    mood, their emphasis on emotion over reason, their often
370512 -    two-dimensional characters, and their frequently contrived plots.
370514 -     ..
370515 -    A quick summary of the first few chapters of Callirhoe, the
370516 -    earliest of the five complete novels, written by a Chariton of
370517 -    Aphrodisias possibily in the first century AD, will illustrate the
370518 -    descriptions given above well.  The novel starts with the heroine
370519 -    and hero, Callirhoe and Chaereas, both renowned throughout Sicily
370520 -    for their beauty, falling, instantaneously, passionately in love
370521 -    after, literally, bumping into one another on the street.  While
370522 -    the heroine, Callirhoe remains respectably mute about her burning
370523 -    infatuation, Chaereas, the hero, falls ill, and drops out of his
370524 -    regular activities.  He is so well-loved and missed by his fellow
370525 -    citizens (because he is a two-dimensional character) that they
370526 -    convince their ruler, who is also Callirhoe's father, that a
370527 -    marriage between the two must take place to save this fine specimen
370528 -    of a man.  Of course, Callirhoe's beauty, likened throughout the
370529 -    novel to the goddess Aphrodite, had brought powerful suitors from
370530 -    many miles around, all of whom were greatly hard-done by this
370531 -    impromtu wedding.  They contrive to ruin the marriage by making
370532 -    Chaereas jealous, and succeed.  In a fit of uncharacteristic rage,
370533 -    Chaereas violently kicks Callirhoe, who falls dead to the ground.
370534 -    Or so it would appear.  She has stopped breathing, is presumed
370535 -    dead, so her family goes through with all the funeral preparations,
370536 -    and finally seals her in the family crypt.  Some hours later, after
370537 -    it is night and all the mourners departed, Callirhoe suddenly
370538 -    begins breathing again, "when lack of food had led to some
370539 -    loosening of her blocked respiration" (a perfect example of
370540 -    outright plot manipulation).  Here the adventures begin in earnest.
370541 -    Tomb robbers save her from slow starvation, but take her and her
370542 -    funeral treasures to sell for a great price somewhere across the
370543 -    Mediterranean.  Despite her arresting beauty, the thieves do not
370544 -    lay a hand on her and she is sold to a Dionysus, another well-loved
370545 -    ruler, who falls in love with her at first glimpse, even though his
370546 -    wife has just died, whom he had loved so dearly that he wished for
370547 -    death as well.  After he falls in love with Callirhoe, he tries to
370548 -    starve himself to death because she will not at first have him.
370549 -    She changes her mind when she discovers that she is pregnant (not
370550 -    only did not suffer any brain damage due to hours without oxygen,
370551 -    but she also managed to not miscarry after being kicked in the
370552 -    stomach), and decides to marry him to give her child a name.  The
370553 -    story continues through the marriage, pirates, searching, and
370554 -    public trials until eventually Callirhoe and Chaereas are reunited,
370555 -    destined to live happily ever after.
370557 -     ..
370558 -    The summary makes clear the plot manipulation, the two-dimensional
370559 -    characters, and the emphasis on emotion rather than reason.  While
370560 -    these are often the characteristics of bad literature today,and
370561 -    while these characteristics may make it difficult for some modern
370562 -    readers to enjoy the ancient Greek romances as pieces of good
370563 -    literature, it does not mean that the same critetria were used in
370564 -    ancient Greece.  The ancient novels and their development has often
370565 -    been compared to the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century, a
370566 -    dangerous comparison to make for we know how well the genre of
370567 -    novels has turned out.  It is also a dangerous comparison because
370568 -    the eighteenth century and ancient Greece under Roman rule were two
370569 -    completely different times with widely divergent cultures from one
370570 -    another.
370572 -     ..
370573 -    Despite what we now consider to be faults, the novels in context
370574 -    may have, in fact, answered to a number of the needs of Greek
370575 -    society.  It has been argued that the plot manipulation so evident
370576 -    in the novels mirrored the Greek belief that human life was
370577 -    manipulated by the gods.  Indeed, throughout Callirhoe, it is
370578 -    frequently explained that Eros, or Fortune, or Aphrodite were
370579 -    making plans for, and taking action on the two heroes, as well as
370580 -    most of the other characters.  The prevailing feeling of
370581 -    helplessness has been read as an indirect indication of how the
370582 -    once mighty Greeks were feeling under Roman rule.  Further
370583 -    allusions to the empire have been interpreted out of the apparent
370584 -    emphasis in the novels on travelling, foreign places, and strange
370585 -    creatures and people in that the vast empire for the first time
370586 -    brought a large, diverse area with numerous cultures under one
370587 -    rule, thereby increasing mutual awareness and curiosity.  That the
370588 -    novels answered to the present needs of the ancient Greeks could be
370589 -    used as a justification for their popularity, but does not prove
370590 -    that they were.
370592 -     ..
370593 -    But it is the supposed inferiority of the novels on which the
370594 -    decision of a popular audience hangs. This attitude harkens back
370595 -    to the beginning of our introduction, where we met the Leavises,
370596 -    who had no tolerance for any culture that was popular because they
370597 -    believed it lowered cultural standards. Interestingly, from the
370598 -    opinion that all popular culture is inferior culture has come the
370599 -    reverse judgement: that any cultural artefact of questionable
370600 -    quality must needs be popular culture. This has been exactly the
370601 -    case with the Greek romances. That the audience for the romances
370602 -    was a popular one has been supported with the lack of contemporary
370603 -    literary discussion of the novels, as well as the fact that there
370604 -    was no ancient Greek equivalent to describe the genre. At first
370605 -    thought, a lack of contemporary discussion would lead one to
370606 -    believe that not only were the novels not popular but they had
370607 -    rarely even been heard of. However, the few known instances where
370608 -    the romances are referred to are actually quite negative, which
370609 -    leads one to believe that they were well enough known about that
370610 -    at least one or two people felt the need to express their dislike.
370612 -     ..
370613 -    For example, the sophist Philostratus, who lived in Rome around
370614 -    200 AD, wrote an open, epigrammic letter to the then dead
370615 -    Chariton.
370617 -     ..
370618 -    "To Chariton.  Do you really suppose that the Greeks are going to
370619 -    remember your stories when you are gone?  Those who are nobodies
370620 -    when they are living, what will they be when they are dead?"
370622 -     ..
370623 -    If Chariton truly had been a nobody, then Philostratus would have
370624 -    had no need to point it out.  Apparently, Philostratus was
370625 -    something of a jealous individual, because he wrote similar chiding
370626 -    letters to a certain Epictetus.  The second century sophists, in a
370627 -    revival of Greek rhetorical practices in the Roman Empire, were in
370628 -    the habit of writing letters to dead philosophers, writers, poets,
370629 -    but presumably they were not in the habit of wasting their time on
370630 -    complete unknowns.  The concluding line in Persius' first satire,
370631 -    which reads His mane edictum, post prandia Callirhoen do, and
370632 -    refers to the heroine of Callirhoe by Chariton, is a contemporary
370633 -    negative reaction.  Also one Macrobius mentions the novels of
370634 -    Petronius and Apuleius, and he states that they belong in the
370635 -    nursery (nutricum cunae), and that they are examples of argumenta
370636 -    fictis casibus amatorum referta, or 'narratives replete with
370637 -    imaginary doings of lovers', or mere ear flattery.  Finally, a
370638 -    fifth century AD physician, Theodorus Priscianus, was known to
370639 -    recommend the work of one of the romance writers, Iamblichus, to
370640 -    men with sexual problems, but beyond that seemed to have no opinion
370641 -    of the work or genre.  There are perhaps three or four other
370642 -    instances where the novels are referred to, but generally the
370643 -    comments are opinionless and their reference serves some other
370644 -    pupose.
370646 -     ..
370647 -    It is possible, though just as difficult to tell with only three
370648 -    negative references, that the novels were considered inferior
370649 -    literature by intellectuals in their own time. But even a
370650 -    contemporary opinion of inferiority does not equate popularity.
370651 -    Notice that there are no references, found thus far, that refer to
370652 -    the audience of the novels, or how well known they were, except
370653 -    perhaps very indirectly in Philostratus' letter. It is more
370654 -    reasonable to suggest therefore, that the absence of an ancient
370655 -    Greek term for the genre (no word for novel, and no word for
370656 -    romance) and the lack of contemporary discussion is an indication
370657 -    to the newness of the genre, and the fact that there were not
370658 -    enough examples of the genre at any one time to form opinions on.
370660 -     ..
370661 -    That the novels were considered popular was not through direct
370662 -    evidence as it should have been, rather it came through an
370663 -    association with modern popular culture. B. E. Perry says just as
370664 -    much in "The Ancient Romances" (1967):
370665 -
370666 -     "...for there is nothing else in ancient literature so much like
370667 -     our present-day movies with their glamorous heroines and heroes,
370668 -     the rapid succession of breathtaking adventures, nearly always
370669 -     ending happily ever after with a wedding, and their highly
370670 -     conventionalized morals, gestures, and techniques, as these Greek
370671 -     romances. "
370673 -      ..
370674 -     This would be an interesting and perfectly acceptable comparison
370675 -     (albeit anachronistic) if it first could be demonstrated that the
370676 -     novels had in fact been popular.  From more recent studies of
370677 -     ancient literacy, papyrus finds, and the content of the texts
370678 -     themselves the notion of the ancient romances' popularity has
370679 -     begun to be refuted in ernest. "Popular" is most often associated
370680 -     with the non-upper class, that is, the non-aristocrats, the
370681 -     uneducated, and the unwealthy.  That the novels were enjoyed
370682 -     primarily by this group has been justified with a downward spread
370683 -     of literacy at this time, as well as a developing bourgeois class,
370684 -     who were able to purchase or have made for them copies of the
370685 -     novels.  These statements, however, are still being hotly
370686 -     contested because of the immense difficulty in determining
370687 -     literacy rates, discerning what type of education might have been
370688 -     available to the non-upper class, and whether members of the
370689 -     developing bourgeois class who were able to read constituted a
370690 -     substantial enough group to be termed a popular audience.
370692 -      ..
370693 -     We have already learned that not only the elite educated class
370694 -     were able to read and write, and it has been shown that literacy
370695 -     did increase, if only slightly, in the first three centuries AD.
370696 -     From graffiti studies it is also known that the lower classes were
370697 -     somewhat familiar with classic literature, such as Ovid,
370698 -     Propertius, and Lucretius, because they were often quoted, though
370699 -     not always accurately (though this is not so surprising given,
370700 -     once again, the oral nature of the culture.  In the second century
370701 -     AD, during the so called Second Sophistic, it was more than common
370702 -     for rhetors, or sophists, to stand before large public audiences
370703 -     and hold a debate, or declaim on a particular topic, making all
370704 -     their training quite familiar to those who attended with some
370705 -     regularity).  Thus it is possible that if the lower classes had
370706 -     been so inclined they might have read the romances.  The romances
370707 -     may have been more complicated than first thought however.  First
370708 -     of all, the romances are much longer than most other ancient Greek
370709 -     literature, taking up several rolls of papyrus, and, because
370710 -     written words were intended generally to read aloud, there were no
370711 -     breaks between the words on the page, nor was there any
370712 -     punctuation.  So while the plot and characters may have been
370713 -     simplistic, the actual mechanics of reading the texts may have
370714 -     been quite difficult.  Secondly, in an effort to redeem the
370715 -     literary value of the novels from inferiority, closer evaluation
370716 -     of the texts has shown that the authors made use of a range of
370717 -     literary traditions including epic, drama, rhetoric, myth and even
370718 -     medical books, and were therefore full of allusions that some
370719 -     argue, may have made it difficult for the average reader to
370720 -     understand.  Furthermore, and more importantly, it indicates that
370721 -     the authors were well-educated and aimed their novels at an
370722 -     equally well-educated audience.
370723 -
370724 -
370726 -      ..
370727 -     Paper Expensive Until 200 AD Papyrus Egypt Monopoly
370728 -
370729 -     In the first few centuries AD, Egypt maintained a monopoly on
370730 -     papyrus, both in its production as well as its trade, therefore
370731 -     paper was quite an expensive material in Greece.  Through much of
370732 -     antiquity, a papyrus roll could cost up to five or six days wages
370733 -     for a labourer.  And again, even those who were able to afford
370734 -     them, may not have had any interest in purchasing books, whether
370735 -     they were romances, poetry or history.  The number of surviving
370736 -     copies also points to this conclusion.  Of Chariton's Callirhoe,
370737 -     the earliest of the five extant novels, there have been four
370738 -     copies found thus far, of Achilles Tatius, another of the five
370739 -     extant novelists, there are six, but there are more than 600
370740 -     copies of the Iliad.  Of course it must be remembered that Homer
370741 -     was first written down in the eighth century BC, so the six
370742 -     hundred copies are the result 1400 years of book copying, yet the
370743 -     four copies of Chariton are the end result of six centuries of
370744 -     copying.  It appears from the copies surviving that the
370745 -     Christians, a minority for the few hundred years after Christ,
370746 -     constituted a larger group than those the audience for the novels,
370747 -     for there are 12 copies of the book of Genesis, as well as 12
370748 -     copies of the Gospel of John (2-4 only) from the same time period
370749 -     (1st century AD to the sixth).
370751 -      ..
370752 -     But, again, ancient Greek culture was predominantly oral.  While
370753 -     it is known that other pieces of literature were performed on a
370754 -     regular basis, by the authors themselves or actors, there is no
370755 -     known evidence that tells of public readings of the novels.  There
370756 -     is mention, however, of some of the novels' main characters being
370757 -     mimed or danced by performers, and there is also a floor mosaic at
370758 -     the Orontes (circa 200 AD) in Antioch which show scenes from two
370759 -     of the romances.  But these two instances do not a popular
370760 -     audience make.  The romances may well have been popular because
370761 -     they were performed often, but there is no evidence so far that
370762 -     this was the case either.
370764 -      ..
370765 -     In their defense, most of the scholars who have studied the
370766 -     ancient romances and who assume that the novels were popular, were
370767 -     not actually studying their popularity.  Perry, for instance, was
370768 -     studying the potential origins of the ancient novel genre.  But
370769 -     the assumption of a popular audience has lead to other premature,
370770 -     if not erroneous, conclusions.  If a popular audience is assumed
370771 -     then the next step is to discover who that audience was, and
370772 -     because the few ancient intellectuals who mentioned the novels had
370773 -     negative opinions, and based on the supposed inferiority of the
370774 -     novels themselves, it has been assumed that the audience for the
370775 -     ancient novels consisted of, variously, women, adolescents, "the
370776 -     poor in spirit" , and people who were "rootless, at a loss,
370777 -     restlessly searching" , as well as the newly literate, and the
370778 -     rising bourgeois class.  The first two were assumed on the basis
370779 -     of the main characters in the novels: there is a considerable
370780 -     focus on the heroines, and the protagonists are usually young.
370781 -     The second two descriptions were presumably concluded from the
370782 -     mood of the romances and who that mood might appeal to.  And the
370783 -     last last two audience types were arrived at from the attempt to
370784 -     justify a non-intellectual audience (as the intellectuals of
370785 -     ancient Greek society traditionally came from the upper class,
370786 -     where both education and money are expected).  Identical
370787 -     difficulties arise in determining the quality of the audience as
370788 -     there did with assuming a popular audience.
370790 -      ..
370791 -     The assumption of a female audience is almost offensive,
370792 -     especially when we consider that these assumptions were made by
370793 -     the same people who were assuming a popular audience based on the
370794 -     inferiority of the novels.  That the romances' popular audience
370795 -     was made up of women, is an opinion that has likely been around
370796 -     since the nineteenth century, spawned by the all too common
370797 -     association of women with sentimental and emotional things, which
370798 -     is exactly how the novels were described.  The opinion was carried
370799 -     on into this century by not only that association (which continues
370800 -     in the minds of some even today) but also with the association of
370801 -     the audience for the modern romance: primarily women.  Clearly
370802 -     this assumption says less about women in antiquity than it does
370803 -     about nineteenth and twentieth century thought.  And when the
370804 -     hypothesis of a popular female audience is tested for the ancient
370805 -     romances, it is left with wobbly legs on which to stand.  We know
370806 -     that there were some women who possessed a higher education, which
370807 -     was based on a knowledge of literature rather than rhetoric, but
370808 -     these women were more often the exception than the rule, and could
370809 -     hardly have constituted a popular, ie. large, reading audience.
370810 -     True, the heroines in the romances are often strong characters,
370811 -     with which women may wished to have identified, but it has also
370812 -     been argued that these female characters were a male construct,
370813 -     based on the author's perceptions, or fantasies about women.  Most
370814 -     recently, the situation has almost reversed itself, in that the
370815 -     novels may have been too complex for a female audience because of
370816 -     the newly discovered intertextual references.  Granted, it is
370817 -     never said that women were unable to understand the novels, but
370818 -     rather that their limited education, imposed on them by societal
370819 -     standards, did not allow them (or anyone without a higher
370820 -     education for that matter) access to the many allusions contained
370821 -     within the texts.
370822 -
370823 -
370824 -
370825 -
3709 -

SUBJECTS
Printing Press Invented 1455 Gutenberg

3803 -
380401 -  ..
380402 - Printing Press Invented 1455 Gutenberg
380403 - Literacy Early-modern Era Printing Press Invented
380404 - Books Created by Monastic Scribes for Religion During Middle Ages
380405 -
380406 - Follow up ref SDS 7 2548.
380407 -
380408 -    Early modern bestsellers: chapbooks and ballads
380409 -
380410 -              http://www.ucalgary.ca/applied_history/tutor/popculture/
380412 -     ..
380413 -    In the early medieval period books were manufactured almost
380414 -    exclusively by monastic scribes, who copied the text out by hand
380415 -    and either made their own illustrations or hired artisans for the
380416 -    job.  In a good year, one scribe might produce two books.  With the
380417 -    rise of the universities on the continent, a need for both
380418 -    theological and legal books arose.  Thus by the fourteenth century
380419 -    the book trade included writers, illuminators, parchment makers,
380420 -    binders, and sellers, who were often the same person and most
380421 -    usually in the employ of the university.  These book tradesmen were
380422 -    licensed by the university, sworn to abide by their regulations,
380423 -    and required to produce books exclusively for university demands,
380424 -    but consequently, they also enjoyed a monopoly on the production
380425 -    and distribution of books for a large body of students and whoever
380426 -    else might be interested.  The production of books, for everyone
380427 -    involved, however, was a slow and laborious process.  As literacy
380428 -    rates slowly climbed, and education spread, demand increasingly
380429 -    surpassed supply.
380431 -     ..
380432 -    Fortunately, in a Mainz workshop sometime in 1450, Johann Gutenberg
380433 -    alleviated both the cramping hands of monks and the frustration of
380434 -    would-be readers by being the first to make a working printing
380435 -    press (although other book craftsmen in Europe were not far behind
380436 -    in his discovery).  With the help of movable type, a page of a book
380437 -    could now be printed in a matter of minutes, an entire book, in a
380438 -    matter of days.  The invention of printing was a technological
380439 -    breakthrough that very quickly changed the habits of Early Modern
380440 -    people.  Suddenly books were available for purchase all over
380441 -    Europe.  A reader no longer had to commision someone to copy a book
380442 -    out, and they no longer had to wait six months to a year before
380443 -    that book would be finished and they could actually have it.  Old
380444 -    favourites were ready and standing by, just waiting to be perused
380445 -    at the printmaker's shop or at a bookstall in the city centre.  By
380446 -    the 1480s a commercial trade in printed literature had been well
380447 -    established and by 1500, printing presses had turned out more than
380448 -    40 000 editions in more than 250 centres across Europe.  Each
380449 -    edition of a book consisted of anywhere from 200 - 1 000 copies ,
380450 -    so that by 1500 there were between 8 000 000 and 40 000 000 printed
380451 -    copies of books in existence at a time when the population of
380452 -    Europe is estimated at little more than eighty million .
380454 -  ..
380455 - Gutenberg is credited for changing the intellectual face of Europe,
380456 - and a leading enabling force for transformation to democracy.
380457 - ref SDS 0 C672
380459 -  ..
380460 - Previously, on 991010 Gutenberg was honored for having developed the
380461 - greatest invention in the past millenium. ref SDS 7 2548
380463 -  ..
380464 - Research continues...
380465 -
380466 -    While the medieval book trade had focused on theological treatises
380467 -    and legal tomes, the printing press freed time for the manufacture
380468 -    of a wider variety of material. Traditional books (as in those
380469 -    previously commisioned by the Church or the university) were sold
380470 -    alongside ballads, which were lyrics printed on a single sheet to
380471 -    be accompanied by a well-known tune, and chapbooks, thin booklets
380472 -    averaging 10-30 pages (known collectively in France as the
380473 -    BibliothŠque Bleue after the blue binding paper otherwise used to
380474 -    wrap sugar loaves in) The subject matter of ballads and chapbooks
380475 -    was a varied assortment of fables, riddles, abridged versions of
380476 -    long romances, religious material, proverbs, advice on courting,
380477 -    cooking and beauty, interpreatations of dreams, as well as
380478 -    exciting stories of heroes and heroines, cross-dressers, infamous
380479 -    criminals and crimes, executions, battles, acts of admirable
380480 -    kindness, funny foreigners, virginal women and wanton women,
380481 -    clever young men and cuckolded old husbands. Because of the
380482 -    proliferation of this newly-printed and non-academic literature,
380483 -    Peter Burke has called the printed books of the Early Modern era
380484 -    (ca. 1500 - 1800) "the most obvious example of the
380485 -    commercialisation of popular culture" . For the material of
380486 -    chapbooks and ballads was just that, culture that was popular,
380487 -    appearing in a new and sellable format.
380489 -     ..
380490 -    From the great amount of material printed we can assume that the
380491 -    demand for this new format was considerable. For example, in the
380492 -    collection of a London bookseller, whose shop dated to the period
380493 -    following the English Revolution, 22 000 tracts and newsbooks were
380494 -    discovered. And in 1664, Charles Tias, an English publisher, was
380495 -    carrying a stock of 90 000 chapbooks, as well as reams for some 37
380496 -    500 ballad sheets. As with today, large editions do not
380497 -    necessarily indicate a similar number sold, but since edition
380498 -    quantities steadily increased over the early modern period, we can
380499 -    speculate that the number of books bought also increased. For most
380500 -    printed popular literature, usually made with cheaper paper, it is
380501 -    difficult to ascertain the numbers actually sold, although in some
380502 -    cases we do have figures. We know, for example that in the
380503 -    seventeenth century 400 000 almanacs were sold a year.
380505 -     ..
380506 -    We also know that books of all types and genres were selling in
380507 -    large enough amounts that publishers and printers in cities were
380508 -    able to specialize and cater to certain segments of the reading
380509 -    public. In sixteenth-century Venice for example, the book trade
380510 -    was divided amongst four groups. The Giunti Family printed legal,
380511 -    medical, and theological books; the Aldine Press specialized in
380512 -    printing classics in their original languages; members of the
380513 -    Bindoni Family catered to the popular audience, with books in
380514 -    easier to read texts and formats, such as medieval romances,
380515 -    chapbooks and ballads; and Gabriel Giolito, who concentrated on
380516 -    contemporary writers and included in his repertoire histories and
380517 -    classics in the vernacular, novelle, drama, comedies, and
380518 -    dialogues. A number of historians have had the impression that
380519 -    early modern printers and publishers were something of
380520 -    proto-capitalists, for it appears that they decided what to print
380521 -    based on what they believed would be profitable.
380523 -     ..
380524 -    The material chosen, the formats used, and selling tactics point
380525 -    to an early market consciousness. Much of what was printed at
380526 -    first was not new material. Printers pulled from the centuries-old
380527 -    oral tradition: ballads, dialogues, mock sermons, mystery plays,
380528 -    medieval romances and epics, fable collections, especially Aesop's
380529 -    Fables and Renard the Fox, as well as religious material,
380530 -    including vernacular Bibles, the Book of Hours (a collection of
380531 -    prayers), and hagiographies. Heroes who had been popular
380532 -    throughout the Middle Ages, like Robin Hood and Guy of Warwick,
380533 -    turned up again and again in printed form. In the beginning
380534 -    printers were likely doing what was most obvious: applying a new
380535 -    format to an old and well-known tradition. Early modern society
380536 -    was fundamentally traditional, even the great ideas and themes of
380537 -    the Renaissance were backward looking in that they revived aspects
380538 -    of the classical world. Indeed editions of old tales and of old
380539 -    genres continued to be made well into the nineteenth century. A
380540 -    German chapman (a wandering chapbook and ballad seller) arrested
380541 -    in 1812 was carrying 36 books which included a dream
380542 -    interpretation guide, a biography of Genoveva of Brabant, a
380543 -    romance called The Four Sons of Aymon, and Till Eulenspiegel.
380544 -    Similarily the arrest of a French chapman in 1825 revealed 25
380545 -    books in his sack also including a dream book, and The Four Sons
380546 -    of Aymon, as well as Pierre de Provence, and Puss in Boots. Much
380547 -    the same material chapmen would have hawked at villages and fairs
380548 -    in the sixteenth century.
380550 -     ..
380551 -    One of the most remarkable things about early printed books was
380552 -    the standardization of formats. The noticeable uniformity of texts
380553 -    within genres is surprising given the great number of individual
380554 -    printers throughout Europe, and the fact that no regulations were
380555 -    imposed on the formatting of printed books. At first printers
380556 -    copied the style of manuscript books almost exactly. They kept the
380557 -    same number of columns per page (usually two), used the Gothic
380558 -    type face, which most closely imitated cursive writing, and even
380559 -    printed the notes and comments of the scribes in the margins. But
380560 -    other type faces quickly developed and just as quickly became
380561 -    associated with certain genres of books. The Gothic type prevailed
380562 -    in legal and theological texts until the seventeenth century. Less
380563 -    cursive forms of Gothic, such as Gothic Rotunda and Roman type
380564 -    were used for literature aimed at a less specialised, and
380565 -    generally less-educated audience. Presumably the less cursive the
380566 -    type the easier it was to read, though it was not uncommon,
380567 -    especially towards the end of the sixteenth century and later, to
380568 -    see a variety of types used in a single book for the purpose of
380569 -    emphasis.
380571 -     ..
380572 -    In addition to a specialisation of type faces, the shape and size
380573 -    of books also indicated what the book might contain. A potential
380574 -    book buyer would have known that legal and theological books were
380575 -    quite large, meant to be placed on a table or a lectern for
380576 -    serious prolonged study, that they used Gothic type, and that they
380577 -    were printed in Latin. Someone looking for an abridged romance or
380578 -    a copy of Aesop's Fables, however, knew that they should look for
380579 -    books that were considerably smaller, averaging 10x15cm, having no
380580 -    more than 200 pages at the utmost, type that was easier to read,
380581 -    often with numerous woodcut illustrations, and printed in the
380582 -    vernacular. That early printed books were remarkably standardised
380583 -    may have been partly due to needing to adjust to a new medium, but
380584 -    was more likely an indication that printers were aware of their
380585 -    customers' preference for styles and forms that they could easily
380586 -    recognise.
380588 -     ..
380589 -    It becomes quite clear from the title pages of cheap literature
380590 -    that printers were actively and consciously trying to sell a
380591 -    product. Devices for inticing buyers included giving ordinary
380592 -    stories sensational titles and making frequently-misleading claims
380593 -    like 'full', 'faithful', 'true', and 'new' about the contents.
380594 -    Often title pages of chapbooks recommended themselves to an
380595 -    audience, and that audience was usually far from particular in
380596 -    scope. For example:
380597 -
380598 -    'to the Humours of all Sorts, Sexes, and Conditions'
380599 -
380600 -    'all Stations and Conditions'
380601 -
380602 -    'for the Recreation of all Gentlemen, Ladies and others'
380603 -
380604 -    'fitted to the Capacities of both the learned and the ignorant'
380606 -     ..
380607 -    and from the title page of Wanton Tom: or the Merry History of Tom
380608 -    Stitch the Taylor we read 'such pleasing Pastimes of Delight, That
380609 -    'twould invite a Lady, Lord, or Knight To Read'. The Cobbler of
380610 -    Canterbury (1590) based on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (ca. 1399)
380611 -    claims that it would be enjoyable to gentlemen, farmers, and old
380612 -    women, an eclectic conglomeration of audience members to say the
380613 -    least.
380615 -     ..
380616 -    Given the highly stratified nature of Early Modern society, the
380617 -    conclusion that printers were simply aiming their cheap literature
380618 -    at the broadest audience possible is at first somewhat
380619 -    troublesome. There was certainly a good deal of social climbing
380620 -    going on at that time, especially with the wealthier families of
380621 -    the bourgeois. Wealthy merchants married themselves or their
380622 -    daughters into impoverished noble families, or had lineages
380623 -    constructed for them, but they were hardly welcomed into their new
380624 -    class nor were they lauded by the one they had left behind. Indeed
380625 -    Early Modern Europe still abided by strict sumptuary laws that
380626 -    regulated what people of certain classes were allowed to wear,
380627 -    from the cut of their dress to the particulor colour or pattern of
380628 -    the material from which their clothes were to be tailored. Thus
380629 -    the chapbooks' pleas to be read by "all Stations and Conditions"
380630 -    seems to be an anomaly. At whom was cheap literature really aimed?
380631 -
380633 -     ..
380634 -    The recommendations on the title pages and the contents of
380635 -    chapbooks seem to have frequently advertised to the gentry.  A
380636 -    study of the collection (one of the largest surviving such
380637 -    collections) belonging to Samuel Pepys, a seventeenth-century
380638 -    English bureaucrat, revealed that chapbooks were full of allusions
380639 -    to the nobility.  They were often, though not exclusively, about
380640 -    gentry heroes and heroines, they displayed gentry values, they were
380641 -    accompanied by woodcut illustrations depicting gentry dress and
380642 -    behaviour, as well as references to classical works and images,
380643 -    even on occasion well-known phrases in Latin or Greek.  The latter
380644 -    two characteristics could only have been fully understood by
380645 -    someone with a higher education.  Furthermore, lower class
380646 -    characters in the chapbooks were frequently stereotyped as foolish
380647 -    or villainous.  While these characteristics likely appealed to the
380648 -    nobility because they were easily able to identify with the themes,
380649 -    these same characteristics would have appealed just as much to all
380650 -    the other classes of society as well.  The nobles, a small and
380651 -    exclusive caste of wealthy, powerful, and beautiful people who
380652 -    never worked, were the superstars of the early modern era.
380653 -    Fascination with royalty and families of long-standing wealth still
380654 -    prevails today, so it should hardly be surprising that the lower
380655 -    classes were intrigued by anything that told them about these
380656 -    mysterious and enviable people.  On the other hand, a chapbook
380657 -    aimed exclusively at an audience of peasants or craftsmen might
380658 -    have alienated the upper classes in a way that the reverse
380659 -    situation would not have.  Furthermore, the oral tradition had
380660 -    always included princes, princesses, kings and queens as the heroes
380661 -    and heroines of stories, as well as woodcutters, farmers, merchants
380662 -    and paupers.  In order for culture to be popular it has to speak to
380663 -    a wide number of people.  What is so surprising about the
380664 -    recommendations that appear on the titlepages of chapbooks is that
380665 -    they actively advertised themselves to an audience.
380667 -     ..
380668 -    In hopes of determinating who actually bought printed books, a
380669 -    number of studies have been conducted on estate inventories in
380670 -    both France and England. The inventories were essentially lists of
380671 -    possessions following a person's death, presumably to gage the
380672 -    wealth of the estate, and by their very nature, reflect primarily
380673 -    the upper and middle classes, but are nonetheless revealing. Book
380674 -    ownership was higher in the sixteenth century than it had been
380675 -    before the advent of the printing press, though comparatively
380676 -    still rather small. A selection of inventories of
380677 -    sixteenth-century townsmen in the county of Kent revealed that
380678 -    only 20% of them had owned books at their death, and by the 1630s
380679 -    ownership was still below 50%. If the book owners had only one
380680 -    book, it was nearly always a vernacular Bible. A similar study of
380681 -    inventories across England for the years 1675-1725 showed that
380682 -    only 20% of those sampled had owned books. Also ownership was
380683 -    higher in the cities (London 31%) than in the villages (ca. 17%),
380684 -    and that 20% of tradesmen and yeomen (wealthier, independant
380685 -    farmers) owned books compared with 4% of husbandmen and labourers.
380686 -    Studies in France had similar results including a strong urban
380687 -    rural divide and differences according to occupation. For example,
380688 -    in sixteenth-century Paris and Amiens it appears that very few
380689 -    artisans or craftsmen died with books in their possession: only
380690 -    10% in Paris, 12% in Amiens. Of those who did, the books were
380691 -    usually one of the following: a vernacular Bible, a Book of Hours,
380692 -    a French Golden Legend (a collection of hagiographies that was
380693 -    popular in the sixteenth century), and/or a technical book that
380694 -    related to their trade, such as a book of patterns. However, these
380695 -    results only speak of the ownership of bound books, which were
380696 -    considerably more expensive than chapbooks or ballads .
380697 -    Consequently it is possible that cheap printed literature was not
380698 -    even included in the inventories, as they would have been of
380699 -    little or no value. Thus while these studies give us a good idea
380700 -    of who bought books and what books were important to have in one's
380701 -    possession, it still tells us nothing about who actually bought or
380702 -    in some way partook of the cheap literature that was intended to
380703 -    be popular.
380705 -     ..
380706 -    Literacy rates reveal little more than percentages of book
380707 -    ownership do, because the rates reflect ownership quite closely.
380708 -    Presumably those who were literate were more likely to own books or
380709 -    other printed material than those who were not.  Studies based on
380710 -    the ability to sign one's name found that people were more often
380711 -    literate in the cities than villages; more in villages than in the
380712 -    countryside; that wealthy farmers were more often literate than
380713 -    peasants; and merchants and tradesmen more than artisans and
380714 -    craftsmen.  E.  Le Roy Ladurie found that from the 1570s to the
380715 -    1590s only 3% of agricultural workers and 10% of the "wealthy"
380716 -    peasants (laboureurs and fermiers) were literate.  A study of 885
380717 -    men in Lyon, from notarial records of the 1560s and 1570s, found
380718 -    that literacy rates among apothecaries, surgeons, and printers were
380719 -    the highest; among painters, musicians, taverners, and metal
380720 -    workers the rate was slightly less but still more than 50%; among
380721 -    artisans in the clothing and textiles trade the rate was about 50%;
380722 -    and among craftsmen in construction, as well as workers in
380723 -    transport, urban gardening, and unskilled dayworkers the rates were
380724 -    the lowest.  Literacy rates, however, are not as revealing as one
380725 -    might hope because they only show half the picture when it came to
380726 -    the dissemination of printed material.  Orality and literacy are
380727 -    not mutually exclusive.  Literate people can easily take part in
380728 -    oral rituals and illiterate people can participate in literate
380729 -    rituals.  Villages only needed a single literate person in the
380730 -    vicinity to justify buying printed books.
380731 -
380732 -
380734 -  ..
380735 - Orality Remained Dominate Literates Read Aloud to Illiterates
380736 -
380737 -
380738 -
380739 -    Oral culture was still the predominate means of transmitting
380740 -    culture in the Early Modern period. Those who were literate likely
380741 -    read aloud to others more often than they read silently to
380742 -    themselves. Most of what was printed, as mentioned earlier, was
380743 -    itself taken from the oral tradition and retained oral
380744 -    characteristics. Phrases like "listen and you will hear", or "as
380745 -    you have heard" were maintained because they still had a function
380746 -    - books, chapbooks and ballads were still intended for a primarily
380747 -    aural audience. Because the stories were familiar an illiterate
380748 -    person could easily "read" the books simply by looking at the
380749 -    accompanying illustrations. Often, it has been reported,
380750 -    illiterate purchasers of cheap printed literature would plaster
380751 -    the pages to the walls of their homes so that they could be read
380752 -    aloud when literate visitors called. Chapbooks were likely also
380753 -    read at village gatherings, such as the French veill‚es, held in
380754 -    the evenings All Saints' Day and Ash Wednesday, where villagers
380755 -    might work on small chores, sing or tell stories, or if someone
380756 -    owned a book and another could read, hear books read aloud. This
380757 -    is attested to by evidence that villagers would pool their
380758 -    resources to buy a single book, chapbooks, or ballads.
380760 -     ..
380761 -    However, direct evidence from small towns and villages is lacking,
380762 -    and it is even harder to ascertain the impact of printed books in
380763 -    rural areas than it is for urban areas. For one thing, although
380764 -    printing material in the vernacular rather than Latin (which had
380765 -    been the practice throughout the Middle Ages) did broaden the
380766 -    book-reading audience, the vernaculars differed widely from area
380767 -    to area. Thus a book printed in Paris could not have been sold to
380768 -    villagers in Languedoc or Brittany, nor even necessarily to
380769 -    villagers of rural areas in the vicinity of Paris, because they
380770 -    would not have been able to read it even if they were literate.
380771 -    The other difficulty was distribution. Likely aware of the low
380772 -    levels of literacy outside the city, as well as the language
380773 -    situation, printers would have been less willing to distribute
380774 -    their material rurally. Peddlars who sold chapbooks and ballads
380775 -    primarily in the city are also believed to have stocked up and
380776 -    walked to various villages and towns in the nearby countryside,
380777 -    but they were only able to cover a finite distance. Booksellers
380778 -    also frequented annual and seasonal fairs in rural areas, but
380779 -    otherwise printed material was not as extensive in the
380780 -    countryside. The Calvinists in France, who like other Protestant
380781 -    groups took advantage of the advent of printing to disseminate
380782 -    their ideas, were the first real group to attempt to bring printed
380783 -    material, albeit entirely religious, to rural areas. Unlike
380784 -    printers and booksellers in the city, they were most concerned
380785 -    with the spread of their ideology and were willing to distribute
380786 -    printed matter witout regard for cost. Yet, even as late as the
380787 -    1750s, distribution to rural areas was slow. Thomas Holcroft, who
380788 -    used to peddle with his parents in rural Berkshire at that time,
380789 -    wrote that books, other than 'those of daily religious use', were
380790 -    'scarcely to be seen' except amongst the 'opulents' in rural
380791 -    areas, but he claims that ballads were quite common.
380793 -     ..
380794 -    But it would be premature to say that printing had no impact at
380795 -    all outside of urban centres. Certainly some material got through.
380796 -    One interesting observation made by Peter Burke hints at the
380797 -    influence of printed material even in the countryside. There
380798 -    appears to be a correlation between the rise of literacy and the
380799 -    decline in popularity of the epic, traditionally performed by
380800 -    travelling perfomers and professional storytellers. Because the
380801 -    minstrels travelled all over the countryside, city and town, their
380802 -    diminishing popularity is telling. In Western Europe as literacy
380803 -    spread, popular interest in the oral epic waned, while in Eastern
380804 -    Europe the oral epic remained popular and literacy rates remained
380805 -    low. Burke suggests that the minstrels would have benefited at
380806 -    first from the influx of printed literature as it would have added
380807 -    new material to their repertoire, and allowed them to supplement
380808 -    their income by selling actual copies of their performances. But
380809 -    eventually cheap printed literature would have become their main
380810 -    competition. An oral performer relied on being able to alter and
380811 -    improvise their stories each time they performed, as well as being
380812 -    able to alter their own versions from that of other performers. As
380813 -    written material was disseminated, Burke asserts, crowds might
380814 -    have come to expect exact repititions of stories, or exact
380815 -    reenactments of the story version that they owned, demands which
380816 -    might have been difficult for an improvisor to fulfill. While it
380817 -    seems certain from their decreasing appearances in the documents
380818 -    of the time, that printed literature had a negative impact on the
380819 -    minstrels, in the cities and elsewhere, it is arguable whether it
380820 -    was for the reasons that Burke suggests, especially since we have
380821 -    no way of knowing if the Early Modern reading audience relied on
380822 -    the written word as heavily as the twentieth-century reading
380823 -    audience does. The most plausible explanation is that the
380824 -    traditional audience of the minstrel was getting its stories and
380825 -    fables and poetry elsewhere, from books.
380827 -     ..
380828 -    A number of later famous men, such as John Milton (1608-1674)
380829 -    author of Paradise Lost, Thomas Holcroft (1745-1809) an English
380830 -    dramatist, actor, novelist, and journalist, Richard Baxter
380831 -    (1615-1691) an English minister, and John Bunyan (1628-1688)
380832 -    author of the Christian allegory Pilgrim's Progress, attest to the
380833 -    importance of cheap literature in their youth. Holcroft claims
380834 -    that he owned two chapbooks which he read over and over until he
380835 -    knew them as well as he knew the catechism. Apparently, this type
380836 -    of repetitive reading was quite common; there are a number of
380837 -    instances where people mention reading a book or chapbook over
380838 -    repeatedly, in contrast with today's habits where one buys a book,
380839 -    reads it and then promptly buys another. Samuel Pepys in the
380840 -    seventeenth century avidly collected chapbooks and ballads which
380841 -    he had bought or had someone make for him. From his diary we know
380842 -    that he read them to himself, aloud to his family and to other
380843 -    members of his household, and commonly alluded to or openly
380844 -    discussed them in conversations and his correspondence. Clearly
380845 -    cheap printed literature became part of the culture surrounding
380846 -    storytelling, and the transmission of information.
380848 -     ..
380849 -    While many of the details concerning the nature of the popularity
380850 -    of cheap printed literature in the Early Modern era have yet to be
380851 -    revealed by research, the large number of surviving copies, the
380852 -    copious numbers known to have been printed, and the fact that
380853 -    those numbers steadily increased up to the nineteenth century, as
380854 -    well as the contemporary testimonies about the influence that
380855 -    chapbooks and ballads had on individuals, are the greatest
380856 -    attestation to truth of that popularity. The printing press has
380857 -    been considered one of the greatest inventions in history by many,
380858 -    for without it the world as we know it today would not have
380859 -    developed. For the study of history and popular culture its
380860 -    invention is priceless. Printing allowed for the first time the
380861 -    recording of the tastes, values, and concerns of the population
380862 -    beyond the power structure of the Church and state. It preserved
380863 -    hundreds of years of oral tradition that may otherwise have been
380864 -    lost; without the printing press, the collectors of folktales in
380865 -    the nineteenth century, headed by the brothers Grimm, would not
380866 -    have been as fruitful.
380867 -
380868 -
380869 -
380870 -
380871 -
380872 -
380873 -
380874 -
380875 -
380876 -
380877 -
380878 -
380879 -
3809 -