Reading and Book Culture

Indexing and Ordering Information from Late Antiquity to the Digital Age

This mini-collection offers material exploring the ways that the experience of reading in the West has changed over the centuries including differences between a scroll and a codex, the rise of new systems of ordering and information retrieval, reading and scribal practices in medieval monastic life and developments into the 20th century,

Miniature of Vincent of Beauvais, a Domincan friar active in the 13th-century and author of Speculum Maius, an important compendium of knowledge in medieval europe. This image is from the Speculum Historiale created in Bruges, c. 1478–1480 and now in the British Library, The scene is assumed to represent the library of the Dukes of Burgundy.