Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

85. Crosby, Op. cit., page 19. This may have been aided by what Jacques le Goff calls the new education of the memory, brought about by Lateran IV’s requirement for the faithful to make confession once a year. Le Goff also says that preaching became more precise at this time. Op. cit., page 80.

86. Crosby, Op. cit., pages 28–29.

87. Ibid., page 33.

88. Ibid., page 36.

89. Paul Saenger, Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading, Stanford and London: Stanford University Press, 1997, page 136.

90. Crosby, Op. cit., page 42. Numbers still had their mystical side. Six was perfect because God made the world in six days, seven was perfect because it was the sum of the first odd and the first even number, and because God had rested on the seventh day after the Creation. Ten, the number of the commandments, stood for law, whereas eleven, going beyond the law, stood for sin. The number 1,000 also represented perfection because it was the number of the commandments multiplied by itself three times over, three being the number of the Trinity and the number of days between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. Ibid., page 46.

91. Jacques le Goff, ‘The town as an agent of Civilisation, 1200–1500’, in Carlo M. Cipolla (editor), The Fontana Economic History of Europe: The Middle Ages, Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester, 1976–1977, page 91.

92. Crosby, Op. cit., page 57.

93. Saenger, Op. cit., pages 12, 17 and 65. John Man, The Gutenberg Revolution, London: Review/Headline, 2002, pages 108–110.

94. Chester Jordan, Op. cit., page 118. Crosby, Op. cit., page 136. Saenger, Op. cit., page 250.

95. A. J. Gurevich, Categories of Medieval Culture, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985, pages 147–150. See Le Goff, The Medieval Imagination, Op. cit., pages 12–14, for medieval ideas of space and time.

96. Crosby, Op. cit., page 82.

97. Ibid., page 101. Jacques le Goff says there was a great wave of anti-intellectualism at this time which retarded the acceptance of some of these innovations. Jacques le Goff, Intellectuals in the Middle Ages, Oxford: Blackwell, 1993, pages 136–138.

98. Crosby, Op. cit., page 113.

99. The German marks fought for supremacy with and throughout the sixteenth century and were not finally adopted until the French algebraists used them.

100. Crosby, Op. cit., page 117.

101. Ibid., page 120.

102. Charles M. Radding, A World Made by Men: Cognition and Society, 400–1200, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985, page 188.

103. Piltz, Op. cit., page 21.

104. Crosby, Op. cit., page 146.

105. Albert Gallo, Music of the Middle Ages, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1985, volume 2, pages 11–12.

106. In particular a form of syncopation known as the hoquet, a French word for the technique where one voice sang while another rested, and vice versa rapidly. Hoquet eventually became the English word ‘hiccup’. Crosby, Op. cit., page 158.

107. Piltz, Op. cit., pages 206–207.

108. Man, Op. cit., page 87, for the demand stimulated by universities.

109. Crosby, Op. cit., page 215. In intellectual terms, the disputation was perhaps the most important innovation of the university, allowing the students to see that authority isn’t everything. In an era of ecclesiastical domination and canon law, this was crucial. The exemplar system of manuscript circulation also enabled more private study, another important aid to the creative student, and something which would be augmented by the arrival of the printed book at the end of the fifteenth century.

110. Even so, a country like France easily produced 100,000 bundles of vellum a year, each bundle containing forty skins. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 18.

111. Ibid., page 20.

112. Man, Op. cit., pages 135–136.

113. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 50. For early presses see: Alister McGrath, In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2001, pages 10ff.

114. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 54. See also: Moynahan, Op. cit., page 341.

115. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 56. Moynahan, Op. cit., page 341 on the print quality of early books.

116. Douglas MacMurtrie, The Gutenberg Documents, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941, pages 208ff.

117. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 81. See McGrath, Op. cit., page 13, for Gutenberg’s type.