The Whole book

Before the computer, even before the printed book, medieval manuscripts used hypertext in organizing space that was naturally interdisciplinary. The Whole Book, edited by Stephen G. Nichols and Siegfried Wenzel, assembles findings from a diverse group of well-respected medievalists, classicists, and text critics.

Their many areas of research have intersected in this study of how medieval manuscripts developed mechanisms for using the available space in the technologies of the codex, which we now know as the book. The scholars presented here, whose own fields of study range from Latin religious texts to vernacular romance, comment on one particular category of manuscript, the "miscellany." This genre of manuscript had the ability to accommodate a wide variety of written documents, making it difficult to classify.

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The term miscellany has traditionally been used, for want of a better term, but such a collection could very well be described as the "hard disk" of the medieval codex: it was a space on which almost any kind of information could be stored in a variety of formats - texts, pictures, designs, symbols, etc. Like the hard disk of a computer, it offered a seemingly vast, though of course in fact limited, space for recording items.

It furthermore inspired numerous ways of organizing, distributing, and codifying the information to facilitate retrieval. The Whole Book deals with manuscripts from the early Middle Ages to humanist works of the early Renaissance, and it presents the conditions of production and analyzes the organizational techniques in particular kinds of miscellanies.