Ledarskap och lidelse - Kungliga biblioteket

With this transformation even the notion of mother tongue assumed a twofold
character – a written and a spoken one.
As written culture gained an ever stronger foothold, the cultural topography
changed profoundly. First and foremost, the world of semi-communication
diminished and the printed work created small, at times mutually
exclusive worlds. The more printed culture, the more difficult it was to cross
and communicate across borders. The irony that is lost on many working
with this period is that even the academic world based in Latin, despite its
geographic spread, its influence in many circles, was in many ways surprisingly
isolated and narrow. It addressed a limited community, not the one
at large. It created end nodes and points, but did not reach out any farther.
Technical innovation associated with printing, in other words, created
surprisingly ubiquitous compartmentalization.
Secondly, it created a culture of reading which was predominantly
private. Before the advent and spread of printing reading was a much more
communal event. One must only hearken back to the reading culture of the
monastic communities and relatively late arrival of silent reading to understand
the profound repercussions of these changes.
Thirdly, the world of printing created the notion of translation in our
modern sense of the word. Suddenly there were separate realms with borders
which no longer could be transgressed by regular communication. The
need for translation signified the profundity of this change. With the inroads
of written culture, there appeared two-way dictionaries, which for all practical
purposes had not existed outside the realm of Latin.
Fourthly, text, and thereby also memory, was compartmentalized. In oral
communication this division is not necessary. The mnemonic devices which
had been in place for centuries suddenly lost their effectiveness. Memory
had to be trained – we can observe an upswing in how mnemonics, most
frequently a part of dialectic and rhetoric, become an integral part of curriculums.
There seems to be an insatiable thirst for recasting existing and
developing new systems for assisting and improving memory. These
systems evolve their own visual forms as the one which we see here. An
effective system of commonplaces, the loci, is construed to facilitate memory.
The key terms here are brevity and perspicuity. This can be accomplished by
dividing and structuring material in a new way.
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