Stallybrass 2002

Peter Stallybrass. "Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible." Books and Readers in Early Modern England. Ed. Jennifer Anderson and Elizabeth Sauer. Philadelphia: University of Pennysylvania Press, 2002. Web.

• long history of discontinuous and indexical reading practices encouraged by the material affordances of the book form and the Bible in particular. Interesting insight about the novel as encouraging "perversely continuous reading"
• 42 the book form combines the ability to scroll with the capacity for random access -- what new and "other cultural technologies now seek to emulate"
• ...We are living with a new intensity the triumph of the book as a technology.
• The book/codex, as an emergent technology, enabled a reader to mark up places discontinuously. In this sense, the history of the codex is the history of the bookmark.
• 43 Christianity immediately adopted the codex as its privileged form.
  • based on survival of pre-5th century Christian texts; as St Clair 2004 reminds us, we have to be careful about arguments from survival
• Christians/book, Jews/scroll
• The codex is thus marked not only by its openness but by its bookmarks. It is represented as above all indexical, a technology that uses bookmarks like prosthetic fingers to take the reader easily from place to place.
• 43-4 C13 development of navigational aids: concordances, subject indexes, library catalogues, alphabetical organization
  • a history continued by Blair 2010 into the early modern period
• 46 Do these bookmarks, then, suggest a radical development, not in the art of discontinuous reading as such, but in the conceptualization of reading as a practice of discontinuity?
  • interesting since Price 2000 maps the development of discontinuous reading as a frowned-upon, feminized practice for literary texts in the C18-19
• discontinuous reading harder in a scroll, which "depends upon a literal unwinding"
  • and this makes me think of how a realist novel is supposed to work; perhaps a distinction between continuous reading and discontinuous use as practices
  • he goes there, too: The novel has only been a brilliantly perverse interlude in the long history of discontinuous reading. (47)
• The discontinuous reading that the codex enabled thus became central to Christianity and led to the cutting up of the bible into specific, usable parts, bound separately.
• 48 Protestants breaking with the Catholic tradition of discontinuous reading by reading the Bible continuously, as if a scroll
  • l/u Patrick Collinson, "The Coherence of the Text"
• 50 Locke complaining about the biblical Epistles being "chopp'd and minc'd" into things resembling aphorisms or commonplaces
• 51 ...the centrality of indexical reading to nearly all Christians in EM England.
  • and indeed it's indexical reading that undergirds modern scholarly and pedagogical practice, the evidentiary practices thereof
• copies of the bible as compilations, composites (cf Knight 2013)
• 52 navigational features of the Newby Bible (Folger)
• 61 tables as working against consecutive reading
• 68-72 example of Anne Askew in Foxe's Book of Martyrs, how she cites (or doesn't) "chapter and verse"
• 73 In other words, the desire of the Book of Common Prayer that "the readyng of holy scripture" should be "doen in ordre, without breakyng one piece thereof from another" must be set against the navigational aids that made it increasingly easy to do what Locke so feared: to "crumble" the scriptures into "loose sentences" and "independent aphorisms." But in attacking these new techniques of disassembling and reassembling "sentences" (witness Anne Askew), Locke turned his back upon the codex and the printed book as machines that enable discontinuous reading.
• Lady Grace Mildmay (who claims in her autobiography to have read her Bible continuously) later says she read discontinuously in a particular way: "liturgically, following the readings of the church service"
• 74 The codex and the printed book were the indexical computers that Christianity adopted as its privileged technologies.