In the first part of Chapter 5, Goodman considers some basic affinities of Emerson and Montaigne that are evident even before Emerson published “Montaigne, or the Skeptic”: their use of the essay form to register spontaneity and contingency, their critique of books and travel, their discussions of the play of moods, their attention to themselves. The second part of Chapter 5 considers the shape of Emerson’s Montaigne essay, which has its own moods and its own architecture, and which concludes by taking what the critic Barbara Packer calls “a miraculous act of levitation” outside the play of moods to the moral sentiment that “outweighs them all.” In evaluating this leap, Goodman deploys Emerson’s own skepticism against his more metaphysical and dogmatic tendencies. “Why so talkative in public,” he writes, “when each of my neighbors can pin me to my seat by arguments I cannot refute?”

Emerson describes a range of experiences that constitute friendship: titanic battles between beautiful enemies; conversational brilliance and expansion; a joyful solitude, as if someone has departed rather than arrived; a generalized benevolence toward people in the street to whom one does not speak; the warm sympathies and household joy one shares with a familiar friend; the disappointment of a friend outgrown. His account shows an intense focus on moral perfection – on our unattained but attainable self, alone and with others – but an equally intense awareness of what he calls in “Experience” “the plaint of tragedy” that sounds throughout our lives “in regard to persons, to friendship and love.” The chapter’s coda charts the opposition in “Love” between love as the experience of being “swept away” and a skeptical vision of marriage as a prison, from which sex, person, and partiality have vanished.

Irish romantic literature was made from a fluid relationship between orality, manuscript and print. Exploring this relationship via the writings of Thomas Dermody, Charlotte Brooke, Mary Tighe and James Orr while also using the better known cases of Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson and Thomas Moore as signposts, the chapter argues for a bookish romanticism shaped by scarcity.

Given that we know little about deviations from ritual norms in most cities of Greece, I limit myself to Athens and concentrate on the later fifth century so that we can acquire an idea of the possibilities but also of the religious Handlungsspielraum within a given chronotope. I begin with the individual responsible for the cave of Vari who was clearly an anomaly in terms of the intensity of his religious worship. I then proceed with some private cults and practices that were frowned upon, continue with individuals who were seen, rightly or wrongly, as actually transgressing civic norms, and end with some final considerations, in which I return to the problem of the relationship between personal religion and polis religion. I conclude that it seems that personal religion was still very much part of polis religion at large.

The Christian community of Rome, since its origins, was adamant in preserving written texts. Documents and books of multiple kinds were treated as important, precious objects. The history of the popes’ libraries exemplifies this approach. In addition to spreading Christianity and keeping records of discussions and decisions taken by the Church, the library was intended as a repository not only of religious books but also of literary and scientific texts of non-Christian traditions, including pagan classics and others. The mission of ensuring the conservation and spreading of the knowledge was clearly stated during humanism, when the current Vatican Apostolic Library was founded. Books were there made accessible “for the common benefit of the learned.” Such a mission continues today. The papacy considers the Library and its books to be the “heritage of mankind,” one that needs to be made available for generations through continuous technological innovations and cutting-edge preservation strategies.

The author describes his parents’ upbringing and move to New York around the time of the Great Depression. The young Weinberg is encouraged to read widely and later takes inspiration from Norse myths from the Poetic Edda.

Despite its familiarity, the fourfold canonical gospel presents a challenge for interpreters, captured in the famous symbols of the evangelists. Mark’s Jesus embodies the paradox of the crucified king of Israel. Matthew adds to this a portrait of Jesus the Prophet-like-Moses and Davidic shepherd who renews Israel’s covenant. Luke presents Jesus as Lord and prophet who brings redemption and distinctively champions the poor. John’s Jesus is the Word from the beginning and glorified Son of the Father. These subsequently canonized gospels stand out as authoritative amidst proliferating Jesus books. An approach that respects the fourfold gospel’s catholicity as well as its holding together of tensions in the historical impact of Jesus of Nazareth on his followers may be a fruitful path toward perceiving the one Jesus in the canonical Four.

Although woodblock printing of books has an earlier origin in China, Korea and Japan, the invention of printing with movable metal type that began in Europe in the middle of the 15th century was truly revolutionary. The innovation of printed books spread rapidly and stimulated the process to democratise knowledge as the medieval world transformed into the early modern, with new genres and audiences for books established in just a few decades.

What is the stuff of dictionaries? And why does thinking about that stuff matter?  These are the paramount questions of this chapter. The physical print dictionary is a specter that looms large in media and the popular imagination, but dictionaries aren’t just or only big books. Accordingly, this chapter begins by drawing attention to the wide array of material incarnations dictionaries have taken – the tablets and scrolls that preceded books, the websites and apps that have superseded them. Next, it considers the materialities necessary to making and using those various forms: the evolving variety of tools available to amateur and professional lexicographers; the implements of interaction deployed by dictionary readers; the traces of production, circulation, and reception that exist in private collections and informal or institutional archives. Finally, I’ll describe some non-textual uses of dictionaries; just as dictionaries aren’t only books, they aren’t only consulted for their content but rather mobilized to a range of physical, aesthetic, symbolic ends.

This short text is an example of a visitation, where the Church authorities visit a church and make a report about the state of the material furnishings or.more commonly in later accounts, the behaviour of the clergy and laity. These reports provide fascinating details about the objects to be found in churches, the physical state of the buildings, and about the morality or lack of it of individuals in each parish. Here it is the church furnishings, books, candlesticks and textiles which are commented on.

Focusing on the eighteenth century, this chapter uses the surviving books from the manuscript library of the Buffalo Agency to reveal how Ibadi intellectual, religious, and commercial life in Ottoman Cairo intersected with that of their non-Ibadi contemporaries. Beyond funding the endowment for students at the Buffalo Agency, Ibadi merchants were also often the ones responsible for gifting or commissioning the books in its library. The books themselves included roughly equal numbers of Sunni and Ibadi titles. It traces the relationship of Ibadis with the famous (Sunni) al-Azhar Mosque and how the library of the Buffalo Agency reflects this relationship. In all cases, from the production of books to their endowment and use by students, Ibadis mirror the social and religious trends of their Sunni contemporaries in the Ottoman period.

Europe was affected by a book crisis in the aftermath of the Great War. Much specialist literature had not been received in institutions across Europe since 1914 or had been destroyed during the conflict and was then rendered prohibitively expensive due to soaring exchange rates. This chapter explores the organization of book relief. The supply of literature was seen as an emergency that required humanitarian assistance to address ‘intellectual hunger’. Intellectual relief of this sort demonstrated the prominence of the belief that the spread of knowledge was essential to the reconstitution of the Republic of Letters and the ultimate stabilization of European political life. While initial responses hinged on humanitarian assistance, the ultimate resolution of the book crisis depended upon the restoration of international exchange networks – many of which had been severed by the war – and which came to fruition around the mid-1920s.

This chapter examines the last phase of the Buffalo Agency’s existence from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. It refracts this institution’s history through an existing body of historical literature that explores the intersections among print technology, Islamic reform and ecumenicalism, and political life in the history of Ibadi and other Muslims communities in Egypt in the context of colonialism. The chapter examines these themes by telling the stories of two people whose lives are largely unknown. The first figure, Saʿīd al-Shammākhī, served as the director of the Buffalo Agency in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1871, however, he was appointed agent (wakīl) for the Husaynid bey of Tunisia in Egypt and served as a line of communication between the governments of the two Ottoman provinces. The second figure is Muḥammad al-Bārūnī, owner of the first Ibadi printing house in Cairo. In terms of its operation, its financing, and its choice of titles, this Ibadi press functioned in much the same way as other late Ottoman presses in Egypt. Through the stories of these two men, the chapter situates Ibadis in the changing technologies and politics of late nineteenth century Ottoman Egypt.

This chapter begins with the arrival of Ibadi student Saʿīd al-Bārūnī in Cairo in 1798, just before the invasion of the French army under Napoleon. It follows the life of Saʿīd in Cairo during the tumultuous decades of the early nineteenth century, including the departure of the French and the rise to power of the Ottoman governor Muḥammad ʿAlī. Following his return to the Maghrib, the chapter continues the story of the Agency by turning to a private letter written to Saʿīd by one of his students, Muḥammad al-Bārūnī, who was studying at the Agency in the 1850s. The books and letters connected to the Agency in this period reveal much about the world of Cairene Ibadis in the mid-nineteenth century, including the state of education at al-Azhar, the changing demographics of the Ibadi community, and signs of a growing relationship between the Ibadi community of the Indian Ocean and that of northern Africa.

This chapter explores the reconstruction of intellectual sites in the aftermath of the war and the attempts to replace the knowledge that had been lost in warfare. It focuses on the reconstruction of the university libraries of Louvain and Belgrade and pays particular attention to not only the physical rebuilding of buildings but also the reconstruction of knowledge itself through the replacement of their collections. It also explores the reconstruction of Tokyo Imperial University in following the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923. While the latter took place beyond Europe, it aroused great public sympathy and became part of the wider process of symbolic rebuilding. The chapter argues that cultural reconstruction was not just about replacing or repairing heritage sites that had suffered war damage but also about providing of the tools for the production and dissemination of new knowledge and symbolically pushing back against the ‘collapse’ of civilization.

This chapter offers a critique of the idea that writing has unique or inherent benefits. It argues that the promise or potential of writing lies in what we do with writing, rather than what writing does to us. The chapter focuses on the ways in which we think with writing as well as how we label and organize our environment, and navigate the world, in both a literal and a metaphorical sense. It also shows how writing has evolved as a way of initiating and sustaining our social relationships. Writing can be used to mislead us, or to persuade us to do things we might later regret, and this is used to counter overenthusiastic claims about the promise of writing.