Development of navigational aids

Notes on "The Influence of the Concepts of Ordinatio and Compilatio on the Development of the Book", by Malcolm Beckwith Parkes.

In the 12th century, the principal apparatus for the academic reader was the gloss, and the principal developments in the layout of the book in the twelfth century centered on the presentation of the gloss. Inherited materials –the auctoritates– was organized in such a way as to make it accessible alongside the text to be studied. Sources were indicated in the margin and this practice was the ancestor of the modern scholarly apparatus of footnotes. There were also rubrics placed in the margin at certain points, sub-headings like "prima causa", "secunda", "tercia", "obiectio", "responsio". "The ad hoc nature of these devices in these early surviving copies demonstrates first that readers felt the need for more ostensible help in finding their way about in a highly sophisticated and technical argument, and secondly that the producers of books had not yet developed a recognized procedure for coping with this problem.

Gratian divided his work into three parts. First part divided into distinctiones, second part divided into causae, third part divided into distinctiones. The dicta of Gratian were distinguished from the text of the auctoritates by means of paragraphi. Also by the second half of the twelfth century the work was preceded by a materia operis which acted as a kind of synoptic introduction and which indicated the topics dealt with in each section.

13th Century: rediscovery of Aristotelian logic. General discussions about the structure of knowledge and the subordination of the sciences to the study of theology. Bonaventura: need to recognize the principles of order inherent in each branch of knowledge and to follow the appropriate procedure.

"With the recognition of the principle that different kinds of ordo were appropriate in different kinds of study, the organization of an individual work came under closer scrutiny. For the first time scholars formulated a definition which included the disposition of material within a text into books and chapters.

Use of running titles: an ancient practice¹

Use of chapter-headings before each book of the text was an ancient practice.[^chapter-headings] But in the 13th century they were brought together in one place and arranged in a tabular form. In many 13th century book the table of contents appear in a separate booklet which has been added to the beginning or end of a book some time after it had been written, but by the beginning of the 14th century the table was copied by the scribe as part of the book.

[^chapter-headings]It occurs, for example, in the late 6th Century copy of Gregory the Great's Cura Pastoralis, copied at Rome in the lifetime of the author.

New divisions were introduced into old books.

Invention of the Table of Contents³

Before books were printed, manuscripts were organized to facilitate access to the content. The "gloss" or comment was presented alongside the main text to be studied. In other words, footnotes were in the margins. Because the purpose of those notes was scholastic commentary, some pre-defined rubrics were placed as reminders to document the logic used in reasoning. In the 13th century, the Greek philosophical heritage was rediscovered, and there were intense discussions about the structure of knowledge, that would eventually lead to emphasize the organization of books into chapters and list the headers under a "table of contents".²

The industrialization of printing in the 15th century generalized this practice, and after having adopted devices that have become so ubiquitous and so obvious that we do not even notice today that they exist–page numbers for example–, new instruments were devised to facilitate direct access to topics of interest: indexes started to appear during the 18th century. This was made necessary because the amount of knowledge stored in books had raised to an unprecedented level. The hope that a literate person could read everything that has been published had vanished.