Scratch my analysis. Just occured to me that the great recorders of knowledge in Europe's dark ages were the Arabs and they didn't have printing even if they did have a good recipe for making paper. I'm guessing that you have to have widespread literacy and some kind of formal institution for scholarship. Cool, I think I might have started putting my holiday reading list together. I'm curious about this now.
Actually, your analysis is at least partially true. The Greeks tended to separate the practical from the theoretical. Scholars were looked up to, but working with your hands to actually build things was manual labour and put you on a lower footing. So the people who built such an object would not have been scholars, with an audience for their written works. They would have been people bucking the trends of their times, probably artisan craftsmen.
You don't start to see widespread literacy until after the printing press for several reasons, and availability is only one of them. There was also the class system that gave knowledge only to the upper crust and the priests (who were often interconnected.) Mass literacy was not common until the nineteenth century, and functional literacy as we define it today is very, very new - like, within the last fifty years.
This is why I wish I had time in my schedule for History of the Book. I'll have to find out what the texts are for that class and read 'em on my own. As it is, I'm only barely going to make the double specialization I'm doing. Internet Library Services and Youth Services in case you're curious.
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velvetpage) wrote2006-12-04 11:35 am
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You don't start to see widespread literacy until after the printing press for several reasons, and availability is only one of them. There was also the class system that gave knowledge only to the upper crust and the priests (who were often interconnected.) Mass literacy was not common until the nineteenth century, and functional literacy as we define it today is very, very new - like, within the last fifty years.
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