The Unfinished BookPub Date : 2020-12-07DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198830801.013.16
A. Bale
{"title":"Pilgrims’ Texts","authors":"A. Bale","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198830801.013.16","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198830801.013.16","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores reading and writing on the move, through the transnational medium of pilgrims’ books. It considers literary writing about pilgrimage by the likes of William Langland and Geoffrey Chaucer; a printed indulgence sold to pilgrims the shrine of St Cornelius in St Margaret’s Church at Westminster; and the routes taken, books read, and texts produced by particular medieval pilgrims, including Henry Bolingbroke, later Henry IV of England. The chapter examines the ways in which pilgrimage was a stimulus to writing as well as to reading, and was a process that put the material facets of textual production into a variety of dynamic and often surprising relations with communities of readers and writers.","PeriodicalId":309717,"journal":{"name":"The Unfinished Book","volume":"36 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132639047","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Unfinished BookPub Date : 2020-12-07DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198830801.013.25
Simon Reader
{"title":"Notebooks","authors":"Simon Reader","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198830801.013.25","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198830801.013.25","url":null,"abstract":"The eighteenth-century German polymath Georg Christoph Lichtenberg developed a utopian style of note-taking that anticipated the fantasy of democratically organized information promulgated by social media in the twenty-first century. In his “waste-books” (a term drawn from accounting) Lichtenberg made a virtue of the unfinished, promoting the use of the notebook as a tool directed to purposes other than publication: first, as an accumulation of informational wealth (“pennyworths); second, as an incubator for future possibilities over which he exercised no control (“seeds”); and, third, as a space where the micro trades places with the macro (“keyholes”). Lichtenberg elected to live in manuscript, relinquishing his witty retorts, aphoristic reflections, or ideas for whole books entirely to posterity. He kept marginal notations as a way of honing an individual style that was simultaneously divorced from social exchange with the living.","PeriodicalId":309717,"journal":{"name":"The Unfinished Book","volume":"37 10","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120920693","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}