Medieval Multitasking

Further evidence that sometimes we give new technology too much credit for producing new varieties of the human condition?

"there were a lot of “distractions” built into a medieval book. Indeed, these were often the main fare for the “reader” of a book. “Anyone can take delight in turning the pages of a Book of Hours, for example,” says Christopher de Hamel, “even without reading the text.” ... medieval books were very often not the single-author volumes familiar to us today. A binding might include a bit of Chaucer—something from the life of St. Bridget, perhaps—and part of an almanac, or a treatise on herbal remedies. They were mash-ups, that is. Or, to borrow terminology from George P. Landow, they were “dispersed texts,” unburdened by the modern fiction of sequential ordering of thought as “natural” or unitary authorship as normative that contributed to Enlightenment understandings of the “focused” mind of the individual thinker."

Puts me in mind of the enjoyment I sometimes derive from reading a text book from a library. Some people forget themselves and leave their annotations and marginalia. But that is sometimes a real help: it can point up where and what the big or contentious issues are and sometimes offer a help to find cross references ...
Medieval Multitasking: Did We Ever Focus? | Culture | Religion Dispatches