CompPanels: Images from the Annals of Composition #32
Telling Book Covers (IV): Scholia

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The Written Word was issued by Newbury House Publishers in 1971. It consisted of four essays on the current state of literacy in the United States, written by three full-bore academics: Sheridan Baker, Jacques Barzun, and I. A. Richards. Literacy was no yawn-provoking topic that year in the USA. Quite the contrary. In 1971 the USSR beat us again in space exploration, this time with the first soft landing of a space vehicle on Mars—and the 20th Admendment to the US Constitution was ratified, giving the vote to 18-year-olds whom six years earlier Merrill Sheils in the cover story for Newsweek famously declared "can't wrte." Literacy, or the lack thereof, was widely assumed to be the reason we had fallen behind the Russians. The authors of The Written Word don't treat the written word as dead letter, but they are eager to imagine its life at stake. It's been "assaulted on all sides" (Baker), and we need to "tighten the screws of loose mental structure" (Barzun) and attack the "great areas of vacuity" (Richards) that have infiltrated US students. In 1971 literacy was the part of the war against Communism that had to be fought on the home front.

Given this background, it strikes me that the cover illustration to The Written Word could hardly have been less apt. The main message of The Written Word is that print technology needs to fight for the allegiance of young US citizens against the deadly allurements of newer technologies, in particular movies, magazines, television, and popular songs. So what text has been chosen to illlustrate the volume? A relict, one of the most notorious kinds of sopor-inducing, dry-as-dust scholarship that the long genealogy of school texts ever produced. It's the first manuscript page of a medieval commentary on Ovid's eleventh book of the Metamorphoses (Orpheus, Part I). On the left stands commentary—accessus or background to the Orpheus legend along with line annotations of literary allusions and grammatical cruxes. The text studied, Ovid's Latin verse, is on the right (full page view).

I'm not competent enough to identify which of the countless medieval scholia of the Metamorphoses this is—Manegold of Lautenbach, Arnulf of Orléans, John of Garland, Pierre Bersuire?—but I know enough of the history of such commentaries to imagine the generations of students tediously copying down the lines from Ovid, adding explanatory glosses dictated by their teachers, expanding their notes into a full commentary for their own use when they became teachers. And this is the exemplum of print literacy that Baker, Barzun, and Richards offer as a weapon against the temptations of photography, song, film, and TV? Is there an unspoken allegorical reading here, not the standard medieval reading that Orpheus prefigures Christ but a contemporary one, that in his beast-captivating music Orpheus stands for non-print media and is rightfully torn to pieces by the Maenads?

Of course we don't know who chose this text to illustrate the volume. In particular I very much doubt that I. A. Richards, whose two essays tout the virtues of Basic English, would have chosen Ovid's hyper-sophisticated Latin to make his point. But I am thinking that a more appropriate text for the book jacket would have been this paragraph from Francis Bacon's own commentary on the Orpheus legend, from Chapter XI of his Wisdom of the Ancients (1609):

For so it is that after kingdoms and commonwealths have flourished for a time, there arise perturbations and seditious and wars; amid the uproars of which, first the laws are put to silence, and then men return to the depraved conditions of their nature, and desolation is seen in the fields and cities. And if such troubles last, it is not long before letters also and philosophy are so torn in pieces that no traces of them can be found but a few fragments, scattered here and there like planks from a shipwreck; and then a season of barbarism sets in, the waters of Helicon being sunk under the ground, until, according to the appointed vicissitude of things, they break out and issue forth again, perhaps among other nations, and not in the places where they were before.

RH, December 2005