The "Matter of Words"

What if there was some kind of modern exhibit on the effect, influence, and meaning of print over the years? What if it was in a museum on our campus?? Well, you are in luck because at the Museum of Art, the main exhibit is called “Matter of Words” with 46 contemporary works of art by artists Adam Bateman, Harrell Fletcher, and John Fraser. 

83,000 lb sculpture made entirely from books

Loco Vendere Liber: ("place to sell the book")

In class we have discussed institutions of knowledge like the library, the monastery, and the university, which pertained to written knowledge, but what about the bookstore?

We might just assume that the Roman book trade has little pertinence or relevance to today’s own complicated market, but there are actually many similarities. Granted, there was no Internet and even no printing press; however, as literacy reached the masses, the bookstore became an ever-increasing important institution of knowledge.

Universities

Dr. John Searle, an uber-renowned professor at UC Berkeley, in an interview on written language, said this:

But furthermore -- and this is where it really gets exciting -- is you can now create the forms of civilization that are enduring. I'm thinking not just of great art and literature, but of money, property, government, marriage, universities, textbooks, all of the elaborate systems that language has that we can encode in written language that enable us to create an elaborate civilization that is based on our capacity to represent and to create enduring representations. (You can read the whole interview here).

In this post I'm going to discuss the Western world's oldest Univeristy, the University of Bologna in Italy and how writing made it possible.