The history and power of writing
Henri-Jean Martin (Author), Lydia G. Cochrane
Cultural history on a grand scale, this immensely readable book is the story of writing from its very beginnings to its recent transformations through technology. Traversing four millennia, Martin shows how the written word originated, how it spread, and how it figured in the evolution of civilization. In pursuit of writing's origins, Henri-Jean Martin asks how much those origins owed to practical necessity, and how much to religious and social systems of symbols. He describes the precursors to writing and reveals its place in early civilizations as a mnemonic device in service of the spoken word. The tenacity of the oral tradition plays an important part in this history. All written texts were normally read aloud well into the thirteenth century, Martin notes, and even as late as the eighteenth century the concept of "taking notes" was largely unknown to educated individuals trained in classical rhetoric and arts of memory
History
xv, 591 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
9780226508351, 9780226508368, 0226508358, 0226508366
28423039
Writing systems
The written and the spoken word
Speech and letters
The death and resurrection of written culture
The arrival of print
The reign of the book
The forms and functions of writing : fifteenth-eighteenth centuries
The book and society
The industrial era
Beyond writing
Conclusion
Translation of: Histoire et pouvoirs de l'ʹecrit