Annotated Bibliography: English Censorship (before 1700)

This is one of my least favorite kinds of posts. I call this type "the assignment" post. Unique to a course based blog, this type of post is generally lacking flavor, swag, personality, d all of the above. However, despite my personal feelings about this post I am going to do it anyways for my grade and because someone out there might appreciate it. So here goes nothing. For more information on the assignment itself check here. Basically what follows is an annotated bibliography on the topic of censorship before 1700. The tale of how I found all of these books can be found at the bottom of the post, if you're here for entertainment value, or to grade, start there. The links lead to the GoodReads page for each book. (Which can also be a good starting place for research!) 

Reform Movements brought about by Print

First of all, I'd like to apologize for not posting last week. I realized too late that being out of town would mean no internet connection.

I loved visiting the library and perusing the shelves for books on these reform movements. As Blaine said in his post about printing presses, I loved how the books are grouped by subject. A library is much more convenient than Google in this respect. Online search engines may be fast and easily accessible, but you have to sift through a lot of fluff to really get down to the real scholarly materials; whereas in the library, if you find one good book nearby will be more. My favorite part about this was actually handling the books. An online article may say the same thing, but there is something about handling the leather-bound pages of a book that makes the information inside seem more real, more reliable. A couple of the areas I had difficulty finding any books in the library, including the online databases, so I had to turn to Google books. After handling the "real" references, it sort of felt like a betrayal.

Before the break in class we talked about the Catholic Church and the changes that were brought about by the printing press. One subject I found especially interesting was the different reform movements. Seen as heresy by the Catholic Church, these movements believed not just different doctrine (or the explanation of dogma), but different dogma itself (the immovable parts of a belief system). The different reforms were as follows:

Print and Religion

As I started to look for books that had to do with the topic of the Protestant reformation, I found many printed resources about the change of religion in general so that is what I decided to focus my research on. My plan was to first check out the library to see what it had to offer. Once I had found the section where print was discussed, I discovered that there were A LOT of books. I picked up a few because their titles described what I was in search of, and a few I chose just because the covers were so old that I had to read it! Reading these books, I am a little sad that I just have to give a brief overview of them. I would have liked to quote some of the books because a few of the authors had personality oozing out of their writing! Especially Amy Cruse. Her style of writing was informative, yet entertaining.

The art of binding

When I did a simple search on bookbinding, I found many titles referring to bookbinding as an “art”. I had never considered bookbinding as this but as I looked more into the art of making codex I understood more about the art of book making. The way that I went about finding this category was through ScholarSearch on the Harold B. Lee Library website which allows one to refine published works by type (book, journal, article) or even by subject. The website even shows where to find the book in the HBLL.

Written Knowledge Final

This is a little Prezi presentation on our final for the Written Unit.

Rosetta Stone Project on Prezi

Posts from other members of the group:

• Brianne
• Mike
• Will
• Morgan
• Holland

Updated 29/11/11 with links to posts from other, and the prezi was changed to add suggestions from readers.

The Standard

As I came upon a small article the other day entitled Five Events that Shaped the History of English (which can be read here), I noticed standardization among the five events. The article labels the Anglo-Saxton Settlement, the Scandinavian settlements, colonization/globalization, the Norman Conquest (1066 and after), and standardization as the five most influential events in the course of the English Language. The start of my research on standardization began here.

Restoration v. Reformation

I fully intended for this post to be super awesome and feature my first prezi presentation as a testament to the sweet changes brought by a new medium. As it turns out prezi is harder to work with than I had previously imagined, so it isn't something I can do in an hour of unfocused work. You'll get to see that in the next couple of days as I work in some focused time...

Learning to Learn

The codex form is highly preferred for how durable and compact it is; yet where did it come from? Well, it didn’t just pop out of nothingness! The earliest form of codex was a wax tablet, which could be bound together at the edges. Since what was being written in was wax, it could be smoothed out and redone if needed, nothing was really permanent. No one gets everything perfect the first time, so it makes sense that the Romans created a way of writing for learning. The instruments and materials they used were not as expensive as an alternative like animal skin. Messing up was just part of the process of learning.

Books Burn People

From as early as 560B.C., people have been condemning witches. Exodus 22:18 "Thou shalt not suffer a sorceress to live." In 1484 and 1580, books were printed to warn the people of witchcraft. The first was commissioned by Pope Innocent the VIII and the second by Charles IX of France. The hysteria escalated as people started to read the books. So as you can see, books can burn people.

1484                                                                                1508

Egyptian Frustration

For the end of unit project, I am in the Hebrew/Islam group. For our artifact, we created a double-sided scroll with two passages of scripture: one from the Qu'ran, written in Arabic, and one from the Torah, written in Hebrew. That, however, was the easy part. For the Rosetta project, my group received an Egyptian Hieroglyphic to translate. It turns out that it is very difficult to translate Egyptian logograms. We tried to find a professor to help us, but none were available. So, we went to the library. 10 books and 4 hours later, we still weren't sure what any of it said. We tried to find online Egyptian dictionaries, but everything we found seemed to be directed towards children or high school students. We tried to contact the African group so they could hint at which book to use, but it seemed they either didn't know the title or didn't answer. So after several hours, we just took the symbols we found and strung them together as best as we could. I'm sure the translation is incorrect, but we tried our best. And we were able to correctly translate the English sentence we came up with into Hebrew and Arabic. This assignment taught me quite a few things:

1. I gained a greater appreciation for the people who wrote with actual feather pens. We were using a calligraphy pen and it was extremely difficult. I can't imagine using a feather. It took a long time to get the ink flowing. You have to hold it at the precise angle so it doesn't smear, and you have to take just the right amount of time on each letter so the ink isn't too thick or too thin. And we learned that if the ink isn't flowing, don't suck on the pen, or your mouth will be black.

Yey for Clay!

For the final from the writing section, we have had to write in the form that our civilizations wrote in, translate another language and write it in our own. This has been a very challenging project because there is no quick translation tool for Akkadian.
Our group wrote in Akkadian and had to translate Chinese into it. This is what our final products look like:

Chinese                                                        Akkadian                                              English

I think they turned out AMAZING!

Celebrating 400 years

As I visited the Life and Legacy of the King James Exhibit at the Harold B. Lee Library I was able to learn so much about the history of something I hold so sacred. The Bible has played such a role in my life as I based much of my conversion to the Church of Jesus Christ of LDS on it and my personal testimony.

Just as King James I rose to the thrown, tensions were growing between the Puritans and the Church of England, especially since the puritans rejected the divine authority of kings. King James I believed that the Puritans, along with the Geneva Bible, were hindering the monarchy.

In 1604, he gathered an assembly of Puritan and Church of England leaders together to let their resentments and grievances air out about the church reforms. James did not approve of the propositions made by the Puritans but he did listen up when they mentioned a possible new Bible translation. Although the puritans may have wanted a retranslation of the Bishop’s Bible, James commissioned a new translation entirely.

Richard Bancroft, the Bishop of London, who then qualified scholars and translation rules to guide the work, oversaw the process of the new translation. He established ecclesiastical posts for the translators, since neither the King nor Parliament were paying for the new translation. Portions of the Biblical text were divided between groups of translators. Their ultimate goal was to find the most accurate translations for the Greek or Hebrew terms, even if that meant adding marginal notes. The divided translations were

then brought together for the final review in front of a group of delegates for approval. After that, the final copy was given to the King’s printer, Robert Barker, (who had a royal patent which allowed him the monopoly on the printing of Bibles.)

Barker received no payment for printing the King James Version of the Bible from the King, the Church of England, or Parliament. Instead he made financial partners to help with the burden of buying new types, paper, ink, and labor. This information and more on the topic can be found here.

So many people were dedicated to finding the most inspired and direct word of God. We can see that the coming about of His word has a long history with many people giving so much to a cause they felt was inspired. Where would we be without the King James Version?

Without Missin' a Beat

In the idyllic example of the studious student that I am, I started this post by poking around on THE BLOG, and trying to fulfill the learning outcomes exactly, came across this post. This post reminded me that while having fun learning from and serving the people on the Navajo Reservation are good ideas, this class requires a bit more research out of me. In this case you will now read about my words on Mozart. Yes, that's right, if you stay tuned you too can know what the engineer thinks of the crazy musician and what he could possibly contribute to the world of knowledge. Mostly the world of written knowledge.

Chapbooks

Chapbooks were early examples of novels. They were cheap and easy to read so the poor would be able to understand them. They covered a wide range of topics: romance, poetry, recipes, etc... Chapbooks created an available source of literature making people want to learn how to read because they can purchase their own literature.

Islamic Calligraphy

Most of my group for the final project was studying an Islamic nation, and since I have been studying Samaria, a Hebrew nation, I decided to research Islam and its written tradition to get up-to-speed.

Islamic cultures write in calligraphy. Calligraphy is basically the art of handwriting. In Islamic cultures, it is forbidden to draw God or represent God with images, so they make the words describing Him as pretty as possible. They also intertwine the letters and symbols to make it look more like a picture, It was the main way Islamic cultures physically preserved the Qur'an, so the art of calligraphy is highly respected and appreciated.

There are a few different forms of Arabic/Islamic calligraphy. There is the geometric style, which is clear-cut. The consonants and vowels are sometimes distinguished with dashes and dots to make reading easier. The cursive style is more decorative and still easily read.

Calligraphy is traditionally written using a dried reed or bamboo pen, called a qalam. Before paper, papyrus and parchment were used for the calligraphy, but after paper, calligraphy-making exploded so that the Muslim world had thousands of books while Europe still only had a few dozen. The ink used for calligraphy was often colored to make it more impressive. Calligraphy was also inscribed on coins and woven into silks.

In addition, mosques are decorated with calligraphy, both inside and out. Typically, it is combined with Arabesque, the geometric and beautiful art of Islam. The words and patterns are written on the walls of the mosque, in accordance with the functions of different parts of the mosque.

Cartography

The earliest known map is the subject of some debate since the definition of a map is not clear and since some artifacts thought to be maps might be categorized as something else. An example of this is a wall painting, which may be the oldest map, depicting the ancient Anatolian city, Çatalhöyük, which has been dated back to the late 7th millennium BCE.

The ancient Greeks and Romans had maps of their own too. The latest being Anaximander in the 6^th century BC, but the most known being in Ptolemy’s discourse on cartography, Geographia, written in the 2^nd century AD. This work contained Ptolemy’s world map according to what the Western society knew at the time.

During the medieval times, European maps were centered on religious views. T-O maps (also O and T maps, or O-T maps) were common during that time. They depicted Jerusalem in the center and east towards the top of the map. These maps were named this because of how they look like the letter T inside of an O with Europe being on the bottom left, Africa on the bottom right, and Asia on top.

The 7th-century scholar, Isidore of Seville, depicts the known world through a T-O map in his Etymologiae (chapter 14, de terra et partibus):

(translated)

“The [inhabited] mass of solid land is called round after the roundness of a circle, because it is like a wheel... Because of this, the Ocean flowing around it is contained in a circular limit, and it is divided in three parts, one part being called Asia, the second Europe, and the third Africa.”

They made maps according to what they knew of, which were the three semi-connected continents.

Creating maps has clearly been of great interest to early peoples. Perhaps this stemmed from the interest in the unknown. Now that we have all of the information about maps that we need, we seem to not regard it as much, yet we seem very interested in another type of cartography, astrology, and even outer space in general. I believe this is because we don’t have as many answers about it as we do geography.

Through maps, we can tell much about a certain group of people as with the Europeans cantering their maps on Jerusalem and how that reflects themselves (as a generality) centered on their church.

In the Land of the Dine (Navajo)

3 of the best engineers ever!

Last week I left you all on the note that I was adventuring out into the Land of the Dine (aka Navajo Reservation) to work on service, engineering, and how I learn! Well here is the post you've waited all week for! What did she actually learn??

(Besides that engineering, service, and the Navajo are awesome!)

Les Chiffres Romains (Roman Numerals.. because everything is simply better in French)

Just a short side blog stemming from today’s class discussion, I wanted to look a little more into Roman numerals. Just so that we all know a little about Roman numerals, I’ll give the basics. If anything is unclear, just look to the chart below.

1. Something fairly obvious (and one of the easiest ways we mark down a number, such as with slashes) are little Is. Therefore I means 1, II means 2, III means 3, but four marks may seem like a little too many..

2. Romans moved on to the mark V, which represents 5. Placing I in front of the V, or a smaller number in front of a larger number, indicates subtraction. Thus, IV means 4. After V comes addition… VI means 6, VII means 7, VIII means 8.

3. X means 10. But with 9 we have the same rules as before. IX means I (one) subtracted from X (ten), leaving 9. Numbers into the teens, twenties and thirties follow the same rules, except with X's indicating the number of tens. So would mean XXXI is 31.

4. L means 50 and based on the principles of Roman numerals, one can probably guess what 40 is. If you guessed XL, you're right = X (ten) subtracted from L (fifty). Therefore 60 is LX , 70 is LXX, and 80 is LXXX.

5. C stands for the word centum, which is Latin for 100. We still use this root in English words such as "century", “centipede”, and "cent". The subtraction rule applies to this too, 90 is written as XC and like the X's and L's, the C's are tacked on to the beginning of numbers.

6. D stands for 500 and M is 1,000. You see a lot of Ms in Roman numerals because they were used to indicate dates.

7. Larger numbers were indicated by putting a horizontal line over them, which meant to multiply the number by 1,000. This usage is no longer used because the largest numbers expressed are usually dates.

Something funny about the Roman numerals, as opposed to Arabic numerals (the one’s we use today), is that they didn’t have a zero, and I wonder if they even had negative numbers. I feel like this would hinder their progression in the math department.

I noticed something else that was odd about this writing system. Just by looking at a number, you can’t tell at first glace if it is a large number. For example, MD stands for 1,500, but LXXXIV means 84. So even if there are more figures, doesn’t mean it’s a larger number, as in the Arabic numeral system.

All I can think about as I type this is the long division. The long division, people! Imagine the horror! But all kidding aside, I can only imagine how much this writing system hindered their progression in mathematics. Just a thought..

Most Gracious, Most Compassionate

From our class today about mysticism, I decided to look up Sufism. Sufism has been defined as the esoteric dimension of Islam. Sufi teacher Ahmad ibn Ajiba, "a science through which one can know how to travel into the presence of the Divine, purify one's inner self from filth, and beautify it with a variety of praiseworthy traits."

The goal to become as God would have them can be seen in these words (attributed to God):


My servant draws near to Me through nothing I love more than that which I have made obligatory for him. My servant never ceases drawing near to Me through supererogatory works until I love him. Then, when I love him, I am his hearing through which he hears, his sight through which he sees, his hand through which he grasps, and his foot through which he walks.


 "In the name of God, most Gracious, most Compassionate"

Ancient Paper-making

Paper is, today, one of the most ordinary of products, used for everything from reading, writing, wrapping, and even cleaning. In the past, however, it wasn't such a common commodity.

Paper-making in China began in between 200 BC and 100 AD. In about 200 BC, the Chinese were using paper for wrapping packages. Writing on paper probably began around 8 BC, as paper has been discovered with Chinese writing on it dating from that time. In 105 AD, a man named T'sai Lun made a piece of paper out of plant fibers, old rags, and fishnets, and by about 200 AD, paper was beginning to be widely used for writing. Toilet paper began to be used around 500 AD.

In Europe in 600 AD, however, paper was not even widely used as a writing medium, let alone for waste. Paper was not widely manufactured in Europe until around 1000 AD. Italy and Germany began to produce paper on a large scale in about 1200 AD and 1400 AD, respectively.