The Philosophy of Umberto Eco

“Look who’s arrived. You know him, don’t you? Professor of semiotics in Bologna. . . .”¹ After more than three hundred pages of Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s extravagantly metaliterary novel, The Club Dumas, as the novel nears its climax, its reader is apt to feel a sense of relief on finally seeing an unmistakable personal reference to Umberto Eco. The reader glimpses Eco at a lavish cocktail party where, fittingly, the guests are some of the world’s most enthusiastic and affluent bibliophiles. This is a suitable milieu in which to find the founder and president of the Aldus Club, an exclusive “International Association of Bibliophily” located in Milan.²

In the scope of these few pages, bibliophilia—in the broadest sense of a love for books and reading—provides the most practical approach to Eco’s relations with the culture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Eco’s bibliophilia is both the product and the inspiration of his devotion to the philosophy, theology, poetry, and fiction of the premodern era. In fact bibliomania—construed in an even broader sense—would almost be a better term: not mere obsessive collecting of printed objects, but, rather, an ingrained, practically frenetic love of books and reading. I don’t wish to upend the traditional and important distinction between bibliophilia and bibliomania. That difference has been sacrosanct at least since the Encyclopédie, and Eco himself has written that “we distinguish a bibliomane from a bibliophile because, if only he can have a book with uncut pages and keep it that way, the former foregoes reading it. I believe there’s no difference between a bibliomane and a bibliophobe, that is, between keeping books without reading them, and destroying them. Books are made to be read. And if they get a bit worn? Never mind, they’ll carry the scars of a loving wear and tear.”³

What I mean is that, like a medieval or early modern author, Eco cannot write without revealing his readings, whether explicitly or implicitly, deliberately or incidentally. Purely aside from the themes of his novels, this prominent intertextuality is the aspect that makes his writings, both fiction and nonfiction, resemble models drawn from the millennium that ended sometime about 1700. Like works from that epoch, Eco’s are always about his reading, whatever their announced subject, and the reader is constantly solicited to recognize the hypotext, whether it is emphasized or not.⁴

I. BIBLIOPHILIA AND LITERATURE

The least efficient way to describe Eco’s relation to medieval and early modern literature would be to attempt listing his interlocutors or his intertexts. Besides, this work has been done with particular thoroughness for The Name of the Rose, especially since the English translation of 1983. Aside from the mountain of interpretive studies, books like The Key to “The Name of the Rose” and Postscript to the Middle Ages, aimed at nonspecialist professors and students of literature and history, have been over this ground quite thoroughly.⁵ As these books document, and as is clear to even the most bewildered reader of Eco’s novels, his definition of literature for any historical period is not limited to fiction and poetry but includes scholarship of every variety. It is litera-tura in the original and broadest sense of writing, “literally,” lettering. Bibliophilia for this author’s author is a form of philology, the historical approach to texts, as well as books, along with writing and libraries. Books are characters for Eco, as much as fictive or historical personages are.

Writers of fiction have not failed to notice this. Pérez-Reverte enlivens his fictional commentary on Eco’s fiction by engaging with the latter’s bibliophilia: not only by writing a bibliophile’s novel about bibliophiles, or by having a fictive Eco show up at the party, but even by the choice of locale. The bibliophiles’ party takes place in Meung-sur-Loire, a town whose name evokes the opening of the Three Musketeers, as The Club Dumas makes explicit, but also the town’s native son Jean de Meun (d. circa 1305), as Dumas’s opening makes equally explicit.⁶ Jean’s defining achievement was the gigantic second part of the Roman de la rose, the most influential work of medieval vernacular literature prior to Dante’s Divine Comedy. Had Pérez-Reverte located the party in the nearby town of Lorris, his homage would have fallen flat, partly for lack of consonance with Dumas’s novel but also because Guillaume de Lorris (d. circa 1240), author of the first part of the Roman de la rose, lacked the irreverent, satirical wit of his subversive continuator Jean. So Pérez-Reverte has suppressed Guillaume’s name, referring to Jean alone as “the author of Roman de la Rose,” thereby slyly reminding us that for most of the world’s nonspecialist readers, “the Novel [Roman] of the Rose” is now identified as the book that Eco published in 1980: the mere name of his Rose has supplanted the medieval classic, much as Jean de Meun commandeered and transformed the genteel courtly allegory of his own predecessor. Lest we overlook the joke, a villain in The Club Dumas refers to the bibliophile detective sarcastically as “Brother William Baskerville [sic]” shortly before the party in Meung.⁷

It is perhaps this kind of easy notoriety that has led Eco to announce that he is tired of his first novel and wishes we would all talk about something else, starting (presumably) with his other novels. A synoptic way to respect Eco’s wishes and approach what I am calling his bibliophilia might be to revisit one of the great classics of medieval studies, Ernst Robert Curtius’s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. First published in 1948 and translated into English in 1953, it is still a book that every serious lover of medieval literature should read, and most probably have, for its vision of literary continuity.⁸ Curtius’s method is not immune to criticism; Eugenio Garin, the great historian of Renaissance humanism and Italian philosophy, certainly thought so in 1954, when he reviewed the book and faulted it for collecting “disparate and heterogeneous texts, from different times, with meanings distant from one another, not examined in context, their differences left undefined,” and concluded that “the absence of any ‘historicization’ empties the entire project of any significance.” Garin was particularly offended by chapter sixteen, “The Book as Symbol,” which, he said, “is simply a random enumeration of ‘examples’ of figurative uses of the term book.”⁹

True. But Curtius had noticed something outside the purview of Garin’s careful philology and concentration on the Italian humanist tradition, something that we, too, are likely to overlook since, like our noses, it is just at the edge of our visual field. I mean the ubiquity, even in recent times, of the Book: not merely as a finite or discrete symbol, but, rather, as a mystique that permeates Western culture from Gilgamesh to the prematurely and obsessively announced “death of the book.”¹⁰ Despite his reservations, Garin freely admitted that Curtius was onto something: “And yet it is undeniable that the symbol of the book is, in a certain way, at the center of a complex web of concepts and disputes: and in its various senses, it encompasses the variations in a vision of the world and of knowledge.”¹¹ Commenting on Goethe’s idea for “a ‘tropics’ or metaphorics of world literature,” Curtius observed that “not every subject matter . . . can be employed by figurative language, but only such as are ‘value-charged’; which, as Goethe puts it, are ‘life relations’ or [those] through which the ‘independent life of earthly things’ is discernible.”¹² Without venturing further into Curtius’s reasoning, we could do worse than to second his adoption of Goethe’s notion of “life-relations”: people talk and make metaphors about what’s important to them.

Although the life relations of Wall Street have since the 1980s riddled contemporary language and behavior with “bottom lines,” “leveraging,” and “low-hanging fruit,” there is a subset of modern people for whom the most cherished, if not the ultimate, reality is not money but books. A subset of that subset collects books, and a third-order subset collects only or mainly those books that appeal to it intellectually, that is, that are “value-charged” as well as monetarily valued. We could refer to these latter people as total or “compleat” bibliophiles, people whose “life relations” to books are broad and strong enough to color everything they do.

Eco is one of these people and, to this extent, he has more in common with authors between 600 and 1700 than with his nominal contemporaries. When explaining the genesis of his Name of the Rose, Eco wrote that “the Middle Ages were my day-to-day fantasy” but also that “I know the present only through the television screen, whereas I have a direct knowledge of the Middle Ages.”¹³ Verba—imaginesque—volant, sed scripta manent: words and images in the air, whether on TV, the computer screen, or in the individual’s memory, fly away, but writing remains. Eco went on to acknowledge the first-hand acquaintance of the Middle Ages he gained through his travel to monasteries and other sites of culture, but he specified that these experiences were no more real than “crossing symbolic forests inhabited by unicorns and gryphons, and . . . comparing the pinnacled and squared construction of cathedrals to the barbs of exegetic malice concealed in the tetragonal formulas of the Summulae,” or being “tempted by Honorius Augustoduniensis, by his fantastic geographies, which explained . . . how to reach the Lost Island, or how to capture a basilisk when you are armed only with a pocket mirror and unshakable faith in the Bestiary.”¹⁴ Except for the reference to scholastic treatises, this quote from the early 1980s sounds like a prophecy about the adventures of Baudolino, the eponymous hero of Eco’s fourth novel.

Honorius “of Autun” (d. 1154), a writer who was prolific, encyclopedic, and accessible to the nonspecialist, is as apt an inspiration as any other for Eco to single out. On the next page Eco recalled “stolen holidays under the vaults of Autun, where the Abbé Grivot today writes manuals on the devil,” that absent protagonist of The Name of the Rose.¹⁵ But in terms of Eco’s total bibliophilia, his most evident predecessor might well be Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham. Closing the lecture on bibliophilia mentioned above, Eco asked his listeners to

permit me to conclude my considerations, which I began under the aegis of bibliophobia, under the aegis of that wise and sane bibliophilia espoused in 1345 by Richard de Bury in his Philobyblon [sic]: “Books delight us, when prosperity smiles upon us; they comfort us inseparably when stormy fortune frowns on us. . . . How highly must we estimate the wondrous power of books, since through them we survey the utmost bounds of the world and time, and contemplate the things that are as well as those that are not. . . . Just as we have learnt on the authority of Seneca, [that] leisure without letters is death and the sepulture of the living, so contrariwise we conclude that occupation with letters or books is the life of man.” So, you see, De Bury tells us what to do with books after having collected and compared them.¹⁶

Richard, who died in 1345, was, like Eco, a passionate collector of books and for centuries has been something of a patron saint among bibliophiles. At least once Richard discussed books and scholarship with Petrarch (d. 1374) at the Papal court in Avignon.¹⁷ The inventor of the Renaissance, himself an accomplished book hunter, was not unimpressed with the Englishman’s enthusiasm for books, and Philobiblon was printed in 1473 and many times thereafter. In 1666 Joachim Johann Mader, librarian to the Dukes of Braunschweig, paradoxically omitted Richard’s founding text from his book, the first anthology of writings on what came to be called library science. But Mader’s book became so well known that in 1702 Johann Albert Schmidt reprinted it, adding two more large volumes in 1703 and 1705. In the 1703 supplement the entire Philobiblon occupied first place.¹⁸

Unlike Petrarch (and Eco, for that matter), Richard wrote very little; he hoped that the books he collected would furnish Durham College, Oxford, which he intended to found. Again unlike Eco, he admitted that his bibliophilia was so excessive that it often weakened his scruples: “the fame of our love of [books] had soon been winged abroad everywhere, and we were reported to burn with such desire for books, and especially old ones, that it was more easy for any man to gain our favor by means of books than of money.”¹⁹ Except for his self-imputed lack of scruples, Richard’s maniacal book-love is the spiritual ancestor of Eco’s bibliophilia. (However, Eco has declared, “I’d like to dig up and keep, selfishly, a copy of the Gutenberg Bible [as] the first book ever printed.”)²⁰ Durham College came to naught after Richard’s death; indeed, all but two items in his beloved collection are now unlocatable, so today he is remembered only for his treatise on the love of books. The word bibliophilia not being yet invented, Richard called his book Philobiblon. His justification for the title appears in a kind of syllogism, based on The Biblical Book of Wisdom.²¹ “We know that the love of books is the same thing as the love of wisdom, as was proved in [my] second chapter. Now this love is called by the Greek word philosophy, the whole virtue of which no created intelligence can comprehend; for she is believed to be the mother of all good things.”²² Philo-biblon by any other name is philo-sophia.

Richard collected the books he expected his future Oxford protégés would need during their training to spread wisdom and truth. From this perspective he was anything but a precursor of Eco, who is more inclined to philo-moria: “I collect books on wrong, zany, and occult science . . . I am fascinated by error, by bad faith and idiocy.”²³ In fact, Eco specifies, “I only collect books relating to falsities and mistakes.”²⁴ By this he means that he buys the books that feed his love of strangeness: “My collection is very focused. It is a Bibliotheca Semiologica Curiosa Lunatica Magica et Pneumatica, or ‘a collection dedicated to the occult and mistaken sciences.’”²⁵ Any number of passages in his novels, and equally many in his literary theory, illustrate this love of lunacy, error, and forgery.

At a certain point it becomes clear that, for Eco, reading the hallucinogenic “scientific” works of medieval and early modern polymaths, epitomized by Athanasius Kircher (d. 1680), is in many ways comparable to his boyhood readings in the adventure novels of Dumas, Salgari, and Eugène Sue—or even comic books (though Eco’s own novels might be better compared to Moby Dick in other respects).²⁶ Purely aside from the connections they share via his theory of semiotics, Eco’s enthusiasms for works by premodern polymaths, nineteenth-century mass-culture novelists, and the creators of Nembo Kid and Topolino (the Italian versions of Superman and Mickey Mouse) all partake of an unbridled, restless fantasia or imagination.

But, conversely, modern culture is as curiosa and lunatica as anything from Kircher or his contemporary La Peyrère’s Preadamites: “In Faith in Fakes [now Travels in Hyperreality] I describe visiting American museums that show reproductions of art works, including a waxwork Venus de Milo with arms.”²⁷ Literary forgery is the bibliomorphic equivalent of such a sculptural “reconstruction,” as Eco made clear in Foucault’s Pendulum. There he staged a deadly ouroboros of lunatic self-financed authors and their cynical editors. But he thereby became the unwitting father of a monster when the reality of publishing mimicked his novel with a vengeance. The resemblances that made The DaVinci Code seem a solemn plagiarism of Foucault’s Pendulum appear to have amused Eco, who had remarked years previously: “This is parody’s mission: it must never be afraid of going too far. If its aim is true, it simply heralds what others will later produce, unblushing, with impassive and assertive gravity.”²⁸ True to the ethos of Faith in Fakes, though doubtless unconsciously, Brown’s potboiler centers on Leonardo’s Last Supper as a vehicle of both artistic and historical “truth.” In “The Temesvar Codex” Eco has since repaid Dan Brown in his own coin, creating an even crazier interpretation of the Last Supper by an imaginary author first mentioned in the preface to The Name of the Rose.²⁹ He has even claimed, with impeccable illogic, that Dan Brown “is a character from Foucault’s Pendulum! I invented him. He shares my characters’ fascinations—the world conspiracy of Rosicrucians, Masons, and Jesuits. The role of the Knights Templar. The Hermetic secret. The principle that everything is connected. I suspect Dan Brown might not even exist.”³⁰ In The Prague Cemetery Eco expounds a conspiracy theory about conspiracy theories, in line with the opening essay of Costruire il nemico (Constructing the enemy).³¹ Baudolino stars a medieval mythomaniac from Eco’s home town of Alessandria in Piemonte, whose adventures reenact—whether in his novelistic “real life” or as consummate lies—the tall tales of ancient and medieval paradoxology and travel narrative.

Other facets of fakery have inspired two articles on forgery, one on literary forgery and the other on forgery in general.³² Eco’s fantasy and sense of humor make him a lighthearted continuator of earnest works by early modern scholars such as Burchard Gotthelf Struve (d. 1738), whose treatise On Learned Forgers (De doctis impostoribus) is perhaps the most lively early study of the subject. Struve examined a pantheon of fraudsters that included Pope Gregory IX, who invented a book that “proved” Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed were charlatans and then pinned the authorship on his arch enemy, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. The slander bounced off Frederick but then rattled around Europe for another half a millennium, pinging off every adventurous intellectual from Boccaccio to Spinoza, surviving as a mere title in search of a book, before finally being written, to near universal disappointment.³³ Eco’s personal collection of rare books contains nine editions, including the princeps, of the consummate forgeries of Annius of Viterbo, an early modern Dan Brown. In 1498 Annius rewrote the history of the world by publishing eleven “rediscovered” chronicles by well-known ancient Babylonians, Egyptians, Persians, Jews, Greeks, and Romans, demonstrating incontrovertibly that the Etruscans, descendants of Noah’s favorite grandson, had ruled the entire world between the Flood and the Roman Republic. The wealth of scholarly detail kept Annius’s supporters and his even more numerous critics busy for over two centuries.³⁴

II. WRITING AND WONDER

It is obvious that Eco shares something fundamental and spiritual (to adopt that worn-out term) with the obsolete books that nourish his bibliophilia: an admiration for the Book itself. That attitude was a hallmark of the ages before the novel, before massive nineteenth-century print runs, before the concept of literature became confined to poems and fictional stories in the modern languages or was returned to its etymological amplitude (as literatura) to include writings of a technical, scientific, or commercial character, such as instruction manuals and advertising. Because of his “life relation” to the mystique of books, Eco’s work, whether novelistic, historiographic, theoretical, or journalistic, also takes part in a larger history: what I’ll call the emotional history of writing. From remote antiquity through early modernity, the love of books was thoroughly entwined with the reverence people felt for the art and practice of writing and for what scholars considered its illustrious history. The “history” that writers once attributed to their discipline has been rightly classified as myth for two centuries now, but wrongly dismissed as irrelevant or uninteresting, so that modern historians of writing rarely mention it, even to dismiss it.³⁵ The severest blow to the ancient, medieval, and early modern attitudes toward writing was administered between 1822 and 1824 by Jean-François Champollion’s crucial discoveries in deciphering the hieroglyphs.³⁶ Since Champollion, plenty of systematic work has been done in the technological history of writing by archeologists and cryptographers, but the emotional history of the art before 1800 remains scattered and anecdotal precisely because, from the modern technohistoriographic point of view, it was filled with what Eco terms “occult and mistaken sciences.” What I have just called the “emotional history” of writing, Eco refers to as “the cult of the written page, and later of the book,” and remarks that it “goes back as far as writing itself.”³⁷ This cultic attitude has been traced by many Eco-lytes to the influence of Jorge Luis Borges’s essays and fiction (most succinctly in Borges’s “On the Cult of Books”). But while Eco’s novelistic and historiographic writings often survey swatches of the emotional history of writing, his knowledge of texts in that tradition before those of Borges is still largely unstudied.³⁸

Borges’s concept of a “cult of books” is metaphysical, theological, and somewhat terrifying. But while the religious Middle Ages and Renaissance respected the holy terrors of writing, they had another view that was broader and more secular, yet filled, if anything, with a greater sense of wonder. In the seventh century Isidore of Seville wrote that “letters are the tokens of things, the signs of words, and they have so much force that the utterances of those who are absent speak to us without a voice, for they present words through the eyes, not through the ears. The use of letters was invented for the sake of remembering things, which are bound by letters lest they slip away into oblivion.”³⁹ Litterae or Grammatica are the first discipline—indeed, the first entry—in Isidore’s encyclopedia. That state of wonder was often implied rather than declaimed. Dante’s visibile parlare in Purgatorio 10–12—the lifelike, synaesthetic bas-reliefs sculpted by God—was to some degree a logical outgrowth of Isidore’s definition of writing as “words through the eyes, not the ears.”

Eight centuries later the humanist Polydore Vergil agreed: he began his encyclopedia On the Discoverers of Things (1499) by declaring that “since only the use of letters makes memory endure and protects things worthy of memory from all damage of forgetfulness . . . we should treat letters before anything else.”⁴⁰ According to Polydore, only the deity, the elements, and the institutions of language, marriage, and religion were more fundamental to human existence than writing. Similar attitudes can be found in other encyclopedias, including the greatest of all, where Diderot and D’Alembert’s collaborators enshrined them in such articles as “Bibliothèque,” “Écriture,” “Lettres,” and “Livre.”⁴¹

The wonder of writing was often illustrated by painters and engravers. When Pope Sixtus V remodeled and expanded the Vatican Library in the 1580s, among its many book- and writing-themed decorations shone a roomful of large murals depicting twenty-six inventors of writing, from the mythical Adam, Abraham, Moses, and ancient Egyptians to the historic Wulfila (Ulfilas), the fourth-century inventor of the Gothic alphabet, and the eponymous ninth-century creator of Cyrillic writing.⁴² Somewhat belatedly, in 1711 the Englishman William Nicols published a six-book Latin poem on the history of writing; his annotations to it constitute one of the most complete documents in the emotional history of writing. It began:

I’ve often wondered whom God did first inspire

To paint the voice, allow us to see words;

And by rude strokes and magic figures made it so

That things believed impossible to catch

Should be at last forever fixed in stone.

Was it Moses or one more ancient still

Who taught the strange new rite of painting words?⁴³

If not Vergilian, Nicols’s poem was Lucretian, a kind of De scripturae natura that explored literary rather than natural history. In 1784 Thomas Astle, the Keeper of the King’s Manuscripts under George III, could still exclaim that “the art of drawing ideas into vision, or of exhibiting the conceptions of the mind by legible characters, may justly be deemed the noblest and most beneficial invention of which human ingenuity can boast: an invention which hath contributed more than all others to the improvement of mankind.”⁴⁴

Medieval and early modern writers often paraphrased the declaration of Pliny the Elder (d. 79 BC) that the immortality of men depended on human writing, and especially on the papyrus reed. The Jesuit Hermann Hugo expanded Pliny’s praise in 1617: “On this one thing depends the very humanness of life, that is, memory, and the immortality of men.” Writing not only provides universal knowledge but “prolongs antiquity, allows nothing to perish, and makes time, which wears everything away, surrender to our hands.” Writing is “something over which the greedy rapacity of death has no power at all.”⁴⁵ Like Mader’s history of libraries, Hugo’s On the Earliest Origin of Writing and the Whole Literary Enterprise enjoyed a durable reputation. It was reprinted and updated in 1738, and in the 1770s its translation into French, as Dissertation historique sur l’invention des lettres, made it legible by a considerably wider audience, probably including more than a few women.⁴⁶

While often placid and implicit, the wonder of writing was frequently made explicit, even dramatic. Hugo’s history of writing retold a story about the power of writing that had originated in sixteenth-century Brazil: how an illiterate slave was defeated and amazed by a written note when he filched figs his master had sent to a friend. The note, and the gift, were actually a reprise. Earlier the master had sent figs but with a note that did not specify the amount of fruit the slave was carrying. When reprimanded for eating some of the figs, the slave was able to bluff his way out of punishment; only dimly understanding the nature and functioning of the note, he declared it a liar and an unreliable witness. On the second occasion, he was careful to extract the note and hide it under a rock to prevent its witnessing his theft, subsequently replacing it in the basket and continuing his errand. Caught out a second time because the note had detailed the exact number of figs being sent, the slave was astonished at the note’s ability to see through the rock. Hugo noted that the master severely punished the slave, “using an elm switch” as a pen to “bescribble” his back.⁴⁷

The slave’s wonder was common in North America as well, as references to “talking books” among slaves of African ancestry reveal. But it was also common among literate free Americans. In 1828 Champollion’s breakthrough was still new and practically unknown. In that year an American girl embroidered her sampler with verses expressing traditional praise of writing: “Whence did the wondrous mystic art arise / Of painting speech and speaking to the eyes / That we by tracing magic lines are taught / How both to color and embody thought?” The synaesthetic wonders of writing’s visible speech described in the verses had been relayed to the young embroiderer through a chain of scholarly quotations that passed by way of William Nicols and culminated in her immediate model, William Massey’s Origin and Progress of Letters, a manual for schoolmasters printed two generations before her time.⁴⁸

Since the early 1990s abundant scholarship on the early modern concept of wonder has concentrated on the vogue of Wunderkammern, studioli, and the literature of geographic and scientific exploration, with their predominant interest in the exotic and the monstrous. Eco’s novels are certainly soaked in fascination with such topics, most dramatically in The Name of the Rose, The Island of the Day Before, and Baudolino. But all his writings depend on imaginatively understanding and sympathizing with the somewhat less dramatic discourse of wonder about writing. Marveling at writing more resembles the preoccupations that, in a thoughtful article from 1997, Caroline Walker Bynum referred to as “medieval” wonder. The discourse on writing as (qua) wonder, which stretched from ancient Babylon to the age of Champollion, does not depend on what Bynum refers to as “the startle reflex,” which dominated the early modern, Cartesian concept of wonder as astonishment; nor does it celebrate what Stephen Greenblatt called “marvelous possessions,” the appropriative and imperialistic attitudes of collectors, explorers, and merchants.⁴⁹ Even in “the age of the marvelous,” writing-discourse only rarely showed the ethos and aesthetics of the Wunderkammer, mainly in cases of conventional bibliomania, with its pride in the unique copy and its elation over the acquisition of rare and virtuosic items. Objects associated with writing, such as an Iliad small enough to fit inside a walnut shell or obelisks like those reerected by Sixtus V or contained in Athanasius Kircher’s Roman museum, lie outside a truly bibliophilic wonder.

In ages before Champollion, the wonder expressed over writing qua writing was rarely provoked by a single object and it was almost never spontaneous; it took the form of meditation not an earthshaking emotional encounter. It resembled, and largely overlapped with, the emotion evoked by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in his 1486 Oration: “I have read in the records of the Arabians, reverend Fathers, that Abdala the Saracen, when questioned as to what . . . could be seen most worthy of wonder, replied: ‘There is nothing to be seen more wonderful than man.’ In agreement with this opinion is the saying of Hermes Trismegistus: ‘A great miracle, Asclepius, is man.’”⁵⁰ In fact Pico’s “On the Dignity of Man” is largely a paean to books: the Bible, Hermetic and Neoplatonic philosophy and theology, and Kabbalah. About the latter, Pico repeated the legend of Esdras (Ezra), who was believed to have restored the text of the Torah after the Babylonian Captivity. Ezra was supposed to have enshrined the Kabbalah in seventy volumes, recognizing that “the custom instituted by their forefathers of transmitting the doctrine from mouth to mouth [that is, orally] could not be preserved, and that it would come to pass that the mysteries of the heavenly teachings divinely bestowed on them would be lost, since the memory of them could not long endure without written records.”⁵¹

Wonder at writing had the same range of emotion that Bynum attributes to medieval wonder in general: such feelings did not “simply occur,” they had to be “evoked, even staged.” Wonder at writing was evoked “less by adjectives than by the responses of an implicit reader”—or what Eco has called a lector in fabula or model reader.⁵² The astonishment of Hermann Hugo’s Brazilian slave, or of other “others” when first confronted with the mystery of “talking papers,” is uncharacteristic of early modern wonder at writing. When addressing their fellow Europeans, writers on the topic sought to awaken them, to shake them out of their inherited indifference to writing and provoke them to consider what life would be like in the absence of reliable cultural memory. Hugo claimed to have written his history of writing after observing that discussions of the topic were limited to asides and brief anecdotes rather than comprehensive treatises. A hundred and seventy years later, Thomas Astle lamented more eloquently that writing of all sorts “has been so long known and used, that few men think upon the subject; so inattentive are we to the greatest benefits from their having been long enjoyed.” Neglect resulted from the fact that, properly considered, writing was almost too wondrous: its “uses . . . are too varied to be enumerated, and at the same time too obvious to need enumeration.”⁵³

Even in the “age of the marvelous” writing about writing had a vocabulary of wonder no less rich than sensational accounts of freaks, monsters, or virtuosi. Despite its lack of shock value, wonder at writing ran no less deep than the other kind, and its lifespan was many times longer. In the third century BC Berossos of Babylonia declared that writing was first taught to an incompetent humanity at the beginning of time by Oannes, a dicephalous, amphibious, icthyomorphic demi-god. Berossos also described a primeval “renaissance,” recounting how provident humans had rescued writing, and with it all civilization, from obliteration in a titanic flood. Plato and Flavius Josephus told similar tales to proclaim the absolute dependence of civilization on writing. Although Berossos’s account was all but lost until Joseph Scaliger rediscovered a medieval Byzantine paraphrase of it in the late sixteenth century, the Timaeus and the Jewish Antiquities inspired wonder at writing and dread of the consequences if it ever disappeared, throughout the Middle Ages and far into the seventeenth century.⁵⁴

These attitudes permeated The Name of the Rose, with the result that, for many readers, including medievalists, the scriptorium scenes, the burning of the Aedificium’s library, and Adso’s retrieval of “fragments” and “amputated stumps of books” are among the most memorable episodes. The reason is doubtless Eco’s meticulous attention to the construction, preservation, and destruction of manuscripts, not only as technical processes but as stimuli to wonder.⁵⁵ Although Curtius’s chapter on “The Book as Symbol” illuminates Eco’s novel, if taken alone it distorts and occludes the emotional history of writing. Curtius began inauspiciously by recalling Plato’s negative assessment of writing in Phaedrus, where Socrates claims that inscription destroys memory.⁵⁶ One has but to remember Pliny’s and Hermann Hugo’s praise of writing to see how uncharacteristic Socrates’s critique was of writers from Berossos to Nicols and Astle. Strangely, Curtius neglected to quote the counterbalancing passage in the Timaeus,⁵⁷ an omission automatically repeated by other modern writers who quote the Phaedrus.⁵⁸ Worse, the omission is historically incorrect: unlike the Phaedrus, the Timaeus was read throughout the Middle Ages, translated into Latin first by Cicero and again in the time of Saint Augustine. Conversely, the Phaedrus had to await the 1460s when Marsilio Ficino translated the Platonic corpus into Latin.⁵⁹

The Timaeus was beloved in part because it seemed to corroborate the creation story in Genesis. But medieval and early modern readers were also fascinated—as readers have been ever since—by its myth of Atlantis. Because it related how Solon brought the 9000-year-old story back from archives in Egypt, this myth counteracted Socrates’s dismissive view in Phaedrus that written words “go on telling you just the same thing forever,” and that writing “[gets] into the hands not only of those who understand it, but equally of those who have no business with it.”⁶⁰ The stability of writing and its capacity for wide dissemination, which Socrates deprecated, were precisely the features that his disciple Critias praised in the Timaeus.

According to Critias, Solon learned in Egypt that the myths prized by Greek culture were degraded echoes of historical events preserved for millennia in the Egyptian priestly archives. The age-old, flood- and fireproof archives at Saïs on the Nile protected fragile papyrus records from both flooding and fire; conversely, owing to the topographic and meteorological extremes of Greece, its history and civilization—memoria literarum as the early medieval translation expressed it—were wiped out every few generations, leaving only vague, orally transmitted myths such as Deucalion’s flood and Phaeton’s inept charioteering. In age after age, disaster “sweeps upon you [Greeks] like a plague, leaving only your illiterate and uncultured people behind. You become infants all over again, as it were, completely unfamiliar with anything there was in ancient times.” Compared to the history preserved in writing, stories about Deucalion and Phaeton are “just like a nursery tale.”⁶¹

Equally long lived was Josephus’s account of how Adam’s grandsons preserved human knowledge on two stele, one of stone to resist floods and the other of brick against combustion. It became the most widely disseminated writing legend between antiquity and the eighteenth century, and is still occasionally quoted.⁶² Memoria literarum, the memory that is of letters because it is encoded in them, is the pivot on which the emotional history of writing turned throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages. The complacency behind this providential myth dissipated after Gutenberg’s invention. Although printing augured well for future preservation, it failed to assuage early modern writers’ regret over what must have been lost. The elegiac struggle between memoria literarum and oblivion captivated everyone who had a professional “life relation” to writing, books, and libraries in this period—which means everyone who read and wrote Latin.

Adso of Melk, William of Baskerville, and Jorge of Burgos enact a range of well-known responses to the battle of inscription and erasure as it played out in the real life of pre-Gutenberg Europe. Richard de Bury, the exact contemporary of Eco’s fictional detectives, is again our best witness. There is something of Adso’s shock and horror at the burning of the Aedificium in Richard’s speculation about what was lost when the library of Alexandria burned.

The secrets of the heavens, which Jonithus [an apocryphal son of Noah] learnt not from man or through man but received by divine inspiration; what his brother Zoroaster [a.k.a. Noah’s son Ham], the servant of unclean spirits, taught the Bactrians; what holy Enoch, the prefect of Paradise, prophesied before he was taken from the world, and finally, what the first man Adam taught his children of the things to come, which he had seen when caught up in an ecstasy in the book of eternity, all these are believed to have perished in those horrid flames. The religion of the Egyptians, which the Book of the Perfect Word so commends; the excellent polity of the older Athens, which preceded by nine thousand years the Athens of Greece; the incantations of the Chaldeans; the astronomical observations of the Arabs and Indians; the ceremonies of the Jews; the architecture of the Babylonians; the agriculture of Noah; the magic arts of Moses; the geometry of Joshua; the enigmas of Samson; the problems of Solomon [ranging] from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop; the antidotes of Aesculapius; the grammar of Cadmus; the poems of Parnassus; the oracles of Apollo; the Argonautica of Jason; the stratagems of Palamedes, and infinite other secrets of science are believed to have perished at the time of this conflagration.⁶³

Such defeats made the victories of memoria literarum all the more valuable.

After Gutenberg, losses were chronicled even more meticulously by humanist scholars than they had been by Petrarch, Boccaccio, or Richard de Bury. Michael Neumann (alias Neander), a disciple of Philipp Melanchthon, lamented in 1565 that

innumerable thousands of excellent books, in every kind of science, studies and discipline, have died a sad and miserable death through the injury and iniquity of time, the long passage of years, age which consumes all, the turmoil and malignity of wars, the devastation of lands by floods, the unexpected accidents of fire, and sometimes through shameful, detestable hatred and envy (which has moved the dull and stupid burners of books even in our own time), or by being eaten by roaches, worms, and other plagues of literature. Their death and their loss were mourned long ago by many learnèd men, nor have writers ceased to deplore the damage that Letters, Education, the Church and the State have incurred by this loss; for they believe that human life cannot lack so many tragically lost monuments of illustrious, excellent, and beneficial writers without suffering inconvenience or sacrifice.⁶⁴

Modern scholars might be disappointed that such a rigorous humanist as Neander went on to bewail many of the same mythical “lost masterpieces” that Richard de Bury had listed: “Nowhere today can be found the infinite treasures of those histories and other books written before Noah’s Flood, even though there is no shortage among the Brahmans (those Indian philosophers also called Gymnosophists or naked philosophers), of writers who, moved by one or another kind of reasoning, claim that those writings are still extant.”⁶⁵

Neander’s other examples fit into a tradition of mythical bibliography that began in Jewish and Christian antiquity when writers dedicated themselves to the task of distinguishing “canonical” writings of the Bible from “apocryphal” (innocently misattributed) and pseudepigraphic (fraudulently misattributed) works jostling for inclusion in the Biblical canon. Among other legendary texts, Neander cited the books of Enoch and Abraham, along with the seventy books to which Ezra entrusted the Kabbalah after the Babylonian Captivity. Neander was also fascinated by mysterious books the Hebrew Bible mentioned as its lost “sources,” such as The Book of the Wars of God, The Book of the Just, and prophetic books attributed to Samuel, Nathan, Gad the Seer, and others.

In the second book of his Bibliotheca sancta (1566), an encyclopedia of the Bible, the converted Jew Sixtus of Siena drew on his knowledge of both Judaism and Christianity to compile a particularly exhaustive, indeed “complete list of all volumes, books, writers and writings, extant and non-extant, both the authentic ones [indubitatas] and those of doubtful or uncertain authenticity, that are mentioned in various places by the authors of the Holy Bible.”⁶⁶ Such lists, and the bibliographic hypotheses and daydreams they inspired, continued spawning successors in such eighteenth-century works as the Codex pseudepigraphus veteris testamenti by the prodigiously productive Johann Albert Fabricius.⁶⁷ This scholar’s life mission was, to paraphrase Sixtus, winnowing extant volumes from nonextant, and authentic ones from those of doubtful or uncertain authenticity. He performed comparable triage on the New Testament and on Greek, Latin, and Patristic literature. In the first of his fourteen great tomes on the history of Greek literature—from its origins to the Muslim conquest of Byzantium—Fabricius devoted over three hundred pages to cataloguing ancient references to Greek authors and writings from before the time of Homer.⁶⁸

Even scholars who did not share the enthusiasm for such mythical masterpieces as the sources of the Bible and of Homer, or the original contents of the Library of Alexandria, echoed these sentiments. In the same year as Neander, the Portuguese humanist Gaspar Barreiros, an unromantic exploder of literary forgeries, found a particularly striking analogy for the sad history of biblioclasms.

Just as there is nothing in human affairs more wonderful or salutary than the monuments of wise and learned men that are entrusted to letters, through the apt counsel of which we learn how to live well and happily, acquire the knowledge of human and divine matters, and learn the course and revolutions of history, likewise I consider that there can be no more awful or calamitous loss than the destruction of books. And when I think of how many priceless books of great philosophers and illustrious poets, great orators and profound theologians have perished, I often very nearly experience what is related of a certain ancient and powerful king of the Persians, who, when he had gathered a numerous and proud army . . . is said to have wept because that infinite multitude of men was fated to succumb to death before a hundred years should pass. But [Xerxes] wept over the future death of men who were trained and ready to kill, whereas we more rightfully mourn that time past has utterly killed wise thoughts of illustrious souls, and divine researches that were wonderfully beneficial. Who does not bitterly contemplate the vast, immense number of Marcus Varro’s books, cut off by the injuries of time? That man about whom the emperor Augustus said that it was wonderful he had time to write, and that he wrote so much that no one else had time to read it . . . ?⁶⁹

In his adherence to the authority of Augustus, Barreiros was remaining faithful to the more than two-century-old tradition of humanist book hunters such as Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Poggio Bracciolini, among whom the loss of Varro’s corpus was mourned as a major calamity.⁷⁰

Clearly such musings encoded a large measure of nostalgic fantasy. The last half of the seventeenth century, which saw the flourishing of Athanasius Kircher, one of Eco’s favorite authors, was filled with such utopian bibliographies. Kircher was too much of an intellectual omnivore to devote entire works to the topic of loss, but works like his treatises on hieroglyphics and obelisks, and even his Arca Noe, enclosed in their mastodontic bulk catalogues of lost books that would have made Adso of Melk blink. The monograph on Noah’s Ark (1675) encompassed not only the complete history of antediluvian politics and science but also the literary history of the patriarchs.⁷¹ Writers almost as erudite as Kircher focused their attention even more narrowly on literary masterpieces before Moses. The doyen of these bibliographers was Joachim Johann Mader, already mentioned as compiler of the first textbook of library history. Mader reproduced the classic pages of ancient and medieval worthies such as Pliny the Elder and Isidore of Seville, as well as sober modern efforts like the Brief Outline of the History of Libraries (second edition, 1607) of the Flemish humanist Justus Lipsius.⁷² Mader’s other selections were far more fanciful but his preface topped them all. Titled “On Antediluvian Writings and Libraries,” Mader’s two dozen pages summarized the bibliographic daydreams of generations of European classical and biblical scholars. They inspired entire monographs about writings of unrepeatable wisdom from the beginning of time, such as Gottfried Vockerodt’s History of Antediluvian Literature and Literary Societies and Jacob Friderich Reimmann’s Essay Toward an Introduction to Antediluvian Literary History.⁷³

All this lore is not mere background to Eco’s writings, nor is it irrelevant to contemporary debates. Eco and other defenders of the paper codex agree with Plato’s Critias, Isidore, and their many followers that to preserve cultural memory, writing in physical codices is indispensable. As Eco phrases it, “modern media formats quickly become obsolete. Why run the risk of choosing an object that may become mute and indecipherable? It is proven that books are superior to every other object that our cultural industries have put on the market in recent years. So, wanting to choose something easily transportable and that has shown itself equal to the ravages of time, I choose the book.”⁷⁴

Moreover, this conviction echoes Polydore Vergil’s declaration that to preserve writing for the long term, nothing beats the traditional printed codex. Polydore famously proclaimed that, with Gutenberg’s “newly devised way of writing,” one man on one day could print “the same number of letters that many people could hardly write in a whole year,” and that “this invention has freed most authors, Greek as well as Latin, from any threat of destruction.” The humanist was moved to exclaim that the invention of libraries was “a great boon to mortals, to be sure”; but he was still thinking of libraries as collections of manuscripts. As such, libraries were “nothing in comparison with [Gutenberg’s] achievement.”⁷⁵ On the other side of the Gutenberg divide, modern defenders of the paper codex observe that even when “copies” of books are digitally multiplied, they leave cultural memory almost as vulnerable to oblivion as the scattered copies of medieval manuscripts, since “e-texts” and “e-books” depend on the vagaries of electrical grids and the ephemeral formats of electronic media.

Conversely, modern threnodies about “the end of the book” often encode a kind of alarmist bibliophilia, a fetishistic fixation on the paper codex. In 1994 Eco and the other authors of The Future of the Book were already opposing this trend. “The shelves today occupied . . . by meters and meters of encyclopedia volumes could be eliminated in the next age, and there will be no reason to lament their disappearance” given the possibilities of hypertext.⁷⁶ When linear reading, consuming a text from start to finish, is inappropriate, electronic searches function like a machete, a chainsaw, or a metal detector, ignoring masses of less relevant text to locate and crosscheck information central to a topic. The intervening years have produced many conversions to electronic formats, to the point that even owners of D’Alembert and Diderot’s Encyclopédie, the 1911 Britannica, or the 1912 Catholic Encyclopedia will at times find the electronic text invaluable, except when the electronic texts have been censored by idealistic editors to remove obsolete cultural prejudices or inconvenient scientific information.

Nonetheless, in light of Eco’s bibliophilia, it could seem strange that he professes nonchalance about the great numbers of books destroyed over the centuries and the masses of texts that were thereby irremediably lost. “I’d like to dig up and keep, selfishly, a copy of the Gutenberg Bible, the first book ever printed. I’d also love them to find the lost plays that Aristotle discusses in his Poetics. Other than that, I do not feel the absence of many lost books. . . . As we have said, they probably disappeared for a reason—maybe they weren’t worth saving from the fire or the inquisition.”⁷⁷

Rabelais implied as much in 1532 when the hero of Pantagruel visited the Library of Saint Victor in Paris, finding it full of volumes such as The Art of Farting Honorably in Company.⁷⁸ While Eco’s opinion may sound flippant, he amends it somewhat by remarking: “Culture is essentially a graveyard for books and other lost objects. . . . Culture is a process of tacitly abandoning certain relics of the past (thus filtering), while placing others in a kind of refrigerator, for the future. Archives and libraries are cold rooms, in which we store what has come before, so that the cultural space is not cluttered, without having to relinquish those memories entirely.”⁷⁹

If we could realize Richard de Bury’s dream of recovering the Library of Alexandria, Eco implies, we would probably find it a curse: “A culture unable to filter the heritage it receives from previous centuries brings to mind Borges’s Funes the Memorious,” a story whose title character is consumed by the inability to forget any detail, no matter how trivial. “That is the exact opposite of culture.”⁸⁰

While such comments can seem to place Eco’s personal attitudes outside the mainstream of medieval and early modern attitudes to writing, books, and libraries, his literary (including scholarly) production reveals how deeply premodern bibliophilia and wonder at the benefits of writing have influenced his imagination.

WALTER STEPHENS

THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY

MARCH 2013

NOTES

1. Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Club Dumas, trans. Sonia Soto (Orlando: Harcourt, 2006), 323.

2. See http://www.marelibri.com/MarelibriAndUmbertoEco.html, visited on March 2, 2012.

3. This is the text of a lecture given in 1990 and later published. “Un bibliomane si distingue da un bibliofilo perché, pur di avere un libro raro e intonso, e di conservarlo tale, rinuncia a leggerlo. Credo che non ci sia nessuna differenza tra un bibliomane e un bibliofobo, e cioè tra conservare libri senza leggerli, e distruggerli. I libri sono fatti per essere letti. E se si consumano un po’? Pazienza, porteranno le cicatrici di un’amorosa usura.” Umberto Eco, “Collazioni di un collezionista,” in Agli amatori di buoni libri: Raccolta di articoli e saggi di bibliofilia, issue 6 of Almanacco del bibliofilo (Milan: Edizioni Rovello, 1995), 46 (my translation).

4. For the hypotext, see Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 1–6.

5. Adele J. Haft, Jane G. White, and Robert J. White, The Key to “The Name of the Rose” (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999). Alison Ganze, ed., Postscript to the Middle Ages: Teaching Medieval Studies through The Name of the Rose (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2009).

6. Pérez-Reverte, The Club Dumas, 317, 320.

7. Ibid., 298.

8. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard Trask (New York: Harper & Row, 1963).

9. “Espressioni e testi disparati, eterogenei, di tempi diversi, di significati tra loro lontani, non collocati in situazioni reali, non definiti nelle loro differenze”; “l’assenza di ogni ‘storicizzazione’ svuota di qualsiasi rilievo tutta l’indagine, che si riduce ad una accidentale enumerazione di ‘esempi’ dell’uso traslato del termine libro.” Eugenio Garin, “La nuova scienza e il simbolo del ‘libro,’” in La cultura filosofica del Rinascimento italiano (Florence: Sansoni, 1979), 451 (my translation).

10. “[See] the tablet-box of cedar, / [release] its clasp of bronze! / [Lift] the lid of its secret, / [pick] up the tablet of lapis lazuli and read out / the travails of Gilgamesh, all that he went through,” The Epic of Gilgamesh: The Babylonian Epic Poem and Other Texts in Akkadian and Sumerian, trans. Andrew George (London: Penguin Books, 1999), 2.

11. “Eppure è innegabile che il simbolo del libro è, in certo modo, al centro di tutta una trama complessa di concezioni e di dispute: e raccoglie in sé, nei suoi vari sensi, il variare di una visione del mondo e del sapere.” Garin, “La nuova scienza e il simbolo del ‘libro,’” 452 (my translation).

12. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 303.

13. Umberto Eco, Postscript to The Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1994), 510.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid., 511.

16. “Permettetemi dunque di concludere queste mie considerazioni, iniziate sotto l’egida della bibliofobia, sotto l’egida di quella saggia e sana bibliofilia testimoniata nel 1345 da Richard de Bury nel suo Philobyblon [sic]: ‘I libri ci dilettano quando la prosperità ci sorride, ci consolano durante i fortunali della vita. . . . Abbiamo letto in Seneca che l’ozio senza le lettere è morte e sepolcro per i viventi, e pertanto solo il commercio con i libri e con le lettere è vita per l’uomo.’ Ecco, De Bury ci dice che cosa dei libri dopo averli collezionati e collazionati.” Eco, “Collazioni di un collezionista,” 46–47 (my translation). The implications of collazionare are not only philological but also culinary, this faintly suggesting bibliophagy as the ultimate bibliophilia. The translation of the citation from chapter 15 of Philobiblon within this passage comes from Richard de Bury, Philobiblon, trans. E. C. Thomas, ed. Michael Maclagan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1960), 137.

17. Antonio Altamura, “Premessa,” in Richard de Bury, Philobiblion, ed. A. Altamura (Naples: Fiorentino, 1954), 8–9. In Familiares 3.1 Petrarch speaks of meeting Richard in Avignon in 1333. Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo, 3 vols. (Albany/Baltimore: SUNY Press/Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975–1985), 1:116.

18. Joachim Johann Mader, De bibliothecis atque archivis virorum clarissimorum libelli et commentationes. Cum praefatione de scriptis et bibliothecis antediluvianis (Helmstadt: Henning Müller, 1666); 2nd ed., Johann Albert Schmidt (Helmstadt: Georg Hamm, 1702); De bibliothecis nova accessio collectioni maderianae adiuncta, ed. Johann Albert Schmidt (Helmstadt: Georg Hamm, 1703); De Bibliothecis accessio altera collectioni maderanae adiuncta, ed. Johann Albert Schmidt (Helmstadt: Georg Hamm, 1705).

19. De Bury, Philobiblon, trans. E. C. Thomas, 80–83.

20. Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carrière, This is Not the End of the Book, ed. Jean-Philippe de Tonnac, trans. Polly McLean (London: Harvill Secker, 2011), 152. See also ibid., 168: “But what do you do with the Bible once you get it home? Either you don’t mention it to anyone . . . Or else you start telling people, and all the thieves in the world spring into action. . . . So what is the point of having your very own Gutenberg Bible?”

21. The Biblical Book of Wisdom 7:12.

22. Richard de Bury, Philobiblon, 136–38. The allusion to Wisdom was well chosen since the whole of its seventh chapter exalts love of wisdom over the love of riches. “I valued her above sceptre and throne, and reckoned riches as nothing beside her” (The Biblical Book of Wisdom 7:8).

23. Eco and Carrière, This is Not the End of the Book, 131.

24. Ibid., 127.

25. Ibid., 173.

26. Ibid., 127–31. For Kircher, see Paula Findlen, ed., Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything (London and New York: Routledge, 2004).

27. Ibid., 131; Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality: Essays, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 20. The best synopsis of La Peyrère’s Prae-Adamitae is Don Cameron Allen, The Legend of Noah: Renaissance Rationalism in Art, Science, and Letters (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1963), 132–37.

28. Umberto Eco, Preface to Misreadings, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1993), 5.

29. Umberto Eco, “Il codice Temesvar,” in M. Scognamiglio, ed., Almanacco del Bibliofilo XV (Milan: Edizioni Rovello, 2005): 131–43. On Milo Temesvar, see Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), 3.

30. I found the link to this citation at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Da_Vinci_Code on July 27, 2012, and the citation at http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5856/the-art-of-fiction-no-197-pauleacute-baacutertoacuten on July 27, 2012.

31. Umberto Eco, Costruire il nemico e altri scritti occasionali (Milan: Bompiani, 2011), 9–36.

32. See Umberto Eco, “Fakes and Forgeries,” in The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 174–202; “La falsificazione nel medioevo,” in Dall’albero al labirinto: Studi storici sul segno e l’interpretazione (Milan: Bompiani, 2007), 203–26.

33. Burchard Gotthelf Struve, Dissertatio historico litteraria de doctis impostoribus (Jena: Müller, 1703) (often reprinted with Struve’s Introductio ad notitiam rei litterariae et usum bibliothecarum, between 1704 and 1754). Georges Minois, The Atheist’s Bible: The Most Dangerous Book that Never Existed, trans. Lys Ann Weiss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

34. Umberto Eco, personal communication on March 11, 2011. Walter Stephens, Giants in Those Days: Folklore, Ancient History, and Nationalism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 98–184. Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 76–103. Walter Stephens, “When Pope Noah Ruled the Etruscans: Annius of Viterbo and His Forged Antiquities,” MLN 119, no. 1, Supplement (2004): S201–S223; Stephens, “Complex Pseudonymity: Annius of Viterbo’s Multiple Persona Disorder,” MLN 126, no. 4 (2011): 689–708.

35. The only exception I have found thus far is Denise Schmandt-Besserat, How Writing Came About (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 1–4, who mentions Berossos of Chaldaea’s third-century BC myth of Oannes, Daniel Defoe’s 1726 Essay Upon Literature, and William Warburton’s 1738 Divine Legation of Moses. For Berossos, see the discussion below. Defoe’s Essay Upon Literature has recently been reprinted (Baltimore: Owlworks, 2007). Warburton’s Divine Legation is available on various sites of the Internet.

36. Andrew Robinson, Cracking the Egyptian Code: The Revolutionary Life of Jean-François Champollion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012): 115–66.

37. Eco and Carrière, This is Not the End of the Book, 22.

38. Familiar examples in Eco’s corpus are the library scenes in The Name of the Rose, the early modern writers (Rosicrucians, alchemists, and others) idolized by the vanity authors of Foucault’s Pendulum, and the texts surveyed in The Search for the Perfect Language. On the emotional history of writing, see Walter Stephens, “Ozymandias: Or Writing, Lost Libraries, and Wonder,” MLN 124, no. 5, Supplement (2009): S155–S168; Stephens, “Writing,” in Anthony Grafton, Glenn Most, and Salvatore Settis, eds., The Classical Tradition, A Guide (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 990–95.

39. Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach, and Oliver Berghof, trans. (with the collaboration of Muriel Hall), The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 39 (my emphasis).

40. Brian Copenhaver has edited and translated the first three books of Polydore Vergil, De inventoribus rerum as On Discovery, I Tatti Renaissance Texts, no. 6 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 77.

41. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une société de gens de lettres, s.v. “Bibliothèque” 2:228–40 (1751); s.v. “Écriture,” 5:358–60 (1755); s.v. “Lettres,” 9:430–33 (1765); s.v. “Livre,” 9:601–11 (1765).

42. Angelo Rocca, Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana a Sixto V Pont. Max. . . . (Rome: E Typographia Apostolica Vaticana, 1591), 78–174. Michele Mercati, De gli obelischi di Roma (Rome: Basa, 1589). Gianfranco Cantelli, ed., Gli obelischi di Roma (Bologna: Cantelli, 1981).

43. William Nicols, De literis inventis, libri sex (London: Henry Clement, 1711), 1 (my translation).

44. Thomas Astle, The Origin and Progress of Writing, as well Hieroglyphic as Elementary (London: Payne, 1784), 10.

45. Pliny, Natural History, Books 12–16, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press [Loeb Classical Library], 2000): 140–41 (NH 13.21.70). Hermann Hugo, De Prima scribendi origine et universa rei literariae antiquitate (Antwerp: Ex Officina Plantaniana, 1617), 21–22.

46. Hermannus Hugo, Societatis Jesu, De prima scribendi origine et universa rei literariae antiquitate, cui notas . . . adjecit, ed. C. H. Trotz (Utrecht: Hermann Besseling, 1738). Louis-Charles Desnos, Dissertation historique sur l’invention des lettres ou caractères d’écriture (Paris: Desnos, 1771).

47. Hugo, De prima scribendi (Antwerp: Plantin, 1617), 15–17.

48. William Massey, The Origin and Progress of Letters: An Essay in Two Parts. The first shewing when and by whom letters were invented. . . . The second consists of a compendious Account of the most celebrated English penmen. . . . (London: J. Johnson, 1763), 3.

49. Caroline Bynum, “Wonder,” American Historical Review 102, no. 1 (1997): 1–26, 4–6. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

50. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, “Oration on the Dignity of Man,” trans. Elizabeth Livermore Forbes, in Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall, eds., The Renaissance Philosophy of Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 223.

51. Pico della Mirandola, “Oration on the Dignity of Man,” 251.

52. Bynum, “Wonder,” 15. Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 7–11.

53. Hugo, De prima scribendi, 3–4. Astle, The Origin and Progress of Writing, i.

54. Gerald P. Verbrugge and John M. Wickersham, eds., Berossos and Manetho, Introduced and Translated: Native Traditions in Ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 44, 49–50. Grafton, Defenders of the Text, 76–78, 101–3. Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 2: 681–728. Hans Schreckenberg, Die Flavius-Josephus-Tradition in Antike und Mittelalter (Leiden: Brill, 1972). Cora E. Lutz, “Remigius’s Ideas on the Origin of the Seven Liberal Arts,” Medievalia et Humanistica 10 (1956): 32–49. Walter Stephens, “Livres de haulte gresse: Bibliographic Myth from Rabelais to Du Bartas,” MLN 120, Supplement (2005): S60–S83.

55. Poignant documents on the destruction of books are in James Raven, ed., Lost Libraries: The Destruction of Great Book Collections Since Antiquity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and Thomas Bartholin, On the Burning of His Library and On Medical Travel, trans. Charles D. O’Malley (Lawrence: University of Kansas Libraries, 1961), 1–42. Bartholin followed On the Burning, a letter to his sons (1670), with fuller meditations on loss in the treatise De libris legendis dissertationes (On the reading of books, or That books are to be read) in 1676, reprinted by Johann Gerhard Meuschen (The Hague: Nicolaus Wildt, 1711).

56. See Plato, Phaedrus, trans. A. Nehamas and P. Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995), 274c–276a.

57. See Plato, Timaeus, trans. Donald J. Zehl (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), 21a–24a.

58. Curtius, European, 304. Henri-Jean Martin, The History and Power of Writing, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) dwells on Phaedrus as “Plato’s mistrust of writing” (90–92) but never mentions the contrary view in Timaeus. The canonical treatment of Phaedrus on the subject of writing is Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 63–117.

59. Stephen Gersh, “Plato and Platonism,” in Grafton, Most, and Settis, eds., The Classical Tradition, 735.

60. Plato, Phaedrus, 275e.

61. Plato, Timaeus, 23a–b. For memoria literarum, see J. H. Waszink, ed., Timaeus a Calcidio translatus commentarioque instructus (London: Warburg Institute, 1962), 14–15.

62. See n. 54 and Nicholas A. Basbanes, A Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 4–5, who sees the myth as a parable about the value of remote “backup copies.”

63. De Bury, Philobiblon, trans. E. C. Thomas, 72–75 (translation slightly modified). “The older Athens” is the Greek city’s ancestor mentioned in the Timaeus.

64. Michael Neander (Neumann), Graecae linguae erotemata (Basel, 1565), 39–40 (my translation).

65. Ibid., 40.

66. Sisto da Siena, Bibliotheca sancta, ed. Pio-Tommaso Milante, 2 vols. (Naples: Muzio, 1742), 1:56.

67. Johann Albert Fabricius, Codex pseudepigraphus veteris testamenti, 2 vols. (Hamburg: Liebezeit, 1713–1723).

68. Johann Albert Fabricius, Bibliotheca graeca, sive notitia scriptorum veterum graecorum quorumcumque monumenta integra aut fragmenta edita exstant tum plerumque e mss. ac deperditis, 4th ed., ed. Gottlieb Christophorus Harless (Hamburg: Bohn, 1790–1812), 14 vols., vol. 1:1–316.

69. Gaspar Barreiros, Censura in quendam auctorem qui sub falsa inscriptione Berosi Chaldaei circunfertur (Rome, 1565), 1–2; Herodotus, Books V–VII, trans. A. D. Godley (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 7.44–46.

70. Remigio Sabbadini, Le scoperte dei codici latini e greci ne’ secoli XIV e XV, 2 vols., ed. Eugenio Garin (Florence: Sansoni, 1967). Two Renaissance Book Hunters: The Letters of Poggius Bracciolini to Nicolaus de Niccolis, trans. Phyllis Walter Goodhart Gordan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974). L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 122–63. Ronald G. Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni (Leiden: Brill, 2000). Ronald G. Witt, The Two Latin Cultures and the Foundation of Renaissance Humanism in Medieval Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

71. See Allen’s synopsis in The Legend of Noah, 182–93.

72. Justius Lipsius, De bibliothecis syntagma (Antwerp: Moretus, 1607); Lipsius, Brief Outline of the History of Libraries, trans. John Cotton Dana (Chicago: McClurg, 1907).

73. Gottfried Vockerodt, Historia societatum et rei litterariae mundi primi, in Exercitationes academicae, sive commentatio de eruditorum societatibus, et varia re litteraria (Gotha: Schal, 1704), 125–82. Jacob Friderich Reimmann, Versuch einer Einleitung in die Historiam litterariam antediluvianam (Halle: Renger, 1709). The latest writer I have found taking antediluvian libraries seriously is Ernest Cushing Richardson in The Beginnings of Libraries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1914), 25–51.

74. Eco and Carrière, This is Not the End of the Book, 3.

75. Vergil, On Discovery, 245.

76. Umberto Eco, Afterword, in the Future of the Book, ed. Geoffrey Nunberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 300.

77. Eco and Carrière, This is Not the End of the Book, 152.

78. See Umberto Eco, “Excess, from Rabelais Onwards,” in The Infinity of Lists, trans. Alastair McEwen (New York: Rizzoli International, 2009), 245–71.

79. Eco and Carrière, This is Not the End of the Book, 63.

80. Ibid.