Ramelli's wheel

Yesterday I tweeted about Agostino Ramelli’s reading wheel, and this appears to be a subject near to the heart of my editor, Adam Keiper. He sent me a link to a picture of the great historian Anthony Grafton with his own reading wheel — right there next to his laptop, interestingly enough — it’s like a tableau vivant of old and new technologies of knowledge — and then provided this passage from Henry Petroski’s The Book on the Book Shelf:

Among the mental constructions that Ramelli describes is a revolving desk resembling a water wheel which is like nothing known to have been seen in any contemporary Western study. Indeed, Joseph Needham, the scholar of Chinese science and technology, has argued that a revolving bookcase had its origin not in the West but in China, “perhaps a thousand years before Ramelli’s design was taken there.” According to Needham “the fact that Ramelli’s was a vertical type, and that all the Chinese ones, from Fu Hsi onwards, were horizontal, would simply have been characteristic of the two engineering traditions,” illustrating ‘perfectly the preference of Western engineers for vertical, and Chinese engieners for horizontal mountings.” Whether this be a valid generalization may be argued, as may Needham’s further speculation that “probably from the beginning,’ however, the rotation was a piece of religious symbolism as much as a convenience.” . . .

Whether such devices were appreciated most on grounds of aesthetics, symbolism, or scholarly convenience may have to remain a matter for speculation. There can be little doubt, however, that many a scholar who used such rotary devices in the course of copying, translating, and explicating found them a godsend. The Ramelli wheel may or may not have been so practical, however, for while the illustration of it shows a reader able to consult a series of books as we might click backward and forward from web page to web page on the Internet today, there does not appear to be any convenient working surface on or near the wheel for the scholar who may wish to make notes or write. If a further anachronism may be allowed, the device looks like a 7- or 8-foot tall model of a Ferris wheel, with open books riding on individual lectern cars, suited for passive or recreational reading but not active scholarship involving writing.

I don't know why Petroski thinks such a wheel is for recreational reading — I would think just the opposite. Nobody reads a dozen books at once for fun: the whole purpose of such a wheel would be to keep authoritative references ready to hand. The photo of Grafton shows how you can set one of these up near your desk and simply turn to it when you need it, rotate until you find the reference you need, then turn back to your writing with the information. Very efficient.

Pedantic Park

My review of Anthony Grafton's book on the Republic of Letters, Worlds Made of Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West, is up at the First Things website. Excerpt:

Grafton shows that in the republic’s early centuries the bracketing of religious differences tended to confuse those who did not understand, or did not follow, the community’s distinctive practices. When Isaac Casaubon failed to employ his vast knowledge of Scripture and the Church Fathers to refute Catholicism, many observers assumed that this meant he was sympathetic to the Catholic cause and ripe for conversion. They could not understand that he was simply trying to assess the historical evidence fairly, which in his case meant that he could not fully sympathize with a French Catholicism that was increasingly Ultramontane or with the hard-line Calvinists within whose orbit he was educated. His loyalties to the Republic of Letters would not allow him to place his learning at the service of partisanship.

This refusal tended to make life difficult for Casaubon, and eventually he left France for England. He did not find England’s communities all that they should have been, but while at Oxford he did become fascinated with the recently opened Bodleian Library and, Grafton explains, was especially pleased that the books in the library did not circulate. “The library is open for scholars seven or eight hours a day,” he wrote to a friend in France. “You would see many scholars there, eagerly enjoying the feasts spread before them. This gave me no little pleasure.”

Three hundred and fifty years later, a scholar sat in that same library — Duke Humfrey’s Library, as the oldest part of the Bodleian had come to be called — and over a period of several years read every volume from the sixteenth century that the library contained. Eventually he wrote a book about what he had read, a book supposedly about the nondramatic literature of that period but, in fact, a sweeping intellectual history of the whole century. He managed the extraordinary feat of admiring and celebrating — within the limits set by scholarly honesty — some of the great enemies of that period, notably Sir Thomas More and William Tyndale, who were, he argued, far closer to each other in theology and ethics than they had been able to discern.

The scholar’s name was C.S. Lewis, and Isaac Casaubon would have loved both his learning and his charity. Just after finishing that book, Lewis was named to a chair at Cambridge University, and in his inaugural address he referred to himself as one of the last examples of Old Western Man — a “dinosaur,” he said, and, we may add, remarkably like the other dinosaurs that roam Pedantic Park. I would say “May their tribe increase,” but that seems unlikely, as I think Anthony Grafton would agree. May it at least not die out.