Too Much to Know

Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age

by

Paperback, 416 pages

English language

Published Sept. 12, 2011 by Yale University Press.

ISBN:
978-0-300-16539-5
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(5 reviews)

The flood of information brought to us by advancing technology is often accompanied by a distressing sense of “information overload,” yet this experience is not unique to modern times. In fact, says Ann M. Blair in this intriguing book, the invention of the printing press and the ensuing abundance of books provoked sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European scholars to register complaints very similar to our own.

Blair examines methods of information management in ancient and medieval Europe as well as the Islamic world and China, then focuses particular attention on the organization, composition, and reception of Latin reference books in print in early modern Europe. She explores in detail the sophisticated and sometimes idiosyncratic techniques that scholars and readers developed in an era of new technology and exploding information.

2 editions

reviewed Too Much to Know by Ann Blair

A Fascinating Dive into Medieval Information Management

We've come to accept certain kinds of information organization as normal - whether that's the Dewey Decimal System, alphabetization, or Google. But for so long this simply wasn't done due to a variety of complex factors, and here Blair explores the different techniques of information management deployed throughout pre-Enlightenment Europe. There is a bit of time spent on Chinese and Islamic-world organizational methods, but that's not where Blair centers her attention. I would've liked more time spent on why particular methods were used (I found alphabetization by final letter in Islamic indices since it facilitating rhyming fascinating, as well as the fact that textual citations were eschewed in renaissance texts since it was viewed as treating the reader like an idiot for not knowing the source themselves). Highly recommend

reviewed Too much to know by Ann Blair

Most interesting view on the beginnings of scholarly annotation

Ann Blair: Too much to know (2010, Yale University Press) 3 Sterne

The emergence of reference books and their differentiation into various genres of encyclopedic literature is much more fascinating than I would have thought. Anne Blair takes a very close look at (surprisingly large) collections of scholarly excerpts and notes in print during the 16th and 17th centuries but she also puts them in the context of the developments before (classical antiquity and middle ages) and after this period. This comes with many anecdotes about scholarly lives and practices, e.g. about a cosmology containing a little construction kit for readers to build their own model of the planetary system or a carpentry-based early platform for collaborative research. The book does not belie its character as a piece of scholarly work with meticulous discussions of various aspects of the matter resulting in much repetition. But it remains most readable …

reviewed Too Much to Know by Ann Blair

This book's anything but commonplace

Attentive, context-laden, surprising, and well worth reading front to back. I didn't expect to empathize with 16th-century reference book authors!

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