Notes on The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind

by Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders, 1988

It's a book about how society was turned inside out by the spread of writing in the Middle Ages.

• While talking about the origins of written language in prehistoric societies -- "Writing is the only technique we know of for making the flow of speech coagulate and for carrying clots of language along intact for tens or even hundreds of years ... nuggets of frozen speech can be carried along in culture. (p5-6)
• "The new use of documents together with a new way of shaping the written page, turned writing, which in the Early and High Middle Ages had been extolled and honored as a mysterious embodiment of the Word of God, into a constituent-element in the mediation of mundane relations." (p32)
• "The swearing of an oath makes the word visible -- not on paper but in the living body of the person concerned," and guaranteed by the family, clan and society. (p34)
• And then everything changes and you swear on your Bible and not on your beard. 

• On time in text, from relative to absolute - Time used to be related to significant events that people would remember, a feast, a wedding, a visit from a sovereign. "By the end of the 14th century, the date on a charter could even be tied to the mechanical tower-clock ... Memory grew a new dimension. Memories could now be shelved behind each other, not according to their importance or affinity, but according to the date from which they issue." (p42)
• On Writing - You didn't write with pen in hand, you spoke to a scribe (Dictation). (p44-45)
• Last words on a death bed became the last will document.

• By the end of the 13th century, libraries became places of silence. (p51)
• On Latin and the difference between universal Latin and local dialects -- "Every monk learned the Latin pronunciation of his own monastery. If he walked from Subiaco to Fulda, his feet bore him no faster than his ear was able to adjust itself to new pronunciations." (p58)
• Latin as the first language to be written, not exclusively spoken (p59) i.e., a dead language; only a dead language that's not spoken can never change and therefore be referenced throughout history.
• Works are written in Latin, but the reader is supposed to read it aloud in their own vernacular tongue, even if that was French or German. (p61-62)

• reshape -> Latin fingere -> fiction (p84)
• "Only when memory is perceived as a text can thought become a material to be shaped..." The transformation of truth to fiction could only occur with the separation of the first-person subjective "self" experience and the consensual reality experience by writing. (p84)
• Lying didn't exist prior to writing (?).
• Regarding Authorship and ChatGPT - Scribes and clerics used to state that they are not the source, only its channel; likewise the dictator states they did not invent it (with their finger, fingere, fiction) (p86~)
• DeFoe's Plague Year 1772 was the first English novel, i.e., work of fiction (although Canterbury Tales was 1382)
• On Forgetting vs Memory in Literature (p93)
• ...and this is why all the early novels start out saying, "this is a story some other guy told me" like pirate stories and Treasure Island.

• in Plague Year, the "real story" is how the bulletins of deaths (called the Bill of Plague) spread like contagion, but also they lend veracity to the story because they provide certified documents...
• The Plague Bill itself is the protagonist (can't see a virus!)