Tuesday, July 25, 2023
The Old-Fashioned Way
Peter Brown, Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023), p. 165:
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In the long run, the only way into the European Middle Ages was an old-fashioned one: reading—tenacious Sitzfleisch, sedentary study, in one's rooms, in the Radclife Camera undergraduate library, in the Upper and Lower Reading Rooms of the Bodleian Library, and—when in Ireland—in the armchair in the sitting room or beside the Moloch in the kitchen during the long, quiet vacations.Robin Nisbet, quoted in Nicholas Horsfall, Virgil, Aeneid 7: A Commentary (Leiden: Brill, 2000), p. ix:
Learning is what you get by wearing out the seat of your trousers in the Bodleian.
