Wax Tablets of the Mind

by Jocelyn Penny Small

In this volume, the author argues that literacy is a complex combination of various skills, not just the ability to read and write: the technology of writing, the encoding and decoding of text symbols, the interpretation of meaning, the retrieval and display systems which organize how meaning is stored and memory. The book explores the relationship between literacy, orality and memory in classical antiquity, not only from the point of view of antiquity, but also from that of modern cognitive psychology. It examines the contemporary as well as the ancient debate about how the writing tools we possess interact and affect the product, why they should do so and how the tasks required of memory change and develop with literacy's increasing output and evoking technologies.

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction

396 pages, Paperback

First published April 9, 1997

Reviews

[Jack Holt]

This is an excellent but dense book. The central premise is important for understanding how the ability to communicate information and store it has changed.

But for me, it was almost a 'gimmick' book because her footnotes were so thorough and her proof relied on retranslating so many ancient Latin and Greek texts. I took it as a challenge!!

So I tracked down every assertion in the original works. I enjoyed tracking down all the quotes in Latin. Unfortunately, although I can still parse out the individual words, the grammar and syntax elude me now, so I foudn out can't read Greek anymore. That made it much more of a slog.

Even so, it was fun to read Cicero again -- and with a wholly different point of view.

[Lance]

A technical work, not very imaginatively written, but it provided me with lots of insight into how the ancients managed to write such long books. Two things that helped were that they were free about inserting new ideas later in the composition because it would be too difficult to go back and re-write all the intervening text.

The second thing is that they were free about paraphrasing others' works. The context might make it seem that quotes are verbatim, but they generally were not unless, for some reason, the author could find the exact text - not an easy thing to do lacking TOC and index. They claimed to have amazing memories for everything, but they probably didn't. Author gives some examples to prove this.