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Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age

Ann M. Blair

3.79 · Rating details · 135 ratings · 20 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 re ...more

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Hardcover, 416 pages

Published November 30th 2010 by Yale University Press (first published November 2nd 2010)

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Dec 31, 2015 Bryan Alexander rated it really liked it

Shelves: books-on-books, history, libraries

This is a delightful and very useful book, but only for certain groups of people. You have to either be a bibliophile, or a specialist in early modern history, or a historian of the book to read this with as much utility and pleasure as did I. I, for one, chuckled and annotated frequently, especially sitting next to my overstuffed bookshelves.

Too Much To Know is about certain ways people in the early modern period coped with information overload, which seems at first glance to be a strange asser ...more

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Sep 19, 2017 Ellana Thornton-Wheybrew rated it really liked it

Shelves: masters-degree, library-academic

A truly fascinating book, covering from the ancients to recent times.

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Feb 16, 2019 Stormie rated it liked it

The last 100ish pages or so of this book is the bibliography (an incredibly thorough one, might I add) and an index, so I am officially finished with the second book for my core class in grad school. Woo!

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Dec 14, 2011 Margaret Heller rated it really liked it

Shelves: library, technology, media-studies

The problems of an overabundance of information is a perennial complaint, but how scholars have dealt with this has evolved over time. Early modern scholars worked in a transitional period where one medium--the manuscript--was being superseded by a new medium--the printed book. This book focuses on the methods of information gathering and retrieval by scholars during the 14th-17th centuries.

There were several things I found particularly striking about this book. First, there was a great concern The problems of an overabundance of information is a perennial complaint, but how scholars have dealt with this has evolved over time. Early modern scholars worked in a transitional period where one medium--the manuscript--was being superseded by a new medium--the printed book. This book focuses on the methods of information gathering and retrieval by scholars during the 14th-17th centuries.

There were several things I found particularly striking about this book. First, there was a great concern that the best books be preserved, and the bad or heretical books suppressed. To this end, people were encouraged to read a few books slowly and consciously rather than many books quickly.

Note-taking was a major component of reading carefully (it still is), and organizing notes in the most efficacious way was a major undertaking and area of publishing. For instance, people were advised to keep extra notebooks to index their notes by subject. An note closet was the ideal piece of furniture envisioned to store notes, basically a library card catalog type of furniture where notes could be stored, indexed, and cross-indexed. The most careful scholars kept careful track of their notes and indexed them frequently. Others liked to make fun of themselves for lack of care and piling up notes without a scheme.

Composing on slips of paper was a common way to turn these notes into new works. Notes would be extracted and copied (or whole sections cut out of copies of books) and pasted onto another sheet. The whole would then be copied out again or given directly to the printer in that manner. There are some really interesting reproductions of such efforts. I am amazed that so many of them are extant.

Ultimately a lot of this work would turn into reference books of the "florilegium" type, which is to say books of quotations from the ancient sources. This was a way to come to grips with the abundance of information and also to select what is worth knowing. These books were edited and censored with different editions for Protestants and Catholics. It is hard to say exactly how much they were used, because people didn't and don't cite reference books, plus at a certain point it was embarrassing to admit you relied on a reference book rather than going to the original source. Enlightenment thinking made it better to think for yourself rather than rely on textual authority.

This is a fascinating and illuminating study of the work habits of these scholars, and extremely instructive for those working in our own transitional period. ...more

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Jun 01, 2016 Tim rated it really liked it

Shelves: memory

Information overload anxiety is not unique to the 21st century. Scholars in the library at Alexandria struggled to make material contained in some 500,000 scrolls useful and accessible. The methods they developed in antiquity to select, store, sort and summarize material continued largely unchanged into the early Middle Ages. From the 13th century onward, dictionaries, concordances, and florilegia (collections of sentences organized by alphabetized headings) evolved and expanded. By the 16th cen Information overload anxiety is not unique to the 21st century. Scholars in the library at Alexandria struggled to make material contained in some 500,000 scrolls useful and accessible. The methods they developed in antiquity to select, store, sort and summarize material continued largely unchanged into the early Middle Ages. From the 13th century onward, dictionaries, concordances, and florilegia (collections of sentences organized by alphabetized headings) evolved and expanded. By the 16th century, the size and availability of reference books mushroomed with the invention of the printing press and the newly invigorated humanist passion to collect information. Larger references demanded better retrieval methods. Alphabetical order, grouping and cross-referencing content by topic, page layout, and color all evolved to make reference books useful.

Since I have been on a quest for an effective system of keeping useful notes, my favorite section addresses the history of note-taking, The author contrasts the systems used by Francesco Sacchini and Jeremias Drexel who along with John Locke and Desiderius Erasmus were dedicated, if not obsessive note-takers. I am grateful that technology such as Evernote eliminates the need to write, copy, glue and sort slips of paper to implement such systems.

In her epilogue Blair considers the challenge we face today, concluding:

"Human attention is one of our most precious commodities and many forces compete for it with an ingenious range of software and hardware devices. Even while information storage has been delegated to other media, human memory still plays a crucial role in recalling what to attend to, and when and how. Similarly, judgment is as central as ever in selecting, assessing, and synthesizing information to create knowledge responsibly. The opportunities to settle for misleading or partial information, and to rely on snippets turned up by an Internet search without attending to their context, have never been more abundant."

I heartily recommend this book if you are interested in the history of reading, technology, scholarship, or the challenges of knowledge management.

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May 29, 2014 モーリー rated it liked it

Shelves: europe, bookhistory, infoscience, history

Yes, it really took me two years to finish this book. I hesitate to be critical because the author is one of my mentors. But while the topic of the book is interesting and the arguments strong, it gets so bogged down in one detail or case after another that it makes for very difficult reading. I have an issue (as a librarian) with an attitude among those administering special collections (which in this country pretty much means early modern European stuff) of being overly fixated on minor detail ...more

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Mar 04, 2019 Ed G rated it it was amazing

Really fascinating look at how knowledge was handled during the era of "information overload" that was the 16th and 17th C. Blair does a really nice job of communicating, it is a pleasure to read. ...more

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Nov 26, 2020 Naked Fish added it

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Nov 23, 2020 Mike rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: dnf

Nice idea; too academic in tone.

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Feb 03, 2016 Luis rated it really liked it

Shelves: history, technology, information-management

I don't think I'll look at the vast amount of knowledge available to us and the work that has gone into producing books and references the same way again. I now have a greater appreciation of the index and table of contents, the library book catalog in categorizing books to aid research as well as elements that go into making a printed work not only pleasingly legible but researchable too.

Ann M. Blair explores the evidence that information overload was not unique to our age of the Internet and ...more

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May 23, 2011 Sally rated it liked it

Shelves: history

Scholars in almost every age seem to feel overwhelmed with the amount of knowledge available to them, and seek ways to extract the most valuable material to have at hand. This is a history of Renaissance Latin reference works, concentrating on how far their makers drew on classical and medieval references for organization and means of composing, how they compare with 19th and 20th century references, and how the purposes behind them changed or remained stable. She gives very brief overviews of t ...more

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Oct 28, 2013 Mandy rated it liked it

While reading this book for class, I was surprised to find that I was quite interested in the management of information and the organization of reference books in medieval and early modern periods. I think some of my neurotic impulses are soothed by thinking through organizational systems, and on that level this was a satisfying read/skim. That said, it's occasionally dry (it's hard to get excited about a chapter titled "Note-taking"), and I'm not sure what I could do with this information, es ...more

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Mar 08, 2012 Alex rated it it was amazing

Information Management Practices: Sort, Store, Select, Summarize. Info glut was not a new problem characteristic to the internet "information age."

Interesting comparative work: islamic, byzantine, chinese.

While most of the material Blair looks at is early modern european (in an age which sees the rise of urban, quasi-secular print culture), there's some great background about medieval information practices too, particularly on the production and consumption of florilegia, where bible bits and o ...more

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Dec 31, 2014 Edward rated it liked it

An interesting and detailed look at the creation and use of the earliest reference works. Very interesting to see that many of the practices, issues, and concerns that we encounter today are not at all new. Take note that this book is far more academic than the title suggests: an important piece of scholarly work in our field. If your interests tend toward the modern, the Epilogue, while short, provides a good entry point to the text and should give you a good sense of whether you want to commit ...more

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May 13, 2013 Janice Liedl rated it really liked it

Shelves: academic, history

If you want to understand how people coped with the avalanche of information which printing and other early modern technologies piled onto their lives, this is the book for you. A useful corrective to the common belief that only the 21st century has ever really seen "information overload". This study ably blends cultural, technological, print and educational history into the examination of what we understand as information and how new avenues of providing it challenged the status quo. Probably a ...more

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Sep 14, 2012 Bill Sleeman added it · review of another edition

Shelves: libraries

This book gets a DNF from me – it is filled with detail and reads like the scholarly text that it is. I really enjoyed the way the author pulled together those 'bits of books' that we appreciate but seldom think about how they came to be. Sadly, I feel like I have too many other things going on right now to give this book the fair and full reading it deserves. Perhaps I will come back to it….perhaps not... ...more

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