Quotes from Ross King

The meaning of a particular action of the hand was understood only in terms of the positioning of the entire body, the facial expression, and the direction of the glance.

While running simple errands I often became hopelessly confused in the maze of crowded, filthy streets that began twenty paces beyond the north gate of the bridge, and as I limped back to my shelves of books I would feel as if I were returning from exile.

The steadfast behavior that could turn the head or melt the heart of Fortune was embodied in the Roman concept of virtus (from the Latin vir, the "man of true manliness"), a cultural value encompassing toughness, bravery, and a never-say-die willingness to combat adversity.

The Prince to a slightly more upbeat view of human action. In order "not to rule out our free will," he arrives at a formula by which Fortune is "the arbiter of half the things we do, leaving the other half or so to be controlled by ourselves.

In 1471, as the first printed volumes appeared in Florence, the poet and scholar Angelo Poliziano—Lorenzo de' Medici's librarian and tutor to his children—complained: "Now the most stupid ideas can, in a moment, be transferred into a thousand volumes and spread abroad."16

Many experts considered its erection an impossible feat.

The differences between Plato and Aristotle had already been much debated. The argument stretched back to ancient Greece, where Aristotle had criticized and corrected Plato, the teacher with whom he began to study in 367 BC, when he was seventeen and Plato around sixty.

Florence's scribes, scholars, and booksellers were at the forefront of a revolution in knowledge.

The natural world we perceive through our senses is, for Plato, a defective and incomplete version of this more perfect and timeless realm in the same way that (in the famous metaphor from Book 7 of The Republic) the images seen by the prisoners shackled in their cave are the shadows of the real objects for which the prisoners, in their ignorance, mistake them.

These men were manuscript hunters, teachers, scribes, scholars, librarians, notaries, priests, and booksellers—bookworms who blew the dust off a thousand years of history and tried to imagine and to forge a different world: one of patriotic service, of friendship and loyalty, of refined pleasures, of wisdom and right conduct, of justice, heroism, and political freedom; a world in which a life in a better society could be lived in the fullest and most satisfying

Mathematics is not merely a tool for commercial transactions but rather a visible expression of the world's beauty and truth

In about 1305, Dante called him the "supreme philosopher" who "holds universal sway in teaching everywhere" and whose doctrines "may almost be called universal opinion.

His appraisal of the state of the world was a bleak one: "No one speaks truthfully anymore," he writes. "Everything is deceit, lies, cunning, theft, sodomy, wickedness, with no fear of God or concern for the world. O miserable Christians, worse than beasts, where are you headed?

autodidacts.

Italians were the largest producers, as indeed they had been for more than a century. The bibliographer Victor Scholderer once speculated that the printing press was invented and perfected in Germany because manuscripts were scarcer and less easily accessible in northern Europe than in Italy, prompting Gutenberg to contemplate a new and different means of producing books. 7

One of the first people to take an interest in Vespasiano, to draw him into this charmed circle of wise and valorous men, was a cardinal named Giuliano Cesarini. Vespasiano would have been about sixteen when the two of them met in Michele Guarducci's bookshop.

Historians now agree that, relatively speaking, the years 1000 to 1300 in Europe—the period traditionally called the "High Middle Ages"—were prosperous and productive.

dwellings are prostrate; walls are toppling; churches are falling; sacred things are perishing; laws are trodden underfoot; justice is abused; the unhappy people mourn and wail.

For hundreds of years, the transmission of knowledge had depended on carnivorous appetites and good animal husbandry. Large volumes with hundreds of pages required the skins of many animals. One goat was often needed for each page of parchment in a large liturgical book such as an antiphonary, while a Bible might take the skins of more than two hundred animals—an entire herd of goats or flock of sheep.

Soon after Plato's death, Aristotle attacked the theory in On Philosophy, later expanding his criticism in his Metaphysics. He denied that a form could exist without matter, and the realm of Forms possessed, he believed, no objective validity. Plato put forth nothing but words—what Aristotle disparaged as "empty phrases and poetical metaphors.

including the partial copy of Lucretius's On the Nature of Things—unseen by scholars for more than five hundred years—and eight previously unknown speeches of Cicero.

The Street of Booksellers, Via dei Librai, ran through the heart of Florence, midway between the town hall to the south and the cathedral to the north.

the Street of Booksellers was home to eight cartolai. They took their name from the fact that they sold paper (carta) of various sizes and qualities, which they procured from nearby papermills. They also stocked parchment

cartolai offered far more extensive services than just selling paper and parchment: they produced and sold manuscripts. Customers could buy secondhand volumes from them or hire them to have a manuscript copied by a scribe, bound in leather or board, and, if they wished, illuminated—decorated with illustrations or designs in paint and gold leaf.