Ancient and medieval literary texts often call attention to their
existence as physical objects. Shane Butler helps us to understand why.
Arguing that writing has always been as much a material struggle as an
intellectual one, The Matter of the Page offers timely lessons for the
digital age about how creativity works and why literature moves us.
Butler begins with some considerations about the materiality of the
literary text, both as a process (the draft) and a product (the book),
and he traces the curious history of "the page" from scroll to
manuscript codex to printed book and beyond. He then offers a series of
unforgettable portraits of authors at work: Thucydides struggling to
describe his own diseased body; Vergil ready to burn an epic poem he
could not finish; Lucretius wrestling with words even as he fights the
madness that will drive him to suicide; Cicero mesmerized by the thought
of erasing his entire career; Seneca plumbing the depths of the soul in
the wax of his tablets; and Dhuoda, who sees the book she writes as a
door, a tunnel, a womb. Butler reveals how the work of writing
transformed each of these authors into his or her own first reader, and
he explains what this metamorphosis teaches us about how we too should
read.
All Greek and Latin quotations are translated into English and technical
matters are carefully explained for general readers, with scholarly
details in the notes.