cathedral, refectory, or a burgher chamber, it lives in its 
     proportions, its materials, its form. This sense for the 
     dignity of space did not end with the Middle Ages. It 
     lasted until nineteenth-century industrialism blurred the 
     feelings. Yet no later age so emphatically renounced 
     bodily comfort. The ascetic ways of monasticism invisibly 
     shaped the period to its own image.

Medieval illumination, gloss, and sculpture alike were aspects of 
the art of memory, central to scribal culture.

*     In this lengthy consideration of the oral aspects of 
manuscript culture, whether in the ancient or medieval phase, 
we gain this advantage: we shall not be inclined to look here for 
literary qualities that were the later product of print culture.