whether crude or stupid, a man of strong visual bias in his 
entire culture, a bias derived from only one source, the phonetic 
alphabet. It is the concern of this book to discover how far the 
visual bias of this phonetic culture was pushed, first by the 
manuscript, and then by typography, or “this mechanical kind 
of writing,” as it was early called. Scholastic philosophy was 
deeply oral in its procedures and organization, but so, in 
different ways, was scriptural exegesis. And the centuries of 
study of the Bible in the Middle Ages that embraced both 
ancient grammatica  (or literature) also prepared the materials 
indispensable to scholastic dialectic techniques. Both 
grammatica  and dialectica  or scholastic philosophy were 
extremely oral in their orientation compared to the new visual 
orientation fostered by print.

     A favorite nineteenth century theme was that the