art represents with a book-scroll. . . . The Old Testament itself 
contained a large stock of metaphors from the book.” (p. 130) 
It is naturally with the coming of paper in the twelfth century 
and the ensuing increase of books that there is also an 
efflorescence of book metaphors. Curtius dips here and there 
among the poets and theologians and begins his section on the 
Book of Nature (pp. 319­20):

     It is a favorite cliché of the popular view of history that 
     the Renaissance shook off the dust of yellowed 
     parchments and began instead to read in the book of 
     nature or the world. But this metaphor itself derives from 
     the Latin Middle Ages. We saw that Alan speaks of the 
     “book of experience.” . . . Omnis mundi creatura / Quasi 
     liber et pictura / Nobis est et speculum. In later authors, 
     especially the homilists, “scientia creaturarum” and “liber