the oral training involved in writing and reading constituted 
much more of a cultural unity for the book than Curtius 
suspects. Printing, Curtius sees, split apart the roles of 
producer and consumer. But it also created the means and the 
motive for applied  knowledge. The means creates the want.

     It was this homiletic use of the book of nature, the mirror 
of St. Paul in which we now see in aenigmatate , that enthroned 
Pliny as a resource of grammatical exegesis from St. Augustine 
forward. Summing up, Curtius finds (p. 321) “that the concept 
of the world or nature as a “book” originated in pulpit 
eloquence, was then adopted by medieval mystico-philosophical 
speculation, and finally passed into common usage.”

     Curtius then turns (p. 322) to Renaissance writers like 
Montaigne, Descartes, Thomas Browne, who took over the book