printed form of any language at all, namely the drive for fixity 
of spelling and grammar.

     Febvre and Martin devote a chapter of their L’Apparition  
du livre  to “Printing and Languages,” pointing to “the essential 
role of print in the formation and fixation of languages. Until 
the beginning of the sixteenth century,” the forms of written 
discourse, Latin or vernacular, “had continued to evolve after 
the pattern of the spoken language.” (p. 477) Manuscript 
culture had no power to fix language or to transform a 
vernacular into a mass medium of national unification. 
Medievalists point to the impossibility of a Latin dictionary for 
the Middle Ages, simply because a medieval author felt free to 
define his terms progressively by the changing contexts of his 
thought. The idea of a word having a definite meaning fixed by 
some lexicon simply could not have occurred to him. In the