To the Editors:

In his review (“Tending the flame,” November 2010) of The Classical Tradition, edited by Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis, Brendan Boyle remarks that “it wasn’t until the early modern period that the motto of the pre-Google, Latin-speaking world of letters—statim invenire, ‘to find immediately’—could be said to have any meaning.” I hope that by “early modern” Prof. Boyle doesn’t mean the twelfth or thirteenth century, since he will find that the term appears in the title of an essay by Richard H. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse, “Statim invenire, Schools, Preachers, and New Attitudes to the Page,” in Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, edited by R. L. Benson, G. Constable, and C. D. Lanham (1982), on pages 201–28, where he will find the following: “This study will deal, then, with the evolution of scholarly apparatus in the second half of the twelfth century: the forms that such instruments took and the causes of their creation.” Among the “instruments” discussed by the Rouses are tables of contents, alphabetical organization of texts, and alphabetical indexes.

It should also be mentioned that books in codex form developed before the fourth century A.D. and are already mentioned by the Roman poet Martial in the first century, as is widely known, and certainly by the editors of the book under review, although evidently not by the reviewer.

Lucy Freeman Sandler
Helen Gould Sheppard Professor of Art History, emerita
New York University