Medieval Bookishness

Lewis argued "the overwhelmingly bookish or clerkly character of medieval culture." They loved their authorities, their manuscripts.

Every [medieval] writer, if he possibly can, bases himself on an earlier writer, following an auctour: preferably a Latin one. This is one of the things that differentiate the period almost equally from savagery [with its oral culture] and from our modern civilisation [where knowledge depends, in the last resort, on observation].... But the Middle Ages depend predominantly on books. Though literacy was of course far rarer then than now, reading was in one way a more important ingredient of the total culture. (Discarded Image, p5)

Since Lewis wrote that, books have no doubt seen a greater decline at the expence of TV and the interweb. Knowledge now depends on Google.

They [medievals] are bookish. They are indeed very credulous of books. They find it hard to believe that anything an old auctour has said is simply untrue. (p11)