With the emergence of literacy as part of human cultural evolution, new kinds of relations and activities formed that have created structures of participation in larger and more distant organizations, relying on accumulating knowledge and mediated through genre-shaped texts. It is for these activity contexts that individuals must produce texts, mobilizing the resources of language, and it is within these contexts that the texts will have their effect.

This second, companion volume to A Rhetoric of Literate Action supplies the theoretical understanding of what written language is and does which underlies that volume’s practical advice. But far from being a mere appendix, this survey of psycho-social theories of media and culture serves well as a compelling introduction to the theory of language in general and its place in society.

The crown prince asked:
“Where do you come from?
What are you looking for?”
The brahmin said:
“I come from Dunnivittha,
And I am begging for two children.”

A translation of the Worin Cheongang Jigok by Sejon the Great, the fourth monarch of the Joseon. The work celebrates the life of Shakyamuni Buddha and is noted for being one of the first works printed in vernacular Korean.

deathbed practices in nineteenth-century Siam were structured to flow seamlessly from chanting for the dying to chanting for the dead, a sequence reflected in the physical layout of the manuscripts themselves.

How did a packaging company get into the publishing business — into the containment and distribution of information? How were geographic imaginations changed in the process?

An exploration of the history of paper as a container for both goods and advertising.

An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the Transporting Images conference in 2023 and can watched on YouTube here.

These arguments and cultural practices point to complexities of concepts on authorship in Thai Buddhism and strongly invite an analysis and deconstruction of ideas of ‘authorship’ as a clear-cut category.

This study focuses on the life and death of Uchiyama Gudō (1874–1911), a disrobed Sōtō Zen priest, who had his priestly status posthumously restored to him on April 13, 1993, eighty-two years after his execution by the Japanese government

You will also need a writing implement and a blank sheet of paper, and you should find the darkest spot possible…

Take a few minutes to copy a text by candlelight 🕯️ and reflect on the experience 🪞.

A model lab report for this exercise can be read here.

Gazing at a massive dam as it holds forth against the huge forces of a river, can we doubt that we are witnessing a marvelous feat of engineering, a triumph of human ingenuity over nature? Yet what a receipt does is no less remarkable and no less powerful, even if it is less immediately apparent, for it is holding forth against the ravages of time.

A history of “the document” and writing in all its forms.

We may quibble over whether the Latin ‘indices’ or the Anglicized ‘indexes’ is the correct plural in English, but at least history has not plumped for the Greek: ‘sillyboi’.

…how the index responded to shifts in the reading ecosystem – the rise of the novel, of the coffee-house periodical, of the scientific journal – and how readers, and reading, changed at these points.

The first thing a student of magic learns is that there are books about magic and books of magic.

A reverse myth imagining the re-emergence of magic in 19th-century England.

Writing often is sloppy, even when it records very sacred texts

Menocchio was certain that at death man reverted to the elements of which he was composed. But an irresistible yearning drove him to picture some sort of survival after death.

A riveting reconstruction of the thought-world of a particular, early-modern, Italian peasant who had fashioned for himself an unpopular popular cosmology.

The victory of written over oral culture has been, principally, the victory of the abstract over the empirical.

As with language, culture offers to the individual a horizon of latent possibilities—a flexible and invisible cage in which he can exercise his own, conditional, liberty.

The letter sent to the royal court at Kandy on behalf of the king of Siam, and published [here], includes some information of considerable interest for the study of the history of Pali texts. For a shipment, which comprised no less than 97 books no longer extant on the island and therefore asked for in a second document accompanying this letter, is said to have been dispatched together with the letter.

… what was the religious environment that encouraged the spread of the new technology of printing in late seventh century China?

The captivating story of how Empress Wu’s struggle for legitimacy led to the printing of the first mass-produced Buddhist text.

… the evidence found in early printed liturgical booklets that promote Buddha-vandanā points to a different kind of modernization. This article reveals how Buddhist activists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made use of the capabilities presented in the colonial context, including print technology, to promote this devotional ritual practice as a principal marker of a newly constructed Buddhist identity.