Latin education dominated the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance; but the future of educational publishing was in producing entirely new textbooks for teaching students who would learn to read only their native, vernacular language. This chapter considers these new reading, writing, and arithmetic books, and then discusses How-To books that provided instruction in practical disciplines.
Regarding the chapter title, “How To” seems fine; “Stuff” may be too cute (and imprecise).
While these two areas, as Diana Robin says, are a bit jarring, I’m really glad you included them. Do the math books pledge allegiance to Plato in intro remarks?
I like “How To Do Stuff” — it seems to express just what you are getting at. I also like this picture of the sad monk (possibly trying to learn how to do stuff?).
Somehow I missed this string back in 2009 – 2010. I hope that, as readers went along beyond this admittedly rather artificial transition, they discovered the link with humanism, namely that all these popularizing books derived more or less directly from humanist textbooks (yes, even for elementary maths), and that the translation of such elitist knowledge into the public sphere through print was in fact a critical problem faced by humanist educators.
After reading this chapter I can say that I enjoyed using this e-book. It was simple to navigate, and it felt like anyone could use this book. I enjoyed the insertion of art, and real life versions of the texts being talked about. Being able to see and read from the actual texts, instead of reading stand alone quotations really kept me engaged throughout the chapter. I also quite enjoyed the link to the bibliography at the end of every page. Making that information more readily available made for a smooth read. The website itself looks dated and having the contents on the open side seems like a good idea, but it tends to drag pages on longer then they should creating a lot of empty space. Having a contents tab that could be opened at any time rather than having it always on the screen would certainly help alleviate some of the issues. Overall though I think the simple and smooth format that attempts to make as much information as possible immediately available to its reader is well done, and shows off what an e-book can be when it is not trying to stretch itself beyond its limits in attempting to improve upon the book.
Thanks for these notes, Mr. Newman. The software was off the shelf, so we didn’t have too much opportunity to customize it, but your notes on the format are useful as we look towards a re-thinking of the site next year. The long contents column seemed like a neat idea when we mounted the site (ten years ago, so it’s really ancient in software terms), but a contents tab is built into the new versions of this software, and will certainly be part of any new format.