John's notes on the cento

Eco writes about the cento in The Name of the Rose. All medieval texts were centos, since multiple books were bound together to save parchment: Boethius with Augustine, Isidore of Seville with Cicero, Bede with Pliny… Medieval thought then let this medial form influence thought itself, in the method of external authority, allusion and commentary. This shows that the postmodern notion of intertextuality (Kristeva and Bakhtin) has retrojective relevance. Other variants on the cento include the anthology, florilegium, chrestomathy and encyclopedia. Indeed, these forms are pointed to as evidence of decadence in medieval scholarship: scholars no longer read Augustine or Aristotle, just fragments in encyclopedic summaries. But here again postmodernism shows a different view: the hierarchial ordering of primary versus secondary source can be problematized, and sometimes re-orderings of primary works can be fruitful. Ours is an era in which the encyclopedic form is the only possible response to an informational eschaton. Negative collage and negative apokatastasis are the beginnings of new creative work.