{"id":3201,"date":"2026-09-05T10:38:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-05T10:38:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/?p=3201"},"modified":"2026-09-05T11:23:31","modified_gmt":"2026-09-05T11:23:31","slug":"medieval-app","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/?p=3201","title":{"rendered":"Medieval app"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have a new enthusiasm for volvelles<\/em> (and yet another suspicion that I would have made a happy medievalist).<\/p>\n

A volvelle is a paper thing made of moveable layers, or more exactly, several circular sheets of\u00a0 different sizes, mounted together so that the new alignments that appear with each turn bring different bits of information together.\u00a0 They expose one specific meaning, single it out and bring it forward out of all the hundreds or thousands of potential meanings that are contained in the object.\u00a0 And the object is part of a book: the base sheet, with the largest circle, is a page bound in to the spine along with the others.<\/p>\n

Volvelles accompanied the long, uneven transition from manuscript, or scribal culture to print culture. In fact they seem to chafe a bit against the limitations of a book proper, as in, a stack of loose paper sheets bound together, with text and images, exuding authority and order, notably from one page to the next, from front cover to back cover.<\/p>\n

But volvelles resist: they flourished around 1400, that is, just as populations were gradually\u00a0 making the complicated adjustments that would underpin print culture (the book is widely assumed to be the first industrial product). Perhaps the most striking resistance is their mathematical, rather than\u00a0 alphabetical context: if you’re reading along and you come to a volvelle (often on a separate page, but not necessarily), you must stop and reorient yourself. The volvelle doesn’t flow with text. Defining its own terms, parameters, weights, layers, it calculates and\u00a0 combines — a tiny, human-scaled computer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have a new enthusiasm for volvelles (and yet another suspicion that I would have made a happy medievalist). A volvelle is a paper thing made of moveable layers, or more exactly, several circular...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3204,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"bgseo_title":"Volvelle: a medieval app stuck in a book","bgseo_description":"Suppose volvelles were like tiny calculating machines, made from circles of paper and bound in to books? Most are old, but surely updatable!","bgseo_robots_index":"index","bgseo_robots_follow":"follow","_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[580,176,259,347,247],"tags":[608],"class_list":["post-3201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ai","category-creativity","category-language","category-print","category-writing","tag-volvelles"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3201"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3201\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3207,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3201\/revisions\/3207"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}