Brendan Boyle replies:

Professor Sandler objects to my use of the phrase statim invenire—“to find immediately.” I claimed that it wasn’t until the early modern period that the phrase had any real purchase. Before that time, finding something in a book—never mind immediately—was awfully hard. She finds this claim odd, since a well-known (to medievalists!) article uses this phrase to describe innovations in the twelfth-century book: tables of contents and what have you. This leads Professor Sandler to wonder whether my command of chronology is so poor that I think the early modern period means the “twelfth or thirteenth centuries.” She’ll be happy to know that it isn’t that poor, and that I only meant to suggest—the well-known article notwithstanding—that books are extremely hard to navigate until, yes, the early-modern period, as anyone who has attempted to read one would know. That her own...

 
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