Finding Devices Developed During This Time Are Perhaps the Most Significant in the History of the Book

"As the professions, law, theology, and medicine took form in the thirteenth century, each with their own curriculum and text books, each developed its particular vocabulary and special abbreviations for them. Of the many features that emerged, the various finding devices made necessary by the length and density of legal and theological works are perhaps the most significant in the history of the book. Some are things we now take for granted on the page: punctuation such as the question mark, paragraph marks, the alternation of the colors red and blue for majuscule letters to catch the eye, the systematic addition of running headlines with the author or title on the left and the book and chapter number on the right. Other devices are more ambitious: the creation of tables of contents and, by 1230, alphabetical subject index indexes enabling the reader to search through a work for every appearance of a word or topic. By 1300 virtually every major work of the Church Fathers was provided with an alphabetical subject index. In addition, free-standing alphabetical reference tools appear in the thirteenth century, most impressive among them being the alphabetically arranged concordance of the words in the Bible" (Rouse, "Authentic Witnesses: Manuscript Making and Models of Production," Rouse & Light, Manuscript Production. Primer 6, published by Les Enluminures [2014] 5).