The Letter and the Cosmos: How the Alphabet Has Shaped the Western View of the World by Laurence de Looze (review)

This book's clear style and helpful illustrations make it engaging for specialists and non-specialists alike. Its main argument is "surprisingly simple: namely, that the alphabet has expressed how people in the West see the world and its cultures while at the same time the world, and even the cosmos, has been seen as a kind of alphabet." Laurence de Looze generously suggests that he aims simply to remind readers what they already know: "[T]his book is, in some ways, a making conscious of what people in the West implicitly know and partake of, though with only a partial awareness." This approach invites readers to augment his wide-ranging examples with their own. And once one contemplates this book's thesis, one sees examples of it everywhere.

The Letter and the Cosmos is divided into ten chapters. The first serves as an introduction to the book's contents as well its scope. It opens by juxtaposing an epigram on minding one's p's and q's from Henry James's Washington Square with an opening sentence on "the Book of Matthew in the Arnstein Bible in the British Library (ca. 1172)." Both of these texts use the alphabet as a system to communicate while ascribing particular meaning to certain letters, revealing a key point de Looze enunciates and addresses in subsequent chapters: "[T]he cultural meaning of letters is often greater than what they simply mean as letters."

This applies to the ways that the alphabet is represented as a system. For example, the cultural meaning of Helvetica as a font can be connected to Firmin Didot's desire for "letters to act as a window through which the content simply flows" in the typeface for his 1757 edition of Vergil. The aim for transparency stands in stark contrast to the ideological work that humanists expected their scripts and typefaces to accomplish in the fifteenth century and that accompanied the moral imperative to "form one's letters with grace" as individual penmanship rose to prominence in the eighteenth century. Rather than extending this discussion by citing the hierarchy of scripts or the typefaces of Nicholas Jenson and Aldus Manutius (which specialists can readily supply and non-specialists will not miss), de Looze offers special insight into the way individual letters carry cultural meaning. He explores the alpha and omega as an important example in the Christian tradition, then turns to less familiar examples. We still mind our p's and q's because French children were "taught to pause briefly in silence after 'P' and then pick up again with 'R' in order to avoid" saying the name of the letter "Q," which "was a homonym with the word 'cul' (ass)." Intriguingly, the letter "Y" has had a somewhat suspect reputation from 700 BC to the present. The letters "I" and "O" are associated with Heroditus' account of the origins of the alphabet, which is retold in Ovid's Metamorphosis and again in Geffrey Tory's account of proto letters in the Champ Fleury (1529). In the story, Io reveals she is a human trapped in a cow's body by pawing letters on the ground. This book explores the negative consequences of associating alphabetic letters with humanity as well as the positive. De Looze points out that seeing alphabetization "as a defining criterion for being civilized" justifies "what was done to pre-Columbian texts" and cultures, where "an alphabetic conquest accompanied the geographical conquest." While "the Meso-American civilization was unquestionably impressive" to Europeans, and was clearly a literate one, "it did not have letters – Christian letters – and was thus inferior and uncivilized by definition." Thus, The Letter and the Cosmos can prompt us to reflect on how Western views of the alphabet have shaped, and continue to shape, contemporary views of those who employ other systems for representing...