Index, a History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age by Dennis Duncan (review)

More often than not, today's book indexes are afterthoughts. Typeset at the last second lest the pagination shift, squeezed into narrow columns, and tucked into the back of the book, the index is an unassuming, if obligatory, part of your average nonfiction text. Taken for granted as long as it does its job, the index tends to draw attention only where it fails, missing or mislabeled entries sending readers on a wild goose chase through the pages.

While the index is certainly a crucial piece of information technology, it is more than a mere tool; it is a site of comedy and controversy, of poetry and wit. Or so Dennis Duncan, a lecturer in English at University College London, argues in Index, a History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age. No stranger to the "books about books" genre, Duncan coedited the 2019 collection Book Parts, which broke down the modern book from its dust jacket to its end leaves. Duncan's own chapter on indexes served as fertile ground for this full-length study. Focusing on Western European manuscript and print traditions, Duncan unravels the evolution of the index, ultimately situating it as a literary form in its own right.

Our adventure begins with the Western index's first precondition: the acceptance of alphabetical order as a navigation system. Taking us to the Library of Alexandria, Duncan explores its library catalog as an early index, arranged alphabetically by author name. Reference tablets would have likely acted as shelf marks, indicating the contents of scroll cases and presaging the mapping function of later indexes: "Something here locates something there" (33). As long as the scroll reigned supreme, though, the index as we know it today would have been little help. Constituting what Duncan deems a "truly random-access technology," the index demands "a form of the book that can be opened with as much ease in the middle, or at the end, as at the beginning" (7).

By the late medieval period, the index's basic preconditions were finally met: by breaking the book into pages, the codex let readers access any section in seconds. As the establishment of universities and the rise of mendicant orders put increasing pressure on the book as a tool, two forms of the index emerged simultaneously to speed up biblical analysis. In thirteenth-century Oxford, Robert Grosseteste introduced a subject index with encyclopedic ambitions, tracking topics across the Bible and other relevant texts. Meanwhile in Paris, Hugh of Saint-Cher, along with the Dominican friars under his direction, performed their own literary labor, producing a comprehensive Bible concordance with every instance of a given word. For Duncan, Grosseteste's and Hugh's efforts configured the parameters that continue to shape indexing today—"word versus concept; concordance versus subject index; specific versus universal" (51).

Aided by the emergence of page numbers and the advent of print, the index spread far and wide. Largely genre agnostic, it was found as frequently in storybooks as in heady works of history and medicine. Typically situated at the front of the book, it offered an entry point or guide, enabling a newly efficient approach to reading while drawing the ire of critics, who warned that the new technology would encourage cursory engagement with texts.

Fears that the index would take priority ironically vested it with even more power. If readers did consult index first and text second, then the indexer was a powerful person indeed. Duncan proposes that by the early eighteenth century, "the rogue index—the index weaponized against its primary text—had become a fashion" (140). In England, political debates took the index as their stage. When Whig advocate John Oldmixon was hired to index Laurence Echard's Tory-friendly History of England, he seized the opportunity. Echard's text...