A history of the index

Index: a history of the (Allen Lane) by Dennis Duncan

The history of the index, Dennis Duncan tells us, should not be of interest to bookish obsessives alone. Rather, it is one dotted with big personalities and scandals, as well as moral panics that hold contemporary relevance. The first indexes were made in the 13th century by the polymath Robert Grosseteste and Cardinal Hugh of Saint-Cher. In its infancy, the form sparked concerns that it might replace the role of books. The idea might sound ludicrous, but similar fears persist today: if people can find information immediately by “Googling” (Google is an index, as Duncan reminds us), what use have they for the written word?

We learn that the mere existence of the index relies on a number of features we now take for granted. One is the alphabet; another is the manufacturing of books in codex form, rather than scroll; yet another is page numbers. When Duncan tries to make use of a 14th-century index, he notices that it is basically useless. Why? Because scribes making copies of books back then paid little attention to pagination. This made indexes almost redundant; only the index in the book’s original version would be faithful. “Though indexes had been around for centuries,” says Duncan, “the printed page number would turbocharge their pervasiveness.”

A running theme of the book is the overlapping of the spoken and the written word: one formative development for the index in the 12th century was that, for “an increasingly rootless, urban population”, there came a greater emphasis on preaching to the wider population. New readers needed new and “instantaneous” ways into the scriptures.

Another earlier development was the birth of universities in France and England. As indexes are useful to today’s students, so they would come to be useful for the often religious students of almost a millennium ago. “Disputation, the citing of authorities, the reading-out of commentaries (a format with a now familiar name: the lecture): scholastic learning would favour external demonstration over inner revelation, intellectual agility over endless meditation.”

By the 18th century the index was, surprisingly, a subject divisive enough to invite disdain and incite literary bickering. Yet Duncan impresses on us the skill and sheer determination required to involve oneself in the world of indexing. Not only was it once painstakingly manual (like all work with books), but it required – and requires – the constant making of decisions about how material can be best categorised for the reader. “Its commitment is not to the author but to the reader, and to the arbitrary order of the alphabet,” Duncan writes of the index. In a modern age that prioritises the ready availability of information, this is particularly true. Since 2007, he notes, the hashtag has became one of many highly effective improvements in the way we arrange information we want immediate access to.

Often, Duncan indulges a likeable urge to treat this bookish history rather like a novel with protagonists: “What is their motivation?” he asks of Grosseteste and Saint-Cher. The book’s witty title also deserves special applause: Index, A History of the encapsulates both the subject and tone of Duncan’s animated and amusing work. In a similar vein, one interesting avenue the book travels down is the discussion of whether or not fiction too should contain indexes, making reference to John Updike’s quip that “most biographies are just novels with indexes”. Though the reader might dismiss the idea as fanciful, Duncan provides examples of novelists using indexes either sincerely or as a way of subverting the form for laughs. As ever, the book educates and entertains in the same breath.

As Duncan seeks to impress on the reader, the testament to the sophistication of the index is that we barely notice it, and instead take it for granted. This book ensures that, for a brief while at least, we do not.

This piece is from the New Humanist spring 2022 edition. Subscribe here.