Society & Culture
Most of us give little thought to the back of a book - it's just where you go to look things up. But a new book reveals that the index has a curious history which can be traced from thirteenth-century Europe to Silicon Valley in the twenty-first. Every time we perform a Google search, we are using ‘technology’ invented by a medieval polymath in Oxford and a group of Parisian monks who were looking for ways to navigate their books more efficiently.