ABSTRACT
The need to cope with large amounts of textual materials is not specific to modernity. According to editors of the Renaissance, law for example was already presented as an ocean of texts.1 Ten centuries before the advances of information science, canon law used highly sophisticated techniques of compilation, classification, and reproduction of texts. All these techniques were used as a support for a fundamental process: interpretation. Archival techniques allowed one to pick up texts which were relevant for the problem at hand. The rules of hermeneutics defined how to use relatively small parts of texts (a sentence, a word sometimes) as an impulse to thought, as a source of comments.
