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Humanist Studies & the Digital Age, 4.1 (2015) 
ISSN: 2158-3846 (online) 
http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ 
DOI: 10.5399/uo/hsda.4.1.3351 
 

 

 

 
 

From Fragment to Hypertext: Adding Layers of Reading 

 

Ernesto Priani and Ana María Guzman Olmos 
 

In this paper we will suggest that a hypertextual representation of the text allows us to show 

different temporal layers of reading and add new ones. We use the notion “layers of 

reading” as a metaphor to explain how, historically, each reading of a text creates a new 

layer, an independent “stratum of meaning” that is superimposed to a previous reading. The 

metaphor comes from geology, of course, but it is also found in software. When we first 

thought about “layers”, we had in mind a Photoshop tool called layer that lets you draw 

over a figure you made before, without changing it. The way in which this tool works is by 

organizing your picture in levels, so you can see the entire figure, while you are working 

only in one part (or layer) of it, and it encapsulates the other parts. At the end, your picture 

is the conjunction of the layers you have opened and drawn, but in the middle of the 

drawing process you can choose to work with some layers instead of others, and, of course, 

open a new layer to draw in it. 

 

Any given text is a layer of reading. It has references to other works and it is an effort to 

organize and expose a meaning of those works. It’s evidence that someone has gathered 

and transformed his readings in a new text, in the way that bees collect pollen and turn it 

into honey as Erasmus describes reading (Cf. Vandendrope, 2009, 117). When we take the 

text and edit it as a hypertext, we can create layers from it in the same way the tool we just 

described does, making the connection between this text and its sources, and with 

subsequent readings of the text through history, and adding new notes and interpretations. 

Hypertext then makes the construction of a complex historical model of reading possible in 

a way that, resembling a rock, exposes temporal layers of reading.  

 

To show how this notion of layers of reading works with the hypertext, we will use the 

Bologna/Brown online edition of the 900 theses of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola1, 

because Pico’s text is an extraordinary model of a layer of reading, and the hypertextual 

edition shows how, from one layer, we can add new ones beneath and above Pico’s text.  
 

I.- Pico’s layer of reading 

 

Eucharius Silber published Pico’s 900 Theses in 1486 in Rome. This text is formed by 

small paragraphs written around other philosophers’ ideas that summarize Pico’s 

statements. If we have to compare this text with some kind of modern publication, we could 

say that Pico has made a Tumblr, using that microblogging platform to collect in small 

                                                        
1 We can have another example of layers of reading in the edition of Homer’s Odyssey by The 
Perseus Project, in which we find annotations and translations added to the text from 1886 to 1919.  

http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/
http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/pico/
http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/pico/
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0135


Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Priani & Guzman Olmos 
 

4.1 (2015)  109 
 

sentences his readings about other philosophers’ ideas. In any case, Pico describes his work 

in this way in the Prefacio: 

 

The following Nine Hundred Dialectical, Moral, Physical, Mathematical, 

Metaphysical, Theological, Magical, and Cabalistic opinions, including his own and 

those of the wise Chaldeans, Arabs, Hebrews, Greeks, Egyptians, and Latins, will 

be disputed publicly by Giovanni Pico of Mirandola, the Count of Concord. In 

reciting these opinions, he has not imitated the splendor of the Roman language, but 

the style of speaking of the most celebrated Parisian disputers, since this is used by 

almost all philosophers of our time. The doctrines to be debated are proposed 

separately by nation and their sect leaders, but in common in respect to the part of 

philosophy -as though in a medley, everything mixed together.   
 

The complexity of the text we have in front of us is this: on the one hand, the Theses are 

about a considerable diversity of topics from Dialectic to Cabalistic, and on the other hand, 

they are about a large group of authors from different philosophical traditions. This means 

that the 900 Theses are, first of all, an extraordinary collection of readings. 

 

But how could we know the way in which Pico made those readings? How could we know, 

in general, how people approached a text in a determined epoch? We think that texts are the 

materialization of readings. This means we could find in a text the vestiges of how, at a 

specific time, people read with particular goals, certain intentions and specific tools. 

Through its textual structure, literary style, and organization, the text makes the evidence of 

a specific reading form visible. In the case of philosophical works, like Pico’s 900 Theses, 

this appearance of the reading in the writing is also an evidence of the way he did 

philosophy: because it shows its methodology of reading. In sum, the presence of all these 

elements in a text is what we call a layer of reading.  

 

The 900 Theses represent the materialization of an enormous batch of Pico’s reading 

material. If we could discover the footprints in the text of how he had approached its 

readings, we would find the nature of the layer of Pico’s reading: its goal, intentions, tools, 

and, as a result, the way he did philosophy. 

 

We know Pico’s reading goal by his own declaration in the 900 Theses, but also through De 

hominis dignitate and a letter to Bienivieni of November 12 (Bori, 2000, 25), 1486: he 

reads for a public debate with theologians.  

 

In fact, most reverend fathers, I was not unaware that this disputation proposal of 

mine, would reveal itself as grateful and enjoyable to all you, who favor the good 

arts and have been willing to honor this discussion with your very authoritative 

presence, as it would be, on the contrary, troublesome and unpleasant to many 

others. (Pico, De hominis dignitate, Paragraph, 161,) 
 

The nature of his aim implies certain issues. Because it was he who proposed the debate, he 

was the one who defines the object, the style, and the organization of it through the 

structure of the 900 Theses. At the same time, in all these structural elements of the text he 

left traces of how he read: 

http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/pico/


Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Priani & Guzman Olmos 
 

4.1 (2015)  110 
 

a) In the specific textual structure. In the thesis or conclusion, that is a fragmented and 

concentrated evidence of reading, we can see that he reads to produce a statement 

that synthesizes ideas. Reading for Pico is an act of collecting, summarizing, and 

memorizing (Farmer, 1998, 50). 

b) In style of speaking. The so-called “Paris style,” a less sophisticated type of Latin 

used among theologians, shows us that Pico reads to translate complex ideas in a 

comprehensible form (Baussi, 1996, 167).  

c) In organization. Pico organizes the conclusions in two sets of paragraphs: one 

according to other philosophers’ works, organized by nation and their sect leaders, 

and another according to Pico’s own opinion. By doing so, Pico distinguished his 

own thought from that of others, in recognition of the authority of those he had read. 

The theses are gathered under the authority of someone that had not directly 

produced the sentence, but probably the idea.  

 

Pico’s reading practice is certainly different from ours, and also different from, for 

example, Hegel’s. We can understand this differences because their goals and intentions are 

not the same, but also because the tools utilized to read are different. It is important to 

emphasize this difference because thinking about a layer of reading makes sense only in 

relation to others layers. It is in the limit with other practices where the particularities of a 

layer are shown. 

 

In the nature of Pico’s specific enterprise, we can see some determinations of the material 

conditions of texts. As Farmer has pointed out, the 900 Theses were published at a time 

when manuscripts were being replaced by printed books, with the consequent impact in the 

way Pico read. Farmer writes:  

 

As we see in Pico, printing made more sources widely available than at any earlier 

stage of Western history, encouraging syncretically minded thinkers to incorporate 

increasingly broad bodies of traditions into their systems and rendering those 

systems progressively open to philological and scientific attack… (Farmer, 1998, 

134). 
 

If this is the result of having printed books, it is the partial legacy of the manuscript culture.  

 

The oratorical and disputational rituals of pre-modern times served crucial 

mnemonic functions for intellectuals who even in privileged cases like Pico’s rarely 

had access to the full range of sources they viewed as authoritative. How often the 

‘texts’ that Pico set out to reconcile were inventions of reconstructive memory -a 

situation obviously easing any syncretic task- is underscored by the fact that 

numerous citations in Pico’s theses can be shown to be loose paraphrases rather 

than exact quotations: Pico’s famous eidetic memory, like those commonly ascribed 

to pre-modern intellectuals elsewhere, can be shown on hard textual evidence to 

have been an illusion (Farmer, 1998, 134). 
 

At this point, we can see the nature of Pico’s layer of reading: the incredible amount of 

references to authors, texts and topics, thanks to the printed books; the fascinating decision 

to organize them in a way that is neither historical nor temporal, but thematic, in the 



Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Priani & Guzman Olmos 
 

4.1 (2015)  111 
 

manner of one grouping notes to prepare a discussion; the intention to extract this 

knowledge and put it in a brief paragraph, written in a style that the opposition could 

understand and memorize, a practice from the manuscript tradition; its attribution to an 

authority instead of an author, itself the result of the conjunction between two material 

conditions of the text, printed books and the manuscript era. In sum, Pico’s 900 theses have 

an extraordinary amount of information about how Pico read and, by extension, Pico’s 

philosophical method.  
 

II. On how we read a fragmented text 
 

For us, modern readers of Pico’s works, the particularities of the 900 theses imply a 

paradoxical challenge in this context: how do we read it? This is the most important 

question for those who study Pico’s philosophy. The text of the 900 theses, because of its 

structure and organization, is not discursive or argumentative, and it is hard to understand 

for the modern reader. We do not have, as well, the clue that perhaps could explain the text 

as a whole: the public dispute.  

 

But to read it, we have a determinate entity: the 900 Thesis is a printed book, and we read 

printed books as unified works, without regard of the nature of the text, and under the 

hypothesis that the unity of the text is result of the author’s intention. These are elements of 

our reading practice that at the end are also determinations for the methodology we use to 

do research. On this Christian Vandendrope (2009, 144) says:   

 

Once they are brought together in the material structure of a book, then, even texts 

initially conceived as fragments can no longer be read as disconnected pieces, since 

the nature of the collection in which they are included and their connection with the 

author automatically play a unifying role. Fragments in the world of the book and 

printed matter are thus always elements of a unified work, and they are read as such. 
 

Scholars who have studied Pico in our time read the 900 Theses as an unified text. A 

consequence of this is the extraordinary ambition to understand why Pico had put all the 

Theses together in the way he did. Hence they follow two strategies to reconstruct “Pico’s 

intentions”. First, they suggest that we could read the Theses looking for an internal relation 

between the Conclusiones. For example Biondi writes: “Comunque il montaggio delle tesi 

ubbidisce ad un disegno -una <<occulta concatenatio>>- che é possibile esplicitare, contro 

ogni tentazione di considerarle una congerie senza senso” (Biondi, 1995, XVI)   

 

Farmer has followed the same idea in his edition of the 900 theses:  

 

Numerological patterns pervade the nine hundred theses, suggesting that another 

structure is hidden there. Moreover, that structure was apparently tied to some 

mystical and eschatological plan underlying Pico's entire project. The outlines of 

that plan become clearer when we recall the reverse historical order (as Pico 

understood it) of the first part of his text: The theses of the Latin scholastics are 

followed by those of the Arab, Greek, Chaldean, Egyptians, and Hebrew "nations." 

The importance of this sequence is suggested in both the Oration and Apology, 

which tell us that "all wisdom emanated from the barbarians to the Greeks, from the 



Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Priani & Guzman Olmos 
 

4.1 (2015)  112 
 

Greeks to us," and further in the Apology, where we find that the Hebrew Cabala 

contained "the secret declarations of God" and "the true sense of the Law received 

from the mouth of God" by Moses; in the Heptaplus, we find that Pythagoras and 

apparently Plato too drew deeply on this secret Mosaic wisdom (Farmer, 1998, 32).   
 

The idea is that we can find a series of connections between conclusions, which organizes 

the 900 Theses in a more unified text. In this approach, each conclusion acquires sense in 

relation to other paragraphs, so they conform to an internal organization that reveals the 

author’s intentions.   

 

Secondly, scholars try to reconstruct Pico’s mind by looking for the sources of its text, in 

order to restore Pico’s reading and understanding of them. For instance, Farmer notices in 

the 45 conclusions according to Thomas that:  

 

The order of these theses suggests that the first half or so were drawn from 

Thomas’s Commentary on the Sentences, with the rest inspired by his De ente et 

essentia and various Aristotelian commentaries. Only the last two conclusions were 

apparently drawn from the Summa theologiae... He also includes theses to point out 

inconsistencies in Thomas’s thought. A copy of Petrus Bergomensis’s 

Concordantiae conclusionum in quibus Thomas de Aquino videtur sibi contradicere 

(1476) was apparently in Pico’s library and may have been used in compiling this 

section (Farmer, 1998, 218).  
 

For Farmer, Pico’s readings of Aquinas in the 900 Theses refer to four different books. The 

first one, the Commentary on the Sentences, is in turn referring to another book, the 

Sentences of Peter Lombard. The last one, by Petrus Bergomensis, is a reading and 

fragmented reference to Aquinas’s works. Under this reading, each conclusion is connected 

with others through the books they are extracted from, so we can complete Pico’s 900 

Theses finding the text referred to directly or indirectly by him, in order to make the text 

more readable, complete or unified, as a way to better understand how Pico thought. We 

can ask, with María Teresa Rodríguez (2012, 54), could this be the best model to 

understand Pico?  

 

El estatuto ontológico del fragmento supone que en sí mismo, en su 

fragmentariedad, hace referencia a un “todo” y por ello su caracterización más 

propia es la incompletud. La historiografía filosófica, como hemos visto a partir del 

caso de Brucker, se ha impuesto la tarea ingente de restablecer el pensamiento 

completo de los filósofos a partir de los fragmentos. ¿Es ello una estrategia 

adecuada? ¿Evidencia o proporciona siempre un conocimiento significativo sobre 

estos autores y el momento particular en el que escriben? 

 
 

What we think is that a hypertextual edition could be an alternate strategy to approach the 

900 Theses in terms of being aware of the difference between the specific way Pico read 

and wrote philosophy.   
 
 



Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Priani & Guzman Olmos 
 

4.1 (2015)  113 
 

III. The hypertextual edition  

 

The Bologna/Brown edition of the 900 theses (http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/pico/) is 

organized following the structure proposed by Pico. There is a menu on the left of the 

screen that shows this structure. From there you can go to the pages in which you see all the 

conclusions Pico has grouped under one title, for example, the 45 Conclusiones secundum 

Thomas or the 71 Conclusiones paradoxe. From here, but also from the menu, you can go 

to each single conclusion, which has its own page. We have, then, the conclusion as both a 

unit and an organizational structure. 

 

At the level of the conclusion, the edition enables readers to see notes written around each 

of the theses. These notes can be translations, text analyses, philological interpretations, 

connections between the theses, books or fragments of books that have been referred by 

Pico. The same unit allows readers to follow various researchers’ approaches to the text and 

to recover different perspectives around each conclusion. At the end, the hypertextual 

edition of the 900 theses lets us see the whole structure of Pico’s work, but also the 

completeness of the single conclusion as a text, and a different layer of reading.  

The central element here is this focus on the conclusion as the fundamental unit, an effect 

of hypertextuality. In a paper book we can't have each conclusion as an independent 

element of the book. All of them are part of a dominant organization that we take as a unit. 

As hypertextuality deconstructs this organization to its units, this order is seen only as an 

option.   

 

This consequence of hypertextuality, the apparition of single units as complete text (the 

theses in this case, but it could be paragraphs, pages, poems, verses) is a clue to how we 

build our digital reading. What we see is what we read: a fragment. “The main feature of 

hypertext is discontinuity -the jump- the sudden displacement of the user’s position in the 

text” says Aspen Aarseth (2003, 771). This discontinuity is also a fragmentation (From, 

Vanderdorpe (2009, 71):  

 

In a text on paper, the paragraphs or blocks of information are arranged in sequence, 

and the reader can access them essentially through contiguity, relying on a number 

of tabular elements. In a hypertext, the various blocks of information may be 

distinct and autonomous and may be located on a single ‘page’ or on separate 

‘pages’. 
 

In a hypertextual edition, the author doesn't play a unifying role, because the structure, the 

order of the theses in our case, is not an expression of Pico’s mind, but a choice of the 

reader:  

 

In a physical book, all the pages are present, but in the case of hypertext, they 

appear only at the request of the user. This creates a particular kind of reading 

situation, the main characteristic of which is that readers have to constantly make 

choices by clicking on one button or another to make various units of information 

appear. Each button, each hyperlink, is thus an invitation to move forward, a 

promise of content (Vanderdorpe, 2009, 133). 
 

http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/pico/
http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/pico/
http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/pico/allSubSection.php?myID=sub10102&expand=
http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/pico/allSubSection.php?myID=sub10102&expand=
http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/pico/allSubSection.php?myID=sec203&expand=
http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/pico/singleThesis.php?myID=p2030001&expand=sec203


Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Priani & Guzman Olmos 
 

4.1 (2015)  114 
 

That is the jump Aarseth refers to. And when this jump -the click to go to another fragment- 

is describing a text, we can ask: what is the text? 

 

Imagine a book in which some of the pages appear to be missing, or the print is 

unreadable every 16 pages, or some of the pages are repeated while an equal 

number omitted. Even if this copy is the only one we ever see, we automatically 

assume that it is not supposed to be this way and that a more correct version exists. 

[...] We do this out of lack of respect of the copy; it appears to misrepresent the 

‘real’ text, even if such a thing may never have existed. In short, we prefer the 

imagined integrity of a metaphysical object to the stable version that we observe 

(Aarseth, 2003, 764). 
 

With this exercise of imagination, Aarseth questions the idea of a metaphysical perfection 

of the text, one in which, for example, Pico would explain all of his decisions collecting the 

theses. Instead he invited us to respect the text as it is. Following this proposition, and 

focusing on the 900 theses hypertextual edition, what we see is what the text is: a 

conclusion, one single conclusion that is a complete and independent text.  

 

As we have already said, the hypertextual edition allows us, from this basic unit, to add 

annotations related to it. Each one of these annotations is a reading of the conclusion and it 

can correspond to our reading or to readings made by anybody in the present or in the past. 

In this way we are adding layers of readings, a stratum of meaning that becomes part of our 

present reading of the texts. Since we can add as many layers as we want, we can have, 

from one single conclusion, a complex methodological object reflecting the way that 

conclusion has been or could have been read. We can see the text, but we can see the 

history of how has been read as well.    

 

For example: In the hypertextual edition of the 900 Theses, we can take a look to theses 

II.11.34. We can read the complete text of the conclusion, as we can with any other 

conclusion, but we can also see its Spanish translation made in 2010. We can see, as well, 

the previous textual comment on how to read id est V, as a V or a U, made in 2002. In this 

same conclusion we could add a note by Farmer or Biondi about the reference to the 

Theology of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite in the text. And so on. By doing this, we 

won’t only have Pico’s text, but we will see something like a rock formed by strata of 

reading, in which Pico’s text is only one stratum. 

 

For us, this is a very interesting model of reading because we can see the history of a text 

through the ways in which it has been read. A digital edition could enable introducing 

different approaches to a text as a part of it in the same way Bernard Cerquiglini (1999, 75) 

thinks a digital edition could include the variants of a text. In this sense, we can see, 

referring to a single text, different ways to read it. For example: Pico refers to the ideas of 

an authority instead of an author. The contemporary reader prefers to refer the same ideas 

to an author and a book. With this simple difference we can see how reading has changed, 

and how important is to us to understand those changes. Pico thinks in terms of authorities; 

we, in terms of authors.  

 

http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/pico/singleThesis.php?myID=p2110034&expand=sec211


Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Priani & Guzman Olmos 
 

4.1 (2015)  115 
 

The digital representations of a text allows to visualize this difference hidden before in 

preceding editions and studies, because previous to the digital edition it was impossible to 

show, in paper editions, the process of formation of this “sedimented reading rocks.” Like 

the Photoshop tool, hypertext allows us to see some layers, encapsulate others and, at the 

same time, create new ones. In fact, it is by visualizing the layers that the opportunity to 

draw new readings arises. 

 

We think the digital edition and the digital reading could create a philosophical 

methodology, based on the awareness of the historical construction of each layer of 

reading. This is, according to us, an opportunity for philosophy to develop a model of 

digital work that takes advantage of the layers of reading to study the history of thought.  
 

 

Works Cited 

 

Aarseth, Espen J., “Nonlinearity and literary theory” on The new media reader edited by 

Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, MIT Press, London, 2003. 

 

Bausi, Francesco, Nec rhetor neque philosophus. Leo S. Olschki editore, 1996 

 

Biondi, Albano, “Introduzione”, Conclusiones nongentae: le novecento tesi dell'anno 1486, 

L.S. Olschki, Firenze, 1995.  

 

Bori, Pier Cesare. Pluralitá delle vie: alle origini del Discurso sulla dignidá umana di Pico. 

Feltrinelli Editore Milano, 2000. 

 

Cavallo G., Chartier, R., Eds. Historia de la lectura en el mundo occidental, Taurus, 

México D.F., 2011. 

 

Cerquiglini, Bernard. In Praise of the Variant: A Critical History of Philology, The John 

Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1999.  

 

Farmer, S.A., Syncretism in the West: Pico’s 900 Theses (1486) The evolution of 

traditional, religious and philosophical systems, MRTS, Arizona, 1998. 

 

University of Brown, Conclusiones CM, 2012, 

<http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/pico/index.php > 

 

University of Brown, Universitá di Bologna, Pico Project, 2012, <  

http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/pico/ > 

 

Rodríguez, María Teresa, El Comentario a una canción de amor de Pico della Mirandola y 

su crítica a la ontología ficiniana, Tesis doctoral, UNAM, México D.F. 

Vandendorpe, Christian, From Payprus to hypertext. Toward the Universal Digital Library. 

Translate from french by Phillis Aronoff and Howard Scott.  University of Illinois Press, 

2009. 

http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/pico/index.php
http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/pico/
http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/pico/
http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/pico/

