Brian Stock

The implications of literacy: written language and models of interpretation in the eleventh and twelfth centuries

This book explores the influence of literacy on eleventh and twelfth-century life and though on social organization, on the criticism of ritual and symbol, on the rise of empirical attitudes, on the relationship between language and reality, and on the broad interaction between ideas and society. Medieval and early modern literacy, Brian Stock argues, did not simply supersede oral discourse but created a new type of interdependence between the oral and the written. If, on the surface, medieval culture was largely oral, texts nonetheless emerged as a reference system both for everyday activities and for giving shape to larger vehicles of interpretation. Even when texts were not actually present, people often acted and behaved as if they were. The book uses methods derived from anthropology, from literary theory, and from historical research, and is divided into five chapters. The first treats the growth and shape of medieval literacy itself. Theo other four look afresh at some of the periods major issues--heresy, reform, the Eucharistic controversy, the thought of Anselm, Abelard, and St. Bernard, together with the interpretation of contemporary experience--in the light of literacys development. The study concludes that written language was the chief integrating instrument for diverse cultural achievements.

Medieval Literacy, Linguistic Theory, and Social Organization

Boethius, attempting to convey the sense of the Greek text to an increasingly Latin culture, oversimplified the original. Roughly equating linguistic and material communication, he likened the imposition of meaning onto words to the impressing of the emperors profile onto an imperial coin. A piece of money, he argued, is not only a metal object; it is also a medium of exchange which represents the value of another thing. Likewise, verbs and nouns are not only physical sounds but also linguistic conventions established for the purpose of signifying what is understood in the mind.1 Some six centuries after Boethiuss untimely death in 525/26, Peter Abelard was to write his own set of commentaries on Aristotle and, while adhering to many of Boethiuss fundamental tenets, to use the Peri ermeneias, together with Porphyry, Priscian, and others, as the basis for a theory of language and meaning which preoccupied medieval thinkers down to William of Occam. Abelard in fact proposed something similar to Saussures distinction between langue and parole2-that is, in Aristotelian terms, a distinction between the logic of meaning, by which individual linguistic usage is understood among speakers, and the individual capacity for speaking, along with its phonetic and acoustic properties. Abelards unique contribution to this theory was to have explored the both abstract and concrete character of signification and to have reshaped traditional thinking on universals to incorporate his ideas. In this, he anticipated not only Saussure but also the later Wittgenstein. In contemporary linguistic terms, Boethius may be called a formalist, while Abelards approach (which, it should be noted, changed over time) lies somewhere on the spectrum between formalism and functionalism.3

The Middle Ages as Subject and Object: Romantic Attitudes and Academic Medievalism

in contemporary tastes and values cannot help but be struck by two interrelated changes that have come about since World War II. On the one hand the scientific study of the Middle Ages has made steady progress. Archival, diplomatic, and palaeographical research, together with the computer, the aerial survey, the soil analysis, and archaeology, have provided tentative answers to a number of much-debated questions. At the same time a wider set of factors having nothing to do with the professional historian has altered his relation to the less-developed stages of the European past. The appearance of many new nations and the abundant literature on modernization they have generated, despite profound differences from Western evolution, have dramatically heightened the awareness of long-buried patterns of thought and action. Under the influence of the social sciences, history, like the medieval theologians conception of the deity, has often seemed like a sphera intelligibilis whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. Yet the results have on the whole been

Toward Interpretive Pluralism: Literary History and the History of Reading

As a discipline, literary history is about four centuries old. There is not much literary history in antiquity or the Middle Ages. Literary history begins to be written seriously in the early modern period. The writing of this kind of history coincides with the appearance of national identity, that is, the sense of identity associated with the nation-state. Literary history is one form of expression of na tional identity. Efforts have been made from time to time to introduce an international perspective into literary history, but most projects in the field are still conceived within a nationalist framework.

Minds, Bodies, Readers: I. Healing, Meditation, and the History of Reading

Rosenbach Lectures, University of Pennsylvania, 1999; reprinted as delivered, with small additions to the bibliography. The theme of the lectures is the historical relationship between mind-body healing and meditative reading in Western culture between Late Antiquity and the present. In the first lecture, the author traces the connection between healing, reading, and meditation in Western and non-Western cultures, arguing that the subject has been inadequately discussed in the history of medicine and religion. The second lecture, which is also historical in focus, compares the functions of meditation in healing and in reading, drawing attention to both continuities and discontinuities in comparative development. The third lecture focuses on the clinical use of meditation in medicine and the relations between reading, meditation, and the narrative of disease.

Ethics and the Humanities: Some Lessons of Historical Experience

This essay discusses the difficulty of teaching ethics through literature based on the models for such instruction provided by the Hellenistic and late ancient periods. Some reasons are given for the contemporary lack of confidence in the teaching of ethics by means of the humanities, in particular, for the abandonment of historical disciplines in ethical debates. The educational method used in teaching ethics in the Graeco-Roman world is briefly outlined, after which a comparison is made between the attitude toward reading and ethics in Seneca and Augustine. The essay ends with reflections on the differences between ancient and modern instruction in ethics through reading: these include the lack of a secular contemplative tradition in literary studies and the implicit assumption that the reader is not ethically responsible for what is read.

Reading, Ethics, and the Literary Imagination

This essay analyzes the problem of reading, ethics, and the literary imagination in two periods, late antiquity and the early Renaissance, through the statements respectively of Augustine of Hippo (d. 430) and Francesco Petrarca (d. 1374). After definitions of reading are taken into consideration, the essay argues that the connection between reading and ethical thinking arose out of the teaching of philosophy and theology in late antiquity. A period that was not notable for the originality of its philosophical achievement thereby gave rise to innovative thinking regarding the ethical use of the literary imagination. Augustine’s attitude toward meditative reading is then analyzed, chiefly in his early dialogues and the Confessions, and a comparison is attempted between the historical Augustine’s views and those put into the mouth of Augustinus, who represents this figure in Petrarca’s dialogue, the Secretum. Attention is then given Petrarca’s use of reading, imagery, and writing as meditative techniques. The essay concludes with some observations on the fate of the last of these techniques in the early modern period.

Experience, Praxis, Work, and Planning in Bernard of Clairvaux: Observations on the Sermones in Cantica

In his controversial classic, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber made the following statement on the significance of western monasticism for the rise of rationally organized, scientific culture: The significance in world history of the monastic plan of living (Lebensfuhrung) in the West, in contrast with eastern monasticism,… is based on its general type (allgemeinen Typus). Beginning in principle with the Rule of St. Benedict, continuing with the Cluniacs, again with the Cistercians and with decisive finality in the Jesuits, the [plan of living] had been emancipated from unsystematic withdrawal from the world and directionless self-torture. It had become a systematically improving method for a rational plan of living with the object of overcoming the status naturae, in order to free man from the power of irrational impulses and his dependency on the world and on nature, to subject him to the supremacy of a purposeful will, to place his actions under constant self-control through the consideration of their ethical consequences; and thus, objec-tively, to instruct the monk as a worker in the kingdom of God, and also subjectively through it to insure the salvation of his soul.1

Listening for the Text: On the Uses of the Past.

Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: Orality, Literacy, and the Sense of the Past Ch. 1. History, Literature, Textuality Ch. 2. Medieval Literacy, Linguistic Theory, and Social Organization Ch. 3. Romantic Attitudes and Academic Medievalism Ch. 4. Literary Discourse and the Social Historian Ch. 5. Language and Culture: Saussure, Ricoeur, and Foucault Ch. 6. Max Weber, Western Rationality, and the Middle Ages Ch. 7. Textual Communities: Judaism, Christianity, and the Definitional Problem Ch. 8. Tradition and Modernity: Models from the Past Notes Index