Orality, Literacy, and Medieval Textualization Author(s): Walter J. Ong Source: New Literary History, Vol. 16, No.

1, Oral and Written Traditions in the Middle Ages (Autumn, 1984), pp. 1-12 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/468772 . Accessed: 22/02/2014 18:11
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Orality,Literacy,and Medieval Textualization

WalterJ. Ong
If we are senis no longer entirelyliterary. sitive now to intertextuality, to the dependency of texts for their existence and meaning on other texts,we are sensitive also to the historicalorigins of literatureout of oral verbalization. Skilled oral art formspreceded and in part predeterminedthe style of the writtenworks which constituteliteraturein the strictsense. was ultimately to transmuteoral performanceinto Although writing new of writing, even afterthe introduction nevertheless, quite genres, works oral mindsetsand waysof expression have persistedin literary from to the For centuries literaeverywhere, antiquity present day. turecarriesa veryheavyresidue of what I have styledprimary orality, the pristineoralityof cultures with no knowledge of writing.This residue notablydiminishesfromthe age of Romanticism on, although it never entirelydisappears. Therefore, literaryhistorymust show some awareness of orality-literacy interactions, past and present. In the European Middle Ages interactions between oralityand literacy reached perhaps an all-time high. The Middle Ages had no print,though they prepared the way for it. In medieval manuscript culture,books were subtlyassimilatedmore to oral utteranceand less to the world of physical objects than they are in a high-technology typprintculture.(This is perhaps one reason whydeconstructionists manunot pretypographic icallyanalyze textscomposed for printing, voceeven scripttexts.)Manuscriptswere commonlyread aloud or sotto when the reader was alone. Speed reading was of course impossible, so whynot vocalize? Vocalization helped the reader to absorb the full meaning (not simplysome "logocentric" meaning),to "eat" the words, as Jousse has explained in La Manducation de la parole. 1 In early print even typesetwords tended in significant ways to be managed not as visual units but as sound units.2 In preprintculture manuscriptbooks had no title pages, visually and often organized labels which were to be an inventionof print,3 were,and stillare, theydid not even have titles.Preprintmanuscripts their firstwords, which could catalogued normallyby their incipits, be typically a conversation-like address to the reader: "Here you have, dear reader, a book writtenby so-and-so about...." They end not witha curt label, "The End," but typically again talkingto someone:
ITERARY HISTORY

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NEW LITERARY HISTORY

"Here ends The Parliament of Fowls held on St. Valentine's Day, as recounted by GeoffreyChaucer. Thanks be to God." ("Explicit parliamentum auium in die sancti Valentini tentum, secundum Galfridum Chaucers. Deo gracias." This explicit to Chaucer's English in occurs Latin.) poem It is true that manuscriptcodices were bulky by comparison with later printed works-parchment was much thickerand stiffer than most paper was to be, and with a quill pen one could hardly copy textsin lettersthe size of pica typeor the much smalleragate lengthy in print.In theirrelativemassivenessmanuscript books common type were thus quite conspicuouslyobjects or "things."But two copies of the same work never matched physically as objects; scriptsand formats forthe same workdifferedwitheach copy; and even the parchment varied in texture and color from page to page. What gave a work its identity consistedverylittlein what it looked like. The work itintosound was whatitsaid when someone was reading it,converting in the imaginationor, more likely,aloud. If a person could not read, he or she could never tell if two manuscriptbooks were the same work or not. Of course, two printed texts today also constitutethe same work not because of what they look like but because of what theysay-or, more accurately,what theybring a reader to say, for a text does not say anythingof itself.Yet commonlyenough one can tell,without reading them,thatthousandsof individualprintedbooks do say the same thing,are the same work,because of what theylook like physically:in a given edition each copy is an exact replica of everyother. Such experience of physicallymatching printed books, together with our late typographichabit of silent reading, has subtlyaltered our sense of the textby dissociatingit notably, thoughneverof course fromthe oral world, making the book less like an utterance entirely, and more like other visibleand tangible "things."Printedbooks virtuallyalways have "tables" of "contents";theyare feltmore as containers,with titlesand title pages serving as labels do on boxes. In manuscriptculture, texts were somewhat more like proclamations. Chaucer concludes several of his poems withan "envoy,"sending off his text to address itselfto someone, like a speaker. He wrote The Parliament of Fowls,he explains, because after he had been reading about Scipio AfricanusMajor, the latterappeared to him in a dream to converse with him and take him on some travels. The way this conversationgrowsdirectly out of reading suggestshow dream-vision to books could be be to oral exchange. Authorfelt close manuscript in was a culture not marked by absences quite so ship manuscript much as it is in print. (Hence, again, deconstructionists are littleattractedto manuscriptworks.)

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ORALITY, LITERACY,

AND MEDIEVAL TEXTUALIZATION

The European Middle Ages were bound to oralityfurtherin that their literatureexhibited on all sides the heavy residue of primary oralitythat stillmarked literatecultures everywhere.This residue is evident in popular verbal art forms,with their regularlyheavy or "heroic" characters,typecast(as Noah's wifeof the mystery plays),in the formulary sententiae which support so much medieval thought,in the episodic narrativenot only of oral storytelling but also of texts in the love of fliting(exemplifiedpar excellence composed in writing, in the by the body-soul debates or by The Owl and theNightingale), addiction to amplificationgrown out of the oral need for copia, for continuousflow of discourse (for an oral performermust never hesitate-though he or she can indeed pause), and in much else. Besides carryinga heavy residue of primaryorality,medieval literaturewas also suffusedwithan academic orality.This was fostered, first,by the academic study of rhetoric inherited from antiquity, where,as the art of public speaking, rhetorichad been the centerof education. The supreme aim of Greek and Roman education was to the orator or public speaker, who was considered prepare the rhetor, the ideally educated man. Writingskillswere learned not for themselves but to make a better public speaker or rhetor. Although over the centuriesrhetorichad been surreptitiously accommodatingitself to writing as culturebecame more chirographic, deep in the medieval psyche the central, though most often unacknowledged, academic paradigm for discourse, including writtendiscourse, remained the relations oration rather than the text. At this point orality-literacy became a bitdizzying.Medieval universities provided a more textually had. Unlike antiquity, orientededucation than classical antiquity they built courses on textual commentary:followingstandard procedure, Thomas Aquinas's lecturesas bachelor of theology,forexample, had But for all their been a Commentary on theSentences ofPeterLombard. oral as universities textuality,medieval universities were radically or exerno written examinations today no longer are. There were to be intended All in milieu was cises. the textualization the recycled in one way or another back into the oral world in disputationsor other public oral performances. Academic orality-literacy mixes could affecteven the unletteredby a kind of cultural osmosis. Rhetoric as studied and practiced by literatescould intensify formsof verbalizationbeloved by oral tradition, such as, for example, the elaborate, arabesqued figuresof speech in balanced antithesesof the courtlylove literatureor the meticulously Ciceronian style.The calculating,analyticcultivationof such devices made possible by writtenrhetorictextbooksbrought such formsto perfections that would have eluded a purely oral performer, no matterhow skilled in other ways. Compare the precision-tooledpar-

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NEW LITERARY HISTORY

in Cicero's Verrine allelismsof the deadly attacksand counterattacks Orationsor the schematic antitheses in St. Anselm of Canterbury's with theirequivalents in recorded and transcribedtotally Proslogium oral Africanpraise poems, however cannilycraftedthese may be, or withOld English textsstillrooted in oral performanceof whichthey are virtuallytranscriptions. It is true that Cicero did not read his orationsbut wrotethe textafterthe orations had been given,thatis, aftertheyhad come into being (withcareful,but not verbatim, planning) in an existentialencounterof orator withreal audience. Cicero doubtlesstidied thingsup a bit in his written texts,forrevisionis one of the great opportunitiesthat writingoffers,as oral performance does not. But the tight,analytic organization of Cicero's oral-style is possible only to the mind conditionedby writing even when effects it is extemporizingorally. Similarly, Anselm's workwas composed in minibut the prayersand the apostrophes in it are essentially writing, orations. Writingcould, of course, affectthe styleeven of illiterates to a degree if theywere constantly exposed to the literateoralityof those whose sensibility and mental operations had been conditioned by writing. Medieval social institutionscalled for intricate interactionsand oftencompetitionbetween oral and literateworlds. Brian Stock's recent large-scale study has shown major effectsof orality-literacy interactionson philosophyand theology,on psychology(especiallyon analysis of sensory perception), on development of Christian docon hereticalmovements, and on secular trine,on reformmovements, and ecclesiasticalpolitics.4 Michael Clanchyhas shownhow legal practice in the BritishIsles mingled oralityand literacybut rested principally on an oral base into the fourteenthcentury,while Italy had much earlier incorporated writingmore thoroughly into its legal work by developing a notarial systemthat made writtendocumentationcompetitive for verifiability.5 Withoutsuch withoral testimony a system,writtendocumentation was quite commonlyproduced by what we today would consider professionally contrivedforgery. Oral witnessescould certainly not be forged,and theycould be rigorously cross-examinedto expose other falsifications. So one rated oral testexts. than timonyhigher Perhaps the most distinctivefeatures of medieval orality-literacy relations were those associated with the state of Latin vis-a-visthe vernaculars.Because of the stateof Latin, the European Middle Ages had a special relationshipto writing, and consequentlyto orality, differentfromthatof classical antiquity and of postmedievaltimes.The WesternEuropean Middle Ages were marked by what can be styled cultural diglossia: they used for some purposes a "high" language,

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ORALITY, LITERACY, AND MEDIEVAL TEXTUALIZATION

Learned Latin, and for other purposes "low" languages, the vernaculars. By comparison to Latin, the vernaculars were basically oral, although a very small number of vernacular dialects were working theirway into writing.By contrast,Learned Latin was not merelya written language, but a textualizedlanguage. language or a literary in the relationshipof lanTextualization marks a special intensity can This to develop in varyingstages. Of relationship guage writing. the countless languages which human beings have spoken over the at all or ever millennia,almost none have any connectionwithwriting will have-since most of them have disappeared unrecorded. It has tens of thousands of lanbeen calculated that of all the conjecturally human of since the life,onlysome 106 have beginning guages spoken ever had a literature,and that of the some 3000 or more languages spoken today,only some 78 as yet have a literature.6 The relationshipof language to writing begins when someone devises a way of puttingthe words of a language into a script.But the factthata writingsystemhas been devised for a particularlanguage does not necessarilymake any differenceat all to the language or its speakers. When a present-daylinguistlaboriouslyworksout a more or less adequate way to transcribea previouslyunwritten language, few if any of the speakers of the language normallylearn to writeit. The script figures in linguistic journals but not in the language speakers' lives. Often the speakers of the language are even incredulous about its writability, believingthat only certain languages, not written.Many languages, now as in the can their be own, including have never had enough speakers to make writingworthwhile. past, If only five hundred speakers know a language, what sort of effort could theyput into teachinghow to writeit,and what would theyuse for on any continuingbasis? writing Once a script has been devised for a language, various stages of or can develop.7 One stage may be styledsemiliteracy limitedliteracy craft literacy(Havelock), the literacyof a scribal culture; here the scriptcomes into use for some limited practical purposes, generally but enters directlyonly into the lives of economic or administrative, the special entrepreneurscalled scribes.One hires a scribe to writea to build a ship. document as one hires a shipwright as a whole If writing becomes more widespread, the culture itself, or in significantparts, can become fullyliterate. In such cultures writingprovides new resources for thought-unlimited verbatim permanency,"backward scanning" with the resultingopportunities for reflective revision,8detailed sequential analysis, and so forth. These resources alter the mental processes of the culture in significant ways.9A body of discursivetexts-not merelyof listsor of var-

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NEW LITERARY HISTORY

ious economic records,which are common in early scribalculturesbecomes an integral part of the resources of the culture. One can surfaceutteranceswith compose in writing, put togetheron a writing no independent oral existence.To be fullyat home in such a culture, now interplay one needs to be able to read. Orality and textuality vigorouslyin the language. Consciously or unconsciously,speakers model theiroral utteranceon formsof thoughtand expressionwhich have come into existence only because of the resources provided by while writtenexpression continuallyaccommodates itselfto writing, oral variations.A language at this stage is a literary language. But it is not totallydependent on texts. Oralitycan stilltake the measure of writing,rather than vice versa: thus Old English texts,because variouslyin Kenttheycontinue to undergo oral change, are written ish, West Saxon, Mercian, or Northumbrian,or in mixturesof these dialects,and in various formsdependent on the date-old, middle, late Mercian-because the scribes were controlledby developments of the in the spoken languages which took place quite independently written texts. Ancient Latin had qualified as a literarylanguage, certainly.The culture of ancient Rome was decisively literate: literacymade the Roman Empire possible.10But the Latin of the Middle Ages, which I have styledLearned Latin, had a commitment to writing thatwent far beyond that of the literarylanguage of ancient Rome: Learned Latin was a fullytextualized language, tied to the text as simplyliterarylanguages are not. The commerce between oralityand literacy in Learned Latin was not quite so freeas that just describedforpurely literary languages. Since Latin had ceased to be a vernaculararound A.D. 500-700, no one who spoke it had learned it as a first language, a mother tongue, orally acquired, tied to the firstgrowthof consciousness out of the early infant'sor child's unconscious: everyone who knew Latin had learned it through the use of writing. Writing in one way or another controlled all its oral use. In Learned Latin there was no longer any baby talk,for example, nor were therechildren's expressions: seven-year-olds learned to use it, as best they could, in fullyadult form. Learned Latin was not a "dead" language, if by dead we mean incapable of furthergrowth. It grew like a weed, developing thousands upon thousands of new termsover the centuries,and even a few new idioms, though for the most part it was totallyinert in its grammar.1lIt was not "dead" in the sense thatno one spoke it. Over the centuries,millionsof persons (virtually all males) spoke it,volubly and oftenpassionately,fromthe elementary schools throughthe uniin law courts,in ecclesiastical circles,in medical and scientific versities,

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ORALITY, LITERACY, AND MEDIEVAL TEXTUALIZATION

circles-if you did not know Latin, there was no way to know medno way to treatthese subicine or physicsor advanced mathematics, no in the vernacular texts,no vernacular words. vernaculars, jects Yet everything that was spoken in Learned Latin was necessarily measured against its writtentexts,for independentlyof these it had no existence. No one could speak it who could not writeit and who it. It was a chirographically had not learned to speak it throughwriting controlledlanguage, or, as we may put it, a textualizedlanguage. Its textualizationwould have far-reaching consequences for many cenLatin circles: for example, texwithin outside Learned and turies, tualized Latin set the objectivesof early modern lexicography.When vernaculars came into their own with the appearance of full-blown vernacular dictionaries in the eighteenth century,lexicographers commonlyambitionedraisingthe statusof one or anothervernacular typoby subjectingthe vernaculars to the chirographic(and latterly graphic) control which had marked the condition of Learned Latin. This textualized mindset is the distantbackground not only of prescriptionist linguistics,but also of attitudes toward language which and it suggestssome marksome formsof present-day deconstruction, reasons why deconstructiveanalysis specializes largelyin textsfrom the eighteenthcenturyto the present, that is, from the age of textualizingprojects.To the Latinist,and to the Latinist'sheirs,the text was the arbiter. Even today most scholars are still quite content to to the verbalizationof an oral performerin a refer unreflectively nonwritten language as the performer's"text." Oralityis thoughtof and by analogy with writing, although it was antecedent to writing, been written. have ever a fraction of languages although only tiny Even the few writtenmedieval vernaculars were felt somehow to be oral languages by contrastwith Latin. By far most writingin the Middle Ages was in Latin, and Latin had the preemptive claim to idiota,did not necesliteracy.Calling a person unlettered,illiteratus, but ratherthathe or not read or write that she could mean he sarily or she did not know Latin, the language which was always learned or idiotae were indocti or The illiterati throughreading and writing.12 which in a who communicated rustici, language countrybumpkins was "low" because not learned through writtengrammaticalrulesthat is, theycommunicated in vulgar Latin shaping itselfinto a vernacular or in some other, non-Romance vernacular. Chirographic rooting legitimized language, and since Latin and Greek were the only Western languages with writtengrammaticalrules, they were the only worthwhilelanguages. Greek was littleknown in the West and thus Latin was in effectthe paradigm of linguisticexcellence. nationalisticpatriots-the Pleiade in France, SidSixteenth-century

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NEW LITERARY HISTORY

ney's circle in England-would still be haunted by the implication that French and English and all vernaculars were "low." The first writtengrammars for vernaculars were just being worked out, and in The Apology for Poetry(writtenca. 1580-84, published posthuto mously,1595) Sidney would set up a ratherdesperate breastwork defend Englishagainstthe charge of lackingwritten rules: he protests that "grammar it might have, but it needs it not; being so easy of What we have called cultural diglossia can of course be found in various formselsewhere than in the WesternEuropean Middle Ages, in the past and in the present.In the past, somewhatsimilardiglossia was engendered in culturesdominated by Sanskrit, classicalChinese, classicalArabic,and Rabbinical Hebrew (not Greek,where the "high" form,the neo-Attickoine,maintained intimatecontact with the still "higher"ancient Atticon the one hand and the "low" demoticGreek dialectson the other-Greek never spawned otherlanguages as Latin classical spawned the Romance vernaculars). Like Latin, so Sanskrit, Chinese, classicalArabic,and RabbinicalHebrew were all chirographically controlled languages used almost exclusivelyby males. All by now are no longer ruling over cultures as "high" languages, having been either more or less demoticized or rendered in effectsocially nonfunctional(Sanskrit-used only in a few specializedjournals or in specialized education) or onlyrestrictedly functional (Latin). In the present, many other cases of cultural diglossia exist, perhaps none more spectacular than that in Papua New Guinea, witha population of some 3,300,000 people speaking over 700 mutuallyunintelligible languages.'4 The "high" language thus far is English, in which the writtenconstitutionhas been drawn up. Attemptsto translatethe English-language constitutioninto one or another of the local languages have thus far been unsuccessful:none of these languages has an adequate lexicon or linguisticcode, so that all one can do is to provide in the two largestlanguages, Tok Pisin and Motu, some sort of paraphrase of partsof the constitution and of the legal procedures it more or less governs. But none of these other instances of cultural diglossia seems to of the human race comparable to have had an effecton the entirety that of medieval cultural diglossia. This set the stage for the univerin Europe, then ultimately all over the world, for all unisities,first versitieseverywheretoday are largely indebted for their structures to medieval Western European antecedents. The "high" language, Learned Latin, provided the matrixfirst formedieval philosophyand science and then for incipient modern science. In accord with the Nacommon practice,Newton thoughtout and wrotehis Philosophiae
itself."13

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ORALITY, LITERACY, AND MEDIEVAL TEXTUALIZATION

in Latin and published it in Latin in 1687. turalis Mathematica Principia after several Latin editions was it finallytranslatedinto other Only in It would 1729. English appear likelythata textualized,chirographcontrolled ically language such as Learned Latin aided greatlyin esthe distance between observer and observed, between the tablishing knower and the known,that science, and especiallymodern science, required. No longer a mothertongue, Learned Latin leftall its users subfree of the rich, emotional, unconscious, but often confusingly of from where learned involvements a jective orally infancy, language knowerand known,subject and object, formeda kind of continuum that could be broken up only gradually and perhaps never completely.The cultural diglossia established by Latin has been studied in great and learned detail by Ernst Robert Curtius in EuropeanLitbut not in the perspectivessugerature and theLatin Middle Ages,15 which need more much development. gested here, to all of Latin-vernacular cultural diglossia does not relate directly the matterstreated in the studies here, but it formsone large and mixes that are backdrop for the diverse orality-literary significant and that help examined in the present issue of New Literary History Brian Stock,who in The Implimake medieval culture so fascinating. has described in painstakingdetail the "textualcomcations ofLiteracy mark the Middle Ages, here treats munities"which so distinctively itself the fascinating etymological associations of the term textus relevance have I have does (which special etymologically suggested not only to writtenmaterials but also to oral performance, often to stitchsong tothoughtof as "weaving" or "stitching"-rhapsoidein, Latin within the textualized on to show Stock gether orally).16 goes universe the deep cleavage between rhetorical and philosophical world views,a cleavage related in various ways to oralityand literacy contrasts. border to show Franz Bauml works directlyon the orality-literacy the existence of pseudo-oral styles,in which some texts claim authoritybecause of their oral roots, although other texts claim aubecause they are based not on oral utterance but on other thority texts. Aaron J. Gurevich explicates the constant interactionof oral traditionand literarytraditionin accounts of visions-some visions are validated because they are said to be set down froman oral account of the vision experience, others "because one can read about this in many other visions." Paul Zumthor shows how far fromtextualizationmedieval oral performancecould be: voice (not so much whatvoice says, but voice itself) and gesture convey the meaning of oral poetry,and the "functionof the linguisticformis to stylizethe spoken word withoutbreaking it." In this settingone finds positive

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grounds for what literatestend to see only negatively-for example, absence of "unity."An orally composed poem is less like a textthan it is like a dance. (Hence the distortion,noted earlier here, when of oral "texts.") today we persistin thinkingand writing wisdom is neithernaive nor how oral Jill Mann shows proverbial often high-minded.Proverbs urge calculation,caution, self-interest, of proverbsthemselves. and pessimismeven about the effectiveness of a Needless to say, textual collection proverbs that undertakes to to proverbialwisdom,which com"put it all together"is antithetical between realityand explanation. the discontinuity monlyadvertises make the point herself,nothingcould the author does not Although be more tellingthan thisessay to dispel the beliefthat"logocentrism" is connected with orality.The proverbs she discusses are as antilomightbe. gocentricas any deconstructionist Russian culture as a system, I. P. Smirnov medieval Studyingearly concludes that texts in this culture have a compensatoryfunction, in the lack of connectionbetween the sociophysicaland other, filling transcendentalworlds. Texts had nonaesthetic,practical purposes: religious,cognitive,socially regulatory,political. Smirnov makes no but in the lightof Gurcomparison between textsand oral tradition, one feels that in the categoriesSmirnovadverts evich's contribution, to, the oral traditionwould functionin much the same way. The always live question as to how much silentreading was practiced in earlier ages commands Manfred Gunter Scholz's attention. He studies presentationand reception directionsin manuscriptsof late medieval German strophicepic and concludes that oral reading may in some ways often have been even more committedto orality than the most convinced oralistsmighthave imagined. The direction und/oder lesenwould appear to refereven to the privatereader, singen who was assumed to want the option not merelyof reading but also of actuallysingingthe strophes aloud to himselfor herself. The derivationof textsfromtextsin a literatecultureis paralleled by the derivation of oral narrative from oral narrativein an oral culture. But Jesse Byock shows that the generationof oral narrative was not always so simple. Conflict resolution was a major ongoing in medieval Iceland, whichwas keptin some kindof turbulent activity order by a systemof continuous feuds. Feuds surfaced and resolved the tensionsthat the societylived under. Icelandic saga is explained by attention to unstructured, episodic conflict resolution through feuds ending in reconciliationand/orrevenge betterthan by looking for analogues and influences fromforeignnarrativesources. There were many foreign influences, of course, but, centrally,Icelandic sagas and the traditionsthey represent grow out of the Icelandic

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ORALITY, LITERACY, AND MEDIEVAL TEXTUALIZATION

11

social world. The feud context would appear to me to advertise an oral groundingof the sagas: oral narrativeis more directly connected withthe totality of the social world than fullyliterary narrativeneed be. Oral culture totalizes,and makes oralityitselfprettymuch continuous withsocial existence. Eric Havelock, to whose workall those interestedin orality-literacy contrastsowe so much, rounds out this issue by looking back to the borderlinecase of ancient Greek drama, composed in writing though rendered orally to a live audience. He shows that, despite its textuality,Greek drama was deeply oral in its acoustic echoes, which derive from the mnemonic requirementsof oral composition,and which include such things as prophecy and fulfillment, or riddling and solution of riddles, or choral anticipationand reflectionon action. An oral noetic economy shows in the stillgeneric characterization in the drama. It certainlydoes, but I would stillargue for some influence of writing: it seems that Oedipus is a somewhat more "round" character than Achilles, more interiorized,though far less so than Freud made him out to be by filtering Greek drama through a sensibility conditioned by novels. One of the major lessons of a symposiumsuch as thiswould seem to be thattextualanalysistoday needs everywhere to take intoaccount the multiform to whichare of texts orality, relationships relationships but also Most lancomplex, especially diachronically synchronically. after have never will written and never be. been all, guages, They all as and most so. Yet its remained for all began oral, vigorous orality, medieval culture pivoted around a strangelanguage, Learned Latin, which programmatically fosteredoralitybut at the same time was so textualized that it appeared never to have been a grammatically malleable, unwrittentongue. Seldom have orality and literacyappeared in such high contrast.
SAINT LOUIS UNIVERSITY

NOTES 1 Marcel Jousse, La Manducationde la parole (Paris, 1975). 2 WalterJ. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing oftheWord(London and New York, 1982), pp. 120-21. 3 S. H. Steinberg,Five Hundred Years of Printing, 3rd ed. (Harmondsworth, 1974), pp. 145-46. 4 Brian Stock, TheImplications Written ofLiteracy: Language and ModelsofInterpretation in theEleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton, 1983). 5 M. T. Clanchy, FromMemory to Written Record:England 1066-1307 (Cambridge, Mass., 1979).

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to theScienceof Folklore and Literature 6 Munro S. Edmonson, Lore: An Introduction (New York, 1971), pp. 323, 332. in Tradi7 Jack Goody and Ian Watt, "The Consequences of Literacy,"in Literature tionalSocieties, ed. Jack Goody (Cambridge, 1968); Jack Goody, The Domestication ofthe Savage Mind (Cambridge, 1977). 8 Goody and Watt,"Consequences," pp. 49-50. 9 Ong, Orality and Literacy, pp. 78-116. 10 William M. Ivins,Jr.,Printsand Visual Communication (Cambridge, Mass., 1953). 11 Stock, The Implications ofLiteracy, p. 21. 12 Stock, pp. 27, 68, 166, 235. 13 Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology ed. GeoffreyShepherd (London, 1965), for Poetry, p. 140. 14 Paul W. Brennan, "Issues of Language and Law in Papua New Guinea," Language 9, No. 2 (1983), 1-7. PlanningNewsletter, and theLatin MiddleAges,tr. Willard R. 15 Ernst Robert Curtius,EuropeanLiterature Trask, Bollingen Series, 36 (1948; rpt. New York, 1953). 16 Ong, Orality and Literacy, pp. 113-14.

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