Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T21:50:09.965Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Utterance unmoored: The changing interpretation of the act of writing in the European Middle Ages

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2008

Jeffrey Kittay
Jeffrey Kittay
Affiliation:
Department of French and Italian, New York University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Work in the ethnography of communication has barely begun to look at writing, despite the fact that the status of writing bas recently preoccupied much of literary theory. The search to locate how writing functions among a culture's communicative practices can involve identifying domains that are unique to it, for example, where some kinds of writing attain a standing such that they are not meant to be understood as the transcription of a testimony or other oral act. Such a possibility is part of our culture but not part of many others, and is, among other things, a significant cognitive development. This article takes a diachronic perspective, back to a moment in our own past when a certain class of writings began to demand a kind of understanding different from that demanded by writing in that culture up to that time. I look at the Middle Ages to examine, inter alia, the written document putting into question prevailing temporal indices; the move of the act of writing away from an identification with other constatable acts and toward a more oblique and less committed relation to those acts; biblical exegesis as elaborating a new stance of writing through its practice of written gloss; the teaching of writing skills and the professionalization of the writer; and the significance of a renewed use of the cursive hand. The changing status of writing both encouraged and is implicated in the appearance and legitimizing of a set of utterances (and the acts behind them) seen as beneficially unmoored rather than moored, in a space and time of their own. (Ethnography of communication, grammatology, medieval studies, writing)

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , June 1988 , pp. 209 - 230
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Basso, K. H. (1974). The ethnography of writing. In Bauman, R. & Sherzer, J. (eds.), Explorations in the ethnography of speaking. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 425–32.Google Scholar
Castoriades, C. (1984). Technique. In Crossroads in the labyrinth. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press. (Original: Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1978).Google Scholar
Clanchy, M. T. (1979). From memory to written record: England 1066–1307. London: Arnold.Google Scholar
Diringer, D. (1962). Writing. New York: Praeger.Google Scholar
Gandz, S. (1939). The dawn of literature. Osirus 32: 263–522.Google Scholar
Giry, A. ([1893]1925). Manuel de diplomatique. New York: Burt Franklin.Google Scholar
Godzich, W., & Kittay, J. (1987). The emergence of prose. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ch. 2 & ff.Google Scholar
Hajnal, I. (1952). Universities and the development of writing in the XIIth–XIIIth centuries. Scriptorium 6: 177–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hajnal, I. (1959). L'Enseignement de l'écriture aux universités médiévales. 2nd ed.Budapest: Académie des Sciences de Hongrie.Google Scholar
Hymes, D. (1964). Toward ethnographies of communication. American Anthropologist 66(2): 1–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leclerq, J. (1962). The love of learning and the desire for God. New York: Fordham.Google Scholar
Levinson, S. C. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poole, R. L. (1926). Chronicles and annals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Reynolds, L. D., & Wilson, N. G. (1974). Scribes and scholars. 2nd ed.Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Richard, F. N. (1983). Dialogus de Scaccario, the course of the exchequer. Ed. & trans. by Johnson, C.. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Riché, P. (1962). Education et culture dans l'occident barbare. Paris: Seuil.Google Scholar
Roberts, C. H. (1970). Books in the Graeco-Roman world and in the New Testament. In The Cambridge history of the Bible, I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Rouse, R. H., & Rouse, M. A. (1982). Statim invenire: Schools, preachers and new attitudes to the page. In Benson, R. L. & Constable, G. (eds.), Renaissance and renewal in the twelfth century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Saenger, P. (1982). Silent reading: Its impact on late medieval script and society. Viator 13: 367–414.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smalley, B. (1964). The study of the Bible in the Middle Ages. Notre Dame.Google Scholar
Stock, B. (1983). The implications of literacy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wright, R. (1976). Speaking, reading, and writing Late Latin and Early Romance. Neophilologus 60: 178–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar