I have been lurking on the list for a months now, but have too harassed to
frame an introduction or reply to any notices on the list. My name is Kim
Rivers and I am an assistant professor at the University of
Wisconsin--Oshkosh. I did my graduate work at the Centre for Medieval
Studies in Toronto, and my thesis was on mendiant use of mnemonics in
preaching and religious life. I could not resist responding to Mark
Williams' comments about Illich's book.
>This thread reminds me of Ivan Illich's _In the Vineyard of the Text: A
>Commentary to Hugh's Didascalicon_. I thought it a fun and even
>provocative read when I first encountered it, yet I seem to be the only one
>here in west Michigan to have read it. (Surely this cannot be true with
>Kalamazoo just 40 miles down the road...) Would anyone care to comment on
>this work? Illich isn't a medievalist--more an old-time European
>intellectual, I guess. So it's not exactly specialist fare: is this a
>problem? Or does this fall under the category of book that we recommend
>(perhaps with hesitation) to non-specialists?
I had the same reaction to the book. I find provocative his idea that the
twelfth century may have been a watershed in approaches to the text, but I
am not sure that I agree with any of his reasons for thinking so. "In the
Vineyard" cannot quite serve as a book for specialists in that the
bibliograpgy is quite out of date. , For instance, though Carruthers' boook
is in the bibliography, it is not cited in the notes in the chapter about
memory.
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Kimberly Rivers Department of History
Assistant Professor University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh
(414) 424-2451 [log in to unmask]
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