Kate, I too am interested in this phenomenon of mnemonic prompts of
verses, but in the context of annotated psalters and commentaries (I
have also seen it in medical prescriptions that use incipits to indicate
which prayers or masses should be said).
The practice indicates a shared body of texts so well known among
the literate that a few words is enough to trigger the whole text. On
numerous occasions I sat in front of a marginal commentary on a Psalm
verse that had (in abbreviated Latin) the first two or three words of a
New Testament Scripture, and racked my brains to get the verse (or used
an online concordance or search mechanism). Obviously they knew their
Latin Bible in a way most of us cannot approximate (my head is stuffed
with many other things, not all of them salubrious).
What interests me is what this practice says about literacy, reading
habits, and the communities who participated in the production or use of
these texts. Perhaps readers of such texts saw words not in a linear
fashion, as a chain of logic, but as a series of prompts connecting
readers to invisible texts or to other parts of the text. Like a web
page.
There is a vast body of theoretical literature on reading and
literacy which I am still ploughing through, but would be interested in
knowing of any works specifically addressing this issue.
Karen Jolly
--
Dr. Karen Jolly
Associate Professor, History
University of Hawai`i at Manoa
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http://www2.hawaii.edu/~kjolly
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