Everyone's remarks are hitting exactly the kinds of things that
interest me.
Patrick suggested ruminatio, which is indeed what I am trying to get
at, inspired to a great degree by LeClerq's ruminations on lectio
divina. I think we need to see this way of thinking operating in a wide
array of contexts.
Clinton suggested illustrations as a parallel, which is in fact
where my studies began, with examining psalter illustrations as a form
of commentary and a source of meditation--so I turned to the interlinear
and marginal commentaries to look for connections and to see how they
work. That is when I began to see the similarities in the way that both
verbal commentary and visual would lead the reader to reflect on
words/ideas that invoke/evoke other images and texts.
Abigail mentioned the Ambrosian style of exegesis creating chains of
allusions that are often hard for us to follow--I think this is the key
to understanding the pre-scholastic mode of thinking about things. I
don't think this is inseparable from the common characterization of
early medieval thought as rooted in grammar (which LeClercq spends a
good deal of time on), but I think the imaginative power of association
is another aspect of this monastic mentality. The visual aspects
particularly intrigue me.
BTW I regularly ran into this abbreviation thing that Boyle
tormented you with--in "quis me lib. d. c. m. h." for example, you can
see how the mind would take a flying leap onto "who will free me...from
this body of death...." The same mental processes are at work, I
suspect, in the abbreviated commentaries (parva glosatura)--shrunken
versions of Cassiodorus or Augustine are crammed between lines and in
the margins of annotated Psalters like Eadwine. One wonders if the
often heavily edited versions of these patristic commentaries were meant
to invoke the whole passage in the full text and to what degree monks
would have known the full texts of these commentaries (either through
oral instruction or reading themselves).
This takes us back to Kate's original query about the amount of
patristic material referenced in the Northumbrian texts as an indication
of their reading experience. It would be fascinating to have the
results from what would be an extremely tedious task of getting the
frequency of quotations of this type.
By the way, when I was at a monastery last fall on sabbatical, they
were reading _Lewis and Clark_, which seems to me slightly more edifying
perhaps than Bill Gates, but both say some interesting things about
monks and reading compared to the early medieval experience, where the
reading matieral was a lot more cohesive and integrated (and
repetitive?). According to LeClercq (and David Knowles also), post
12th-century monastic reading broadened dramatically, stretching down to
today apparently.
Karen Jolly
P.S. I reset the address to medieval-religion because I was receiving
duplicate messages, I think because someone started a trend of replying
to individuals and ccing the list (or vice versa). Subsequent replies
"to sender and all recipients" were double-hitting?
--
Dr. Karen Jolly
Associate Professor, History
University of Hawai`i at Manoa
[log in to unmask]
http://www2.hawaii.edu/~kjolly
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