Dear All
many thanks for the many and varied responses thus far. There is
a large area for debate here, larger than I am probably going to be able
to engage with! The Steve Justice stuff is obviously useful and
suggestive, and I thank commentators for their other inquisitorial
suggestions... In specific reply to Patrick Nugent's generous and
thoughtful posting, I'm not trying to reinstate an absolute literate/oral
divide, or Latin/vernacular either; I'm rather trying to find ways of
talking about how those terms and accompanying cultures (literate,
textual, oral, vernacular) make and remake themselve in a more fluid way.
(Incidentally, if anyone is interested, part of what set me thinking
along this line is a rather wonderful book by Isobel Hofmeyr, called _We
Spend Our Lives as a Tale that is Told; Oral Historical Narratives in a
South African Chiefdom_ (London: James Currey 1994). Although
non-medieval, I heartily recommend this anthropological work to one and all!)
What set me on this quest was a small moment in one of the Jacques
Fournier inquisitorial records, where a deponent called Pierre Sabatier
(he is mentioned a bit in Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou) is accused of
saying that all that was ever sung or said in church was lies. Pierre's
statement is interesting, because he is not a 'Cathar' (as far as one can
tell), nor is he against all elements of Christianity (he goes happily to
Mass, and does 'good works' etc). I'm dealing with this small element in
a paper originally delivered at Kalamazoo, that deals more generally with
the negotiations of literacy and orality within the inquisitorial
context; and a paper that was originally an orally delivered argument now
needs to gain some textual apparatus... ;-)
I hope the list will forgive me if I remain a little coy about all the
details of my arguments, at least until I've finished revising the article
and sent it off to press! (It's going to come out in
a general book on medieval literacy, edited under the auspices of the
Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York, UK, as part of the
CMS's thirtieth anniversary celebrations).
Anyway, thank you all once again, and please feel free to continue the
thread!
cheers
john arnold
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