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In my view, the questions you're asking are excellent, and currently dramatically under-theorized (and under-thought) in this field. I think you may need to reach beyond the usual boundaries -- and if I read you right, you know that quite well!

So:

You might take a look at Jack Goody's two books on orality and literacy in developing societies; a little dated, but still interesting. I talk about some of these issues in my book on Agrippa, though there it's more a question of conceptualizing written text beyond the simplistic assumption that it's transcription. I would also recommend that you read through Derrida's "Plato's Pharmacy," the first long essay in Dissemination, very slowly and carefully; his discussion of Levi-Strauss on writing in the first big block of Of Grammatology is also excellent, and may prompt you to ask some peculiar and revealing questions.

Of potential relevance is some of the work on Italian Renaissance imprese and emblemata; I found Armando Maggi's Identita e imprese especially thought-provoking.

I am told that there is some good work on apotropaic usage of printed bibles among late-20th C. and contemporary American evangelicals -- waving "the Book" around, carrying it, gesturing at it, but not necessarily actually reading much of it -- but I wouldn't know where to look.

My feeling is that a central question here is the intersection of "writing" (or "text") with "magic" in categorical usage. If one assumes (as one should not) that "writing" is transcription and therefore is "properly" read as a matter of decoding-into-language, then it becomes very easy to find pejorative or trivializing descriptions of those who "use" texts without reading them (much) -- and "magic" will then crop up, rather like "superstition." The problem, as Derrida pointed out so strongly (though he was perhaps not the first), is that this assumption about writing is utterly false. To take non-Derrida examples, consider how copying the Lotus Sutra in medieval Japan was itself an important and meritorious act -- and it was often copied onto small slips of bamboo, rendering the text utterly unreadable; again, it is not necessary to be able to read or understand the characters to copy them, and this again has nothing whatever to do with the merit acquired or accrued. In a good deal of Islamic legal wrangling, the Qur'an only requires special handling when it is in Arabic (a mushaf), such that when one is in a state of ritual impurity (e.g., menstruating) one may not touch a mushaf -- but it is always acceptable and indeed meritorious to read aloud from a mushaf (you just have to get someone else to turn the pages, as it were). The point being that the medium of the writing -- be it the glyphs or the paper/bamboo/silk/vellum/etc. -- and the meaning of the writing linguistically, not to mention the meaning of the writing system and the meaning of the appearance of the writing, and so forth -- all these are distinct properties and may be theorized and valorized discretely. Usually they get blurred together to make an apparently cohesive system, but one can never predict in advance how this will work or what will get prioritized in a given instance.

Hope some of this helps!

Yours,
Chris Lehrich

On 3/5/2014 5:36 PM, Katherine Hindley wrote:
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Dear all,
I wonder if any of you might be able to help me?  I'm a PhD student currently in the process of writing a prospectus for my dissertation, which will deal with the ways in which text was used for protection and healing in medieval England.  I'm particularly interested in texts being used in ways that didn't require them to be read. 
And so my question: might any of you be able to recommend any books or articles which deal with the relationship between magic and literacy?  I'd love to find something discussing how forms of magic change (or don't change) as societies become more literate, but any relevant reading would be much appreciated.
Best wishes, and thank you in advance for your help,
Katherine




-- 
Christopher I. Lehrich
Boston University
Vice President, NAASR