Karen Jolly wrote:
"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."
I'm sure this is true, which is one reason why the big Latin
databases are such a valuable research aid; the author of _Ancrene
Wisse_, the C13 ME rule for anchoresses I'm editing, sometimes comes
up with 'portmanteau' Latin quotations, where two Scriptural texts
sharing the same keyword are merged, and at one point applies the
standard exegesis of one 'widows and orphans' Scriptural quotation to
another whose exegetical tradition is quite different (concordance
rather than hypertext thinking perhaps, but the same kind of
non-linear association).
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Bella Millett
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