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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the 11th and 12th Centuries

The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the 11th and 12th Centuries

Stock, Brian

Paperback

Medieval & Renaissance HistoryLiterary CriticismGeneral Reference

ISBN10: 0691102279
ISBN13: 9780691102276
Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr
Published: Jan 21 1987
Pages: 616
Weight: 1.90
Height: 1.49 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.25
Language: English

This book explores the influence of literacy on eleventh and twelfth-century life and though on social organization, on the criticism of ritual and symbol, on the rise of empirical attitudes, on the relationship between language and reality, and on the broad interaction between ideas and society.

Medieval and early modern literacy, Brian Stock argues, did not simply supersede oral discourse but created a new type of interdependence between the oral and the written. If, on the surface, medieval culture was largely oral, texts nonetheless emerged as a reference system both for everyday activities and for giving shape to larger vehicles of interpretation. Even when texts were not actually present, people often acted and behaved as if they were.

The book uses methods derived from anthropology, from literary theory, and from historical research, and is divided into five chapters. The first treats the growth and shape of medieval literacy itself. Theo other four look afresh at some of the period's major issues--heresy, reform, the Eucharistic controversy, the thought of Anselm, Abelard, and St. Bernard, together with the interpretation of contemporary experience--in the light of literacy's development. The study concludes that written language was the chief integrating instrument for diverse cultural achievements.

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