7 Literacy R. M. Liuzza The ability to use spoken language is built into the structure of the human brain, and develops naturally and spontaneously in early childhood. The ability to use “written” language, on the other hand, must be acquired with considerable expense of time and effort. Efficient writing systems have been in use for only about 6,000 years, and for most of this time writing has been a highly specialized skill practiced by only a small percentage of the members of any culture. Within these cultures, writing has almost inevitably created hierarchies of power and prestige, dividing the world into the written and the unwritten, the recorded and the merely remembered, the authorized and unauthorized, learned and popular, high and low culture. Literacy is still often regarded in the popular imagination as the feature that distinguishes “civilized” from “primitive” cultures (Graff). The durability of written media, moreover, has meant that all evidence for those elements of past societies “without” writing is contained within the products of written culture, and must be read through the refracting lens of literacy – written culture defines, denigrates, deposes, then devours its opposition. Broad, vague, and laden with value, as a critical term “literacy” has long been subject to various types of intellectual inflation. Scholars of the 1960s and 1970s working in a number of different fields converged upon the idea – derived in part from the thinking of Marshal McLuhan – that writing is a “technology,” like the plow or the internal combustion engine, and is an agent of cultural change that remakes society and even “restructures consciousness” (Ong 78). Anthropologists Jack Goody and Ian Watt, the classical scholar Eric Havelock, and above all the historian Walter Ong argued that literacy was inseparable from – indeed, largely responsible for – the idea of the autonomous individual self that arose in ancient Athens and has underwritten Western thought for over two millennia. The spread A Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Studies, First Edition. Edited by Jacqueline Stodnick and Renée R. Trilling. ! 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 100 R. M. Liuzza of alphabetic writing tipped the historical balance in favor of social stratification, bureaucracy, and economic and political centralization, but also made possible logical thought and science, individual expression and participatory democracy. The “technological determinism” embedded within these great claims for the power of literacy has often been accompanied by a kind of romanticization of the oral culture that writing was said to have displaced – a world of face-to-face presence, dynamic and emotionally charged connections between people, and organically formed communities scaled to the “human life-world,” as opposed to the isolated anonymous reader and invisible author of modern texts (Street; Ong 42). This metaphysical nostalgia owes as much to the eighteenth century as to the twentieth (see Fielding), but the idea that literacy entails a kind of loss is as old as Plato’s Phaedrus; it begins at the very beginning of literate culture (see Havelock). The ideology of literacy seems to require that it define a preexisting state of “orality” that is both an inferior primitive state and a place of Edenic origin, powerful through its absence, visible only at the moment of its disappearance. The mythology of orality as a state of presence, immediacy, honesty, and community supports the complementary mythology of permanence, objectivity, and power that is attached to writing: in an often cited essay, Claude L!evi-Strauss suggested that “the primary function of writing, as a means of communication, is to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings” (292). Like all myths, these mythologies of orality and literacy no doubt express in dramatically heightened form something fundamentally real about the nature of speech and writing. Writing is, in essence, simply a means of communication, a way of recording spoken words or ideas. But writing makes possible new kinds of language, and as it spreads in a society – as the technology of writing becomes the cultural phenomenon of literacy – it creates new centers of power and authority. Without writing, all cultural transactions – celebration, commemoration, education, analysis, decision-making, the exercise of power – must take place aloud and communally in more or less the same social space, with memory and tradition forming the cultural horizon. Writing brings not only a dramatic broadening of that horizon – “the past” might now include ancient histories from distant cultures, and long-dead authors can be regarded as authorities alongside (or in preference to) living people – but a deepening of the structures of power and authority. Education can be restricted and prolonged; memorial traditions can be replaced by official histories, traditions subjected to critical analysis, agreements recorded, laws proclaimed, philosophies expounded, all at a distance of time and space from the communities they might most directly affect. Writing makes possible great efficiencies in the exercise of power and can be a powerful tool in the extraction of service or capital or the promotion of ideologies and systems of belief. It offers the advantages of durability, privacy, portability, and replicability; these advantages can be used to expand a group’s economic or political reach and to leverage the force of administration, education, law, and other agencies of social control. It is no mere accident of survival that most of Literacy 101 the earliest examples of writing are bureaucratic records, mercantile exchanges, and royal proclamations – writing organizes and orders things; the powers that control this ordering and organizing have, literally, the last word. And writing accomplishes these things at a level of abstraction unassailable by most forms of speech or acts of violence. A physical text is a kind of absent presence and present absence; the very things for which Socrates criticized and feared writing in Plato’s Phaedrus – its mute powerful stability, its imperviousness to question or dialogue – are the things that make it such an attractive and efficient means for imposing power upon others. But the mythologies of orality and literacy are only abstractions from a far murkier historical reality. While literacy as a concept depends upon a sharp distinction from its own opposite – whether “illiteracy,” “nonliteracy,” or the less pejorative “orality” – and a strong narrative of displacement of an older by a newer technology, literacy in practice has never been an absolute condition but rather part of “a complex set of continuums” (Finnegan 272). Writing did not displace rhetoric or tradition; the Dialogues of Plato were read alongside the works of Homer. Reading and writing are intimately connected to speaking and hearing, and absolute distinctions between “oral” and “literate” forms of discourse are difficult to make. Christianity, for example, is often characterized as a “religion of the book,” and the Anglo-Saxons were only one of many peoples for whom the introduction of literacy was inseparable from conversion to Christianity. In Christian practice, however, it is the spoken word that matters, the word preached, sung, proclaimed, spoken in benediction or prayer – the “embodied” word. Written texts are fundamental to the structure of the church and the spread of the faith, but most of the activities that form an individual’s Christian identity require oral expression. Throughout most of history, texts that were composed in writing and copied in manuscripts often served as scripts for oral delivery. Ælfric of Eynsham was an enormously literate author, concerned with the orthodoxy of his sources and the accuracy of his copyists, but his work almost certainly had more listeners than readers; both his Catholic Homilies and his Lives of Saints are, he says, meant sive legendo, sive audiendo (“either for reading or hearing”) (Gretsch, Intellectual Foundations, 158). A person of status might employ a scribe or secretary to copy letters or read books without being personally capable of either of these skills; this person may have been unable to read himself or herself, but still participated in a “textual community” constructed around written texts (Stock). Nor can we assume that the early medieval experience of reading was like our own, silent, private, and isolated; texts were often read aloud by a servant or cleric to groups or individuals. The etymological and semantic connections between Old English rædan (“read”) and the noun ræd (“advice, counsel”) suggest not only the social and vocal nature of reading, but its purpose – to instruct the reader or to offer counsel (Howe). Whatever its real or imagined power, the spread of literacy did not and could not fully replace existing cultural practices. 102 R. M. Liuzza The Opposite of Literacy The struggle between the desire to make sharp distinctions between written and spoken language, on the one hand, and the blurring, shifting interlace suggested by the historical evidence, on the other, has marked the critical history of Old English as well. While the use of “literacy” as a critical focus in Old English studies is relatively recent, the “idea” of literacy has had a profoundly important place in the history of the discipline through its shadowy complement, the notion of “orality.” The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the publication of most surviving Old English texts in reliable editions, the development of a coherent and comprehensive theory of prosody, the reconstruction of the history of Old English phonology and morphology. These were monumental, even heroic achievements, and they made the modern study of Old English possible; in general, however, scholars in this period tended to avoid questions of aesthetics, style, and meaning, and focused instead on the historical or philological value of Old English texts. In the middle of the twentieth century the need for some suitable critical language for discussing Old English poetic style grew more acute; it was triumphantly met by the importation of oral-formulaic theory, originally developed to account for the nature of Greek poetry (this history is traced in Foley). The work of Milman Parry in the 1920s combined ethnographic field research on singers in the Balkans with philological inquiry into ancient Greek poetry to explain the peculiarly repetitive diction and narrative structure of the Iliad and Odyssey. Parry’s student Albert Lord continued and developed this work, most notably in The Singer of Tales. Parry’s and Lord’s great insight was that Homeric verse was composed of a mosaic of traditional formulae, each conveying a small unit of content in a metrically acceptable form, and that by combining these units it was possible to compose long narrative tales more or less extemporaneously and without the aid of writing. Works composed in this way could not be understood with the critical preconceptions one brings to written texts – novelty, invention, logical consistency, and uniquely varied self-expression were neither possible nor desirable in tales composed orally from preexisting traditional materials. Francis P. Magoun, noting the presence of a roughly similar sort of formulaic language in Beowulf, applied this principle to Old English poetry; Magoun’s student Robert Creed was another early proponent of the theory in the field of Old English poetry. The locus classicus for the study of poetic composition in Old English is the story of Cædmon, told in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica (HE) IV.22 (see Fry). Cædmon is a lay brother of Whitby Abbey who receives a miraculous gift of poetic composition; Bede’s purpose in telling this story seems to have been to put a safe distance between English Christian poetry and its secular origins, placing it firmly in the monastic community and the service of the church. Cædmon experiences a kind of “immaculate conception” of poetry without poetics whose power and beauty were derived from divine grace rather than ancient (and pre-Christian) tradition. The purpose of most modern scholarship on the poem, on the other hand, has been just the opposite – to extract details of traditional oral poetic practice from Bede’s Literacy 103 Christian Latin context. Modern readers generally privilege the English version of Cædmon’s nine-line “Hymn” over Bede’s Latin paraphrase and its enclosing narrative. Magoun reads the story as a “case history of an Anglo-Saxon oral singer” by the simple (if critically dubious) expedient of accepting as true those aspects of Bede’s account that support his theory and rejecting those that do not. If, as Seth Lerer has noted, “Cædmon’s story may be read as a narrative of the Christian literary appropriation of an earlier poetics,” modern scholarship has vigorously turned the tables on Bede, appropriating a hagiographical narrative to support a theory of poetic composition (42). Magoun initially insisted that if all oral poetry was formulaic, then conversely all formulaic poetry was oral; he proposed a strict divide between orality and literacy: “Oral poetry . . . is composed entirely of formulas large and small, while lettered poetry is never formulaic” (447). This was logically flawed, self-evidently false, and quickly disproven by the fact that the same poetic formulae found in Beowulf were also employed by literate Latinate poets to create learned verse such as the Phoenix and the lives of saints (see, among many others, Benson). Formulaic verse, in other words, was a style, not a method of composition, and that ought to have been the end of it. But the relative absence of alternative theories of poetic composition, and perhaps the romantic appeal of the notion of wandering Anglo-Saxon bards chanting traditional stories of kings and heroes, allowed oral-formulaic research not only to survive the collapse of its theoretical foundations but to grow and thrive as a lively and productive field of Old English studies. Many Old English poems are presented in the language of a narrator and audience and foreground the oral/aural qualities of the poetic diction and the milieu of living discourse; some – Beowulf is an excellent example – contain scenes of oral poetic performance. So, too, of course, do many later poems; the question is whether this diction and these scenes of performance reflect the historical circumstances of the poems’ creation or reception. We cannot know whether such poems offer “unmediated visions of historical reality” or a kind of virtual orality, a selfrepresentation that serves to construct an imagined poetic tradition (Lerer 4). Historical evidence for a living oral poetic tradition is, naturally, scarce – hence the critical fascination with Bede’s story of Cædmon. King Alfred’s biographer Asser, for example, claimed that the king enjoyed “reading aloud books in English and above all learning English poems by heart,” but what he describes is closer to the medieval pedagogical tradition of memorization and recitation than the world of oral composition and performance (Keynes and Lapidge 91). As Roberta Frank notes, Asser has “portrayed that ruler’s fondness for vernacular poetry, but only as a reader and memorizer; never as an oral singer or frequenter of bards” (20). Early applications of the oral-formulaic approach to Old English literature tended to remove poetry from literary history and disregard manuscript evidence for the reading, recording, circulation, and reception of Old English texts;1 at the same time, however, scholars of oral-formulaic composition were among the first to make any serious attempts to define and describe poetic style in Old English. More recent work has focused on the performative aspects of the poetry, issues of 104 R. M. Liuzza audience and reception, and the dynamic relationship between poems, people, and traditions (Doane and Pasternack). The concept of “orality” need not be regarded as a compositional technique or a means of transmission to have value in AngloSaxon studies (see Amodio); reading for the “performative” mode in Old English poetry will bring into focus questions of narrative pace, authorial voice, and textual reception, and keeps the reader mindful of the fluid, interactive, elastic qualities of Old English texts. Scribal practice in the vernacular retained something of a performative quality, which Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe has called “residual orality” (6). A manuscript text was not a closed or fixed space – one copy varied from every other in unpredictable ways; the theory of oral composition and reception may provide the best framework for appreciating this fundamental aspect of manuscript textuality. The lasting value of oral-formulaic scholarship may be that it has made the modern reader of editions or the scholar of manuscripts aware of the social nature of literary production and reception in the earlier Middle Ages, the ongoing negotiation between tradition and creation, and the living human voices whose echoes still reverberate in the reading and copying of old texts. From Writing to Literacy The transformation of these voices into textual artifacts was a long and slowly developing process. When Bede wrote the story of Cædmon in his Historia Ecclesiastica, he did not transcribe Cædmon’s English poem; instead he provided a Latin paraphrase and an apology. Nor does he indicate anywhere that Cædmon’s poems were copied down as they were performed. By the time Bede’s work was itself translated into English in the later ninth century, however, Cædmon’s English poem, which is added as a kind of gloss in the margins of some manuscripts of Bede’s Historia, was simply substituted for Bede’s Latin paraphrase, and Bede’s Latin is altered to suggest that Cædmon’s work was transcribed as it was performed. Where Bede says “At ipse cuncta, quae audiendo discere poterat, rememorando secum, et quasi mundum animal ruminando, in carmen dulcissimum conuertebat, suauiusque resonando doctores suos uicissim auditores sui faciebat” (“He learned all that he could by listening, and turned it over in his mind, and like a clean beast chewing the cud turned it into the most harmonious verse, and recited it so sweetly that his teachers became in turn his listeners”), the Old English version asserts that his songs were so sweet and pleasant to hear “þætte seolfan þa his lareowas æt his muðe wreoton ond leornodon” (“that even his teachers themselves wrote and learned from his mouth”). Bede, firmly embedded in Latin monastic culture, may not have imagined that English poetry could take written form; between his age (the early eighth century) and that of his translators, a fundamental cultural shift had occurred. The reasons for this cultural shift are difficult to define, and its extent is hard to measure. The prefatory letter attached by Alfred the Great to his translation of Gregory’s Pastoral Care, completed around 890, famously lays out a program of Literacy 105 translation and instruction in English against a background of regret for the loss of the great learned traditions of the past – presumably the traditions of scholars like Bede and Aldhelm. Despite its obviously polemical rhetoric, Alfred’s letter has long served as primary evidence for the state of literacy at the end of the ninth century. It has given many scholars the impression that the promotion of English was a concession to the regrettable incompetence of clerical Latin, but it might equally well be read as evidence that some degree of vernacular literacy was already widespread in ninth-century England (Godden). Susan Kelly suggests plausible reasons for this: English was a more convenient language for legal transactions and descriptions of property which would be difficult to frame in Latin, and more accessible for verbal agreements between laymen who did not speak Latin. A document in English simplified written communication because it required only a reader, not a translator (Kelly 56–57). The promotion of English as a written language may indeed be a reflection of the failure of many clerics to learn Latin, but it is also a measure of the success of the late Anglo-Saxon kingdom in forging a unified sense of “Englishness” around the idea of a common written language. Still, the study of literacy in Anglo-Saxon England cannot disregard the fact that intellectual culture was diglossic in Latin and English.2 For most of the Middle Ages the word litteratus was used to describe a person who could read and write Latin; proficiency in reading or writing in the vernacular was not included in this definition. English texts existed alongside Latin texts – often literally, in the same manuscripts – and they were read and used in the context of a well-established Latin literary culture. The relationship between English and Latin cannot be reduced, however, to a fixed hierarchy with Latin superior to English, as in a manuscript with a Latin text and English gloss. Latin may have been the language of the church, the liturgy, and international traditions of scholarship and learning, but English was the language of secular aristocratic self-fashioning, poetry, historical tradition, and law, and it had its own conventions of style, form, and narrative. Aldhelm’s Latin verse, for example, bears distinct signs of vernacular influence in its prominent alliteration and use of verbal formulae (Lapidge). When Ælfric or Wulfstan rose to rhetorical heights, they did so in alliterative two- and three-stress phrases that distinctly recall the rhythms of Old English poetry. Authoritative works in Latin, from Bede’s Historia to Benedict’s Rule, were translated into English, as were considerable portions of scripture, learned works of science, and important monastic texts. Texts in English survive in increasing numbers from the mid-tenth century and later, and their subjects range from poetic collections like the Exeter Book to charms and medical recipes, laws and land grants, homilies and grammatical treatises. Such a large and diverse body of written texts requires a network of authors, scribes, and readers – a literary culture. Efforts were eventually made to standardize spelling, vocabulary, and to some extent grammar in English, trying to give the vernacular some of the stability and authority of Latin as a primarily written language (Gneuss); there must have been a reasonably organized system of education in English, and a sufficiently large enough audience for learned works in English, to make this development of a standard version of English thinkable. 106 R. M. Liuzza Measuring the extent of this literacy – either as a percentage of the population generally or in the minds of individual readers – is an impossible task. The term “literacy” has traditionally meant the ability to read and write, even though these two accomplishments are by no means necessarily linked, and in fact require very different kinds of skill; nor is there any general agreement on the level of proficiency one must attain in these skills to be considered fully “literate.” Reading and writing are increasingly seen as part of a larger competency in the handling of information, ideas, and media; in keeping with the perception that “literacy” is not a condition that one has or does not have but a set of skills diversely deployed in different situations, scholars have proposed terms such as “craft literacy” or “pragmatic literacy” to describe the moderate level of skill in reading and writing sufficient for one’s trade or everyday life (Parkes, “Literacy”). This is a useful qualification; not only does it place literacy on a sliding scale of proficiency, it suggests that the essence of “literacy” lies not simply in the “ability” to read and write, but in the ways people “use” written language – that is, in a certain kind of “relationship” between people and texts. As noted above, if writing is a technology, literacy is a cultural phenomenon; writing is a “precondition” for literacy, not a synonym. As Rosamund McKitterick notes, “literacy in any society is not just a matter of who could read and write, but one of how their skills function, and of the adjustments – mental, emotional, intellectual, physical and technological – necessary to accommodate it” (5). Written texts and oral communication may be different means used to achieve the same end, and as we have noted, writing supplements rather than supplants the already existing cultural practices that took place in the medium of oral discourse. A study of literacy in Anglo-Saxon England must consider the extent to which practices involving written texts coexisted with, were accommodated within, or came to replace established oral procedures of law, government, and society. The complex and shifting relationships between written and spoken discourses may not be susceptible to precise measurement, but they can be observed in a number of different areas, and these observations may offer us some sense of the development of English literacy. Observing Literacy: The Grammar of Legibility The gradual spread of literacy might be observed in two broad areas at very different scales: the visual organization of information and the textual organization of society. The second of these has to do with the effect of written documents on social relations and social acts – recording claims of land tenure or royal decrees, writing manuals of instruction and works of history, and so on – and will be discussed below. The first concerns the physical placement of words on a manuscript page and in a codex, what Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe has described as “the gradual shift from aural to visual reception and . . . the increasing spatialization of a written text” (2). Surviving manuscripts offer concrete evidence for the Literacy 107 transformation of spoken into written language and the extent to which scribes and authors began to conceive of texts primarily as visual objects on a page. The Parker manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, for example, begins by imitating the page layout of an Easter table in the liturgical computus, with a single line for each year – the tabular layout is not really appropriate to the more discursive nature of a chronicle, however, and is eventually abandoned, but it is notable that the “visual” form of one genre of text has influenced a related genre. Even at the most basic levels of textual practice, the development of visual cues for reading – punctuation, word separation, lineation, rubrics, capitals and headings, divisions between texts, the use of blank space and margins to signify textual divisions, the development of annotations, glosses, tables and diagrams – all indicate a growing sense that written language is more than just a transcription of the spoken word. In a larger sense one might also regard the growth of archives, libraries, catalogues, and scriptoria as signs of literacy – an increasing sophistication in the use of written language as a medium separate from speech. All books, of course, are visual objects; many were also powerful visual symbols of the church’s wealth, antiquity, and sophistication. The great Bible which Augustine of Canterbury brought from Rome (now lost, but reconstructed by Budny) on his mission to convert the English “was written probably in Uncial . . . very extensively illustrated and provided with resplendent purple leaves at the beginning of some books” (Budny 271). This was a book whose lavishness was intended to impress the importance of its contents upon those who could not hope to read them. It is a stunning visual display, but it is only for display – a book for the unlettered. Such books have much to say about the experience of conversion, but they offer little insight into reading practices; reading was not necessarily their primary purpose. The development of textual conventions for written language is a longer and more complex story (what follows is indebted to Parkes, Pause and Effect). Many early medieval texts lack the commonplace conventions of written language that we take for granted – one word is not separated from the next, text runs from one margin to the other without a break, capitalization and punctuation are infrequent and inconsistent. Visual cues for reading developed in part because of the need to read texts (particularly liturgical texts) aloud, and the development of punctuation was strongly influenced by oral recitation. The spread of ecclesiastical Latin to non-Romance speaking countries, however, made these visual cues – what Malcolm Parkes calls “the grammar of legibility,” the system of purely visual conventions for emphasizing the meaning of a text – even more important as an aid to understanding a language that was apprehended “as much (if not more) by the eye, as by the ear” (Pause and Effect, 23). The Anglo-Saxons learned these practices from Irish teachers and from imitation of Roman exemplars, but a fully developed written language with regular and consistent word separation, a hierarchy of punctuation marks and scripts, and standard layout for different types of texts – along with codicological refinements such as indexes, tables of contents, and chapters – was only partly in place before the twelfth century. 108 R. M. Liuzza The relation of this “grammar of legibility” to the spread of literacy can be seen, to take one example, in Old English poetic manuscripts (the classic study on this subject is O’Brien O’Keeffe). No text in the corpus of Old English poetry is represented in a way that makes it visually distinct from prose. Poems are written continuously from margin to margin, and punctuation varies considerably in both quantity and quality from one manuscript to another – the poems of the Junius manuscript are almost regularly pointed by half-lines, while Beowulf is very lightly punctuated. There are few visual cues for reading the poetry, and those that do exist, such as capital letters and divisions into numbered sections, are sometimes misleading or erroneous. The practices of copying Latin poetry were not applied to English poetry; the fact that the scribes of English poetry did not apply their experience of reading or copying Latin to English might indicate that they did not consider the two bodies of literature as equivalent in status; it may also be there was not a large enough body or a long enough tradition of written poetry in English to encourage the growth of a set of uniform habits and practices. Old English poetry never fully took advantage of the visual nature of the written medium; it might be said that it was not fully textualized. Its rudimentary “grammar of legibility,” like its textual fluidity, suggests that written English remained closely tied to the spoken language and did not undergo significant development independent of it. Observing Literacy: The Book as the World The spread of literacy can also be observed in the degree to which people and institutions relied on documents and archives to represent and organize social relations. A rise in the use of archives and records is naturally related to the development of a “grammar of legibility”; the more sophisticated sense of visual information hierarchies and structures undoubtedly lent support to the sense of fixity, authority, and priority attached to the textual record, while the reliance on texts, references, and archives created a greater need for visual and spatial organization on the page and in the library. The act of writing requires a degree of self-awareness about the form and shape of language; the durability and stability of writing may contribute to an awareness of language as a thing apart from oneself, and of one’s self as a thing apart from the language and culture in which one is immersed. As this self-awareness grows and the use of written texts becomes more common, writing may be regarded not as a transcript of spoken language but as a separate analytical tool for organizing and understanding the world. Literacy provides capabilities beyond the scope of spoken language – analysis, order, detachment, revision, reference, impersonality, durability; a system of writing can be used not just as a tool for representing reality but as a way of “constituting reality” in textual form, of organizing the world around the documents that record and describe it. If “the world as book” is one of the great metaphors of the Middle Ages, we might also say that the “book is a world” – the text and its pages, margins, quires, and rubrics offer a way of collecting and Literacy 109 arranging, and eventually of creating and controlling, a particular set of beliefs and values, a view of reality which shapes one’s fundamental understanding of the order of things. A book or a library might ultimately be regarded as a model of the world itself – the world reimagined as a list, a lectionary, a collection, a rule, a chronicle, or an encyclopedia. The great survey of English land and property made by William the Conqueror and known as the “Domesday Book” reveals a particularly vivid understanding of this principle – the impulse to make a textual inventory of every shire and town, every farm and village, every pig and cow, is a thoroughly literate one, however quixotic it may seem in retrospect. Possession of the country could be symbolized by ownership of a book, as if the book were somehow coterminous with the land it described (Clanchy 32). The degree to which individual people gave written documents priority over the social relations they recorded, or saw documents as “constructing” rather than merely transcribing the order of things, is naturally difficult to measure; its development can be glimpsed, however, in a number of different areas of later Anglo-Saxon society. It may be seen, for example, in the efforts of Æthelwold and the tenth-century reformers to impose a single monastic consuetudo, standardized and synchronized, across the kingdom – a feat which would be inconceivable without considerable faith in the power of a stable written rule, efficiently promulgated and obediently received (Gretsch, Intellectual Foundations). A belief in the authority of the textual record can be seen in the activity of collecting and revising popular stories about holy men like Cuthbert or Swithun in order not only to preserve their memory against the vagaries of popular imagination but to create authorized and edited vitae in the service of monastic foundations or the church at large (Gretsch, Ælfric). It can likewise be seen in Alfred the Great’s commissioning and distribution of a chronicle of Anglo-Saxon history that placed his own family and his West Saxon kingdom securely at its center – an authorized national history to justify and promote a local political ideology. It can be observed above all in changing practices of governance with regard to the making of law and the ownership of land. Bede records that some time after the arrival of Augustine’s mission, King Æthelberht of Kent ordered the laws of his kingdom to be written in English, iuxta exempla Romanorum (“after the Roman manner”) (ii.5). Æthelberht’s laws show no trace of Roman influence and were apparently meant to record well-established and well-known traditions – yet the code begins by outlining generous protections for the church and clergy, giving a relatively exalted status to these new members of society. Early law-codes like the Laws of Æthelberht may have been more symbolic than practical; Patrick Wormald argues that they “projected an image of society which corresponded to the ideological aspirations, as well as the practical needs, of what we might call its articulate classes” (Lex Scripta, 131). But whether written law-codes served as symbolic gestures or as actual tools of governance, their creation signals the king’s realization that a new system had arrived, one in which the most fundamental as well as the most novel of social arrangements were to be inscribed in a text. 110 R. M. Liuzza It is likely that strong traditions of oral customary law made written law-codes seem either unnecessary or unwelcome to many members of the Anglo-Saxon ruling classes. The relative scarcity of surviving copies of Anglo-Saxon legal texts, and the relatively disorganized, incomplete, or inadequate quality of the texts that do survive, reflect, at best, “a culture adjusting to the technology of script” (Wormald, English Law, 477). This process of adjustment can be seen by comparing Anglo-Saxon law to the collections of Anglo-Saxon law made after the Norman Conquest, such as the Quadripartitus and Textus Roffensis (see Wormald, English Law, for a discussion of these manuscripts). The purpose of these later manuscripts was apparently to collect and organize as much pre-Conquest legislation as possible; the texts are carefully revised and collated, and some are translated into Latin. The manuscripts are generally smaller, more portable, and more fully rubricated and annotated than any surviving Anglo-Saxon legal text; they were designed to be consulted and used. Compared to the laws written by the Anglo-Saxons themselves, these twelfth-century collections reflect a very different attitude toward written law and written language – the Normans gave a priority to the textual record of English law that the Anglo-Saxons did not, presumably because the Conquest had destroyed the living social context of customary law. The evidence of charters, on the other hand, suggests the growing importance of these documents not just as transcripts of a verbal transaction but as textual authorities in themselves (introductions can be found in Stenton, Sawyer). Charters (also called diplomas) were used to document the ownership, leasing, and transfer of land. They were primarily ecclesiastical documents; there seems to have been little use of charters outside the church until almost a century after the beginning of the conversion. This may be simply because documents in monastic archives have survived in greater numbers than documents in secular hands; but monasteries had more experience with recording and remembering their privileges, customs, possessions, and landholdings, and a more pressing interest in doing so, and so charters were probably used more frequently for donations of land to the church than for transactions between lay landowners. About 1,500 Anglo-Saxon charters survive, about 300 in their original form on single sheets and the rest in later copies, either on single pages or in collections called cartularies. A good proportion of the surviving charters are later forgeries. Whether or not these spurious charters contain genuine material or make genuine claims, the fact that they were fabricated at all suggests, in its way, a remarkable respect for the power of written records as the validation of the social memory of the community. Forged documents, particularly those that try to mimic the language and form of genuinely early documents, imply a sophisticated understanding of how texts can represent, supersede, or even create the memories they are supposed to preserve. Many early Anglo-Saxon charters, however, appear to have been in many respects primarily symbolic documents. One of their most striking features is a complete lack of validation or autograph signature – charters do have lists of witnesses, often long ones, but these are invariably written by a single scribe. In effect, charters were recognized as important documents but they were ancillary to the transactions they Literacy 111 recorded; drawing up a charter or adding a list of witnesses to a prepared document could easily be made part of the ritual of land donation, but the charter itself was only a kind of souvenir or symbol of that ritual, not its textual equivalent; AngloSaxon charters “look like objects of reverence rather than record” (Wormald, Bede, 147). The long lists of witnesses that usually accompany these charters suggest that the locus of authority was thought to reside not in the document but in the consent and collective memory of the community. In contrast, writs issued after the Conquest tend to have far fewer witnesses, indicating a shift of attitude from transactions as public ceremonies to simpler and more bureaucratic exchanges whose warrant and authority was in the written document itself (Wormald, English Law, and see Keynes). Charters introduced not only a new way to indicate land ownership but also a new kind of ownership. Traditionally, land could not be transferred outside the family of its owner without royal consent. The church preferred gifts of land that were permanent and irrevocable, free from claims of inheritance and family, and exempt from taxation and traditional duties like the provision of military service and the upkeep of bridges. This new category of land ownership required restatement and reinforcement, and charters generally spell out the church’s rights and the donor’s intentions in careful detail. Patrick Wormald argues that secular landowners used this concept of bocland or “chartered land” to their advantage (Bede); aristocratic families used these new instruments of land donation to secure their property by setting up family monasteries on chartered land. Because it offered advantages over traditional forms of ownership, the concept of land held by the provisions of a written charter was taken up by secular landowners, and tradition was newly formulated as a documentary agreement – a “text-act” rather than a “speech-act.” By the end of the Anglo-Saxon period, charters were widely used in secular society – the majority of late surviving charters concern laymen (Kelly 45) – and consequently took on greater importance as documentary records. Simon Keynes notes two cases relating to Ely Abbey in which the possession of a written charter seems to have implied entitlement to the land; the charter had become a symbol not of the ceremony of donation but of the property itself (250–251). Nor was the use of written documents limited to land transactions; nearly all the fifty-eight surviving Anglo-Saxon wills are in English. Not all of these deal with ecclesiastical property or with the estates of noble families, so there is some evidence that lay people across a broad portion of society regarded written documents as the appropriate way to express their interest in the organization of their lives and property. Other documents record the manumissions of slaves (often written in the flyleaves of Gospel-books), agreements reached after land disputes, and in two cases, property arrangements for a marriage. There were almost certainly many more such documents, but because laymen lacked the archival resources of monasteries and cathedrals, few have survived. In texts like these one can see literate ways of thinking and acting first imitating, then accommodating, and gradually absorbing older oral customs. 112 R. M. Liuzza The disruption of English society caused by the arrival of a new ruling class with a new language of power and authority was no doubt a catalyst for the development of more pervasive practices of literacy in the centuries after the Conquest (see Clanchy). Centers of power shifted, social hierarchies were reordered, memories and histories were challenged and contested, and cultural capital redistributed, all in part through the effective deployment of the potent instrument of the written word. It can be argued, however, that the Normans would not have been able to rule England so efficiently if the English had not already had considerable experience with the everyday use of written texts and some degree of consent to the idea that documents and texts are an appropriate medium for social organization. The successes of the twelfth century suggest how deeply the practices of literacy and the ideology of a world made of written words had already penetrated into the fabric of Anglo-Saxon society. Notes 1 It must be said that in this they were little different from the methodology of New Criticism, broadly defined, through whose lens medieval poetry was being read at this time. And by the same token, scholars of manuscripts, sources, transmission, and textual criticism have often tended to work in isolation from ideas about the social world of the texts – their use and performance, reading and remembering, impact and influence, or participation in the living world of readers and writers. 2 This statement places to one side the effect of language contact between English and other languages such as British, Irish, or Scandinavian; though these are significant, these “horizontal” relationships had a greater effect on the spoken language, while the “vertical” relationship of Latin to English also had a strong impact on the written language. References Amodio, Mark C. Writing the Oral Tradition: Oral Poetics and Literate Culture in Medieval England. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004. Bede. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon, 1969. Benson, Larry, D. “The Literate Character of Anglo-Saxon Poetic Formulae.” PMLA 81 (1966): 334–341. Budny, Mildred. “The Biblia Gregoriana.” In Richard Gameson, ed., St Augustine of Canterbury and the Conversion of England (pp. 237–284). Stroud: Sutton, 1999. Clanchy, M. T. From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307. 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. Creed, Robert, P. “The Making of an AngloSaxon Poem.” English Literary History 26 (1959): 445–454. Doane, A. N. and Carol Braun Pasternack, eds. Vox Intexta: Orality and Textuality in the Middle Ages. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Fielding, Penny. Writing and Orality: Nationality, Culture, and Nineteenth- Literacy Century Scottish Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Finnegan, Ruth. Oral Poetry: Its Nature, Significance, and Social Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Foley, John Miles. The Theory of Oral Composition: History and Methodology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Frank, Roberta. “The Search for the AngloSaxon Oral Poet.” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 75 (1993): 11–36. Fry, Donald K. “Cædmon as a Formulaic Poet.” In Joseph J. Duggan, ed., Oral Literature: Seven Essays (pp. 41–61). Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1975. Gneuss, Helmut. “The Origin of Standard Old English and Æthelwold’s School at Winchester.” Anglo-Saxon England 1 (1972): 63–83. Godden, Malcolm. “King Alfred’s Preface and the Teaching of Latin in AngloSaxon England.” English Historical Review 117 (2002): 596–604. Graff, Harvey J. The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Culture and Society. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Gretsch, Mechthild. Ælfric and the Cult of Saints in Late Anglo-Saxon England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Gretsch, Mechthild. The Intellectual Foundations of the English Benedictine Reform. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Havelock, Eric A. Preface to Plato. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963. Howe, Nicholas. “The Cultural Construction of Reading in Anglo-Saxon England.” In Jonathan Boyarin, ed., The Ethnography of Reading (pp. 58–79). Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Kelly, Susan. “Anglo-Saxon Lay Society and the Written Word.” In Rosamund McKitterick, ed., The Uses of Literacy in Early Medieval Europe (pp. 36–62). 113 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Keynes, Simon. “Royal Government and the Written Word in Late Anglo-Saxon England.” In Rosamund McKitterick, ed., The Uses of Literacy in Early Medieval Europe (pp. 226–257). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Keynes, Simon and Michael Lapidge. Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources. London: Penguin, 1983. Lapidge, Michael. “Aldhelm’s Latin Poetry and Old English Verse.” Comparative Literature 31 (1979): 209–231. Lerer, Seth. Literacy and Power in AngloSaxon Literature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991. L!evi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes Tropiques, trans. John and Doreen Weightman. New York: Criterion, 1961. Lord, Albert Bates. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960. Magoun, Francis P. “Bede’s Story of Cædmon: The Case History of an Anglo-Saxon Oral Singer.” Speculum 30 (1955): 49–63. McKitterick, Rosamund. “Introduction.” In Rosamund McKitterick, ed., The Uses of Literacy in Early Medieval Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. O’Brien O’Keeffe, Katherine. Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982. Parkes, M. B. “The Literacy of the Laity.” In David Daiches and A.K. Thorlby, eds, Literature and Western Civilization: The Medieval World (pp. 555–77). London: Aldus, 1973. Parkes, M. B. Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the 114 R. M. Liuzza West. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Sawyer, P. H. Anglo-Saxon Charters: An Annotated List and Bibliography. London: Royal Historical Society, 1968. Stenton, F. M. Latin Charters of the AngloSaxon Period. Oxford: Clarendon, 1955. Stock, Brian. The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Street, Brian V. Literacy in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Wormald, Patrick. “Lex Scripta and Verbum Regis: Legislation and Germanic Kingship, from Euric to Cnut.” In P. H. Sawyer and I. N. Wood, eds, Early Medieval Kingship (pp. 105–138). Leeds: Leeds University Press, 1977. Wormald, Patrick. Bede and the Conversion of England: The Charter Evidence. Jarrow Lecture 1985. Jarrow: St Paul’s Church, 1986. Wormald, Patrick. The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century, vol. 1: Legislation and Its Limits. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. A Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Studies Edited by Jacqueline Stodnick and Ren!ee R. Trilling This edition first published 2012 # 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell. Registered Office John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK Editorial Offices 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell. 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