Listening for the Text: On the Uses of the Past by Brian Stock (review)

120Rocky Mountain Review the seams show when Spilka repeats facts or summarizes plots that have already been covered. But the book is more than the sum of its parts, and the reader will carry away much more from the book than from all of the earlier essays. ROBERT E. FLEMING University of New Mexico BRIAN STOCK. Listening for the Text: On the Uses of the Past. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. 208 p. Building upon his 1983 study ofthe rise ofliteracy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Stock in this new book uses other medieval evidence to explore how people use texts to recollect the past. His concern focuses on orality and literacy, less as representing discrete stages in the evolution of culture than as vitally interdependent elements in a culture that is becoming increasingly literate. What links the oral and the written is the text, and useful to understanding the relationship is Stock's notion ofthe "textual community," a concept which, in one of its many uses, refers to any of the "small, isolated, heretical and reformist groups in medieval Europe" (151) whose shared experience of a text leads to particular social organization. Members of the group, guided by an interpreter, relive the text and thence create a history. The formation of such communities is superbly illustrated by Stock's account of the Waldensians, "who, if employing oral methods, participated in what was largely a literate experience" (28). The concept does not apply exclusively to the formation of religious sects, however; in this book, Stock shows how textual communities evolve in a variety of settings. A concomitant ofthe late medieval rise ofliteracy, including the use oftexts to affect group behavior, is an increasingly functionalist perspective on how language achieves meaning. In contrast to Boethius' sixth-century formalist approach, Abelard in the twelfth century perceived language both as a replica of something else and as an aspect ofbehavior. In this view, or in views more broadly "rhetorical," meaning is thought to arise in part from subjective interpretation. This subjectivity is part of what Stock seeks to recover in the past; at the same time, it is a feature he recognizes in the very task of writing history. In his perspective, it is not enough merely to analyze texts within a system of purely semantic relations, or merely to seek "objective" facts, neatly arranged in linear sequence, in the outside world. Stock sees greater value in a comparative approach that combines synchronic and diachronic elements, that takes a "subjective problem orientation" (74), but with a recognition of the subjectivity. This method, used properly, forms a response to specialization that commits one narrowly to statistical methods or aprioristic assumptions of mentalité: it is a means of recovering a living past. In this light, Stock assesses the formation ofcultural myths about the Middle Ages in later centuries (e.g., in the Romantic period) by those seeking tojustify their own place in history. Indeed, his own "empirical generalization" of the Book Reviews121 textual community provides a stay to this ideological tendency, especially to the extent that it produces factual history showing concepts "acted out by individuals or groups in everyday life" (13). A late chapter on Max Weber focuses the problem in another way. Stock values Max Weber's "concept of the subjective element in meaningful social relations" (113), but he also provides a corrective to Weber's denial to the Middle Ages of an emergent process of "rationalization": Weber lacked sufficient knowledge ofthe period, and he virtually ignored the factors oforality and literacy in the rationalization process. Against the penchant to recreate the Middle Ages as a myth, Stock more directly sets the work of Erich Auerbach, who, in his aesthetic historicism, sees texts as the products of "variable individual conditions" (56). Auerbach also places empirical analyses in a comparative framework, thereby seeking to discover the totality of stylistic relations to "forms of life" of the period. For Stock, the historical event gains its meaning from a logic both in the mind and in the outside world. Following Hilary Putnam's thesis that "the mind and the world jointly make up the mind and the world" (96), he offers a critique of...