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

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER BRIAN STOCK. Listening for the Text: On the Uses of the Past. Parallax: Re­ Visions of Culture and Society. Baltimore, Md., and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Pp. x, 197. $24.95. If it is now the case, as Brian Stock says, that "for the academic medi­ evalist. .. the age of bold interpretation would appear to have yielded to that ofthe cautious advance," Stock himselfcan hardly be blamed. In Myth and Science in the Twelfth Century (1972) he provided a lucid guide to Chartrian thought that also raised fundamental questions about intellec­ tual change, and in the massive and erudite Implications a/Literacy (1983) he used the relation of literacy to orality to reconfigure the terrain of Western thought during the crucial yearsbetween 1000 and 1200. Over the past fifteen years Stock has also been publishing essays that explore the relation of the Middle Ages to the modern world and survey the common ground shared by literary criticism and history, essays that are concerned above all with the recovery ofa distant past that is always in danger ofbeing obscured by either forgetfulness or unthinking academic routine. Now eight ofthese essays have been collected in Listeningfor the Text, and they provide an opportunity to come to grips with this creative if sometimes elusive thinker. Stock is motivated above all by a sense of the centrality of the Middle Ages to Western culture as a whole. In part this sense is rather narrowly expressed in the claim that current theoretical topics have long medieval histories. One of the book's purposes, Stock says, is to "draw attention to the role of the Middle Ages in the formation of postmedieval theories under discussion in our time," a well-known case in point being language theory. Far more important to his thinking, however, is the sense that it is during the Middle Ages that Western culture first becomes "textualized:" the Middle Ages was "the moment in time when texts become a recogniz­ able force in an evolutionary process that has continued uninterrupted down to our own day." Stock's point is not only that it was then that the West became literate, since he continually and importantly insists that literacy and orality are conditions that coexist throughout the period and in society generally. Indeed,as he points out, Christianity defined itselfas at once oral and literate: it accommodated both "the Greek connection between being and speaking" (by preferring the spirit to the letter) and "theJewish custom ofrepresenting divine knowledge in sacred texts" (by becoming a religion of the Book). But the relation oforality to literacy is progressive as well as functional: it 240 REVIEWS is with literacy that the Middle Ages "entered the mainstream of early modern thought." Stock's project is to show that the coming of literacy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries places the Middle Ages at the source of what he rightly calls "the largest historical thesis ofthe century, the debate on the origins of capitalism and modernization." For Stock literacy gener­ ates "a new style of reflection," a "self-consciousness, in particular the consciousness ofchange" that is indispensable for modernization: it is here that we find "the cultural roots ofthe early modern scientific outlook." This processis,however,to be understood notpsychologically (as many theorists of literacy assume) but socially. The early Middle Ages experienced a disjunction between textuality and reality: the available models of inter­ pretation were inadequate to express the "immense range of relatively uncharted events, sensations, and emotions." Around 1000, however, there began to develop what Stock calls "textual communities." These were "microsocieties organized around the common understanding of a script," an understanding that is provided by a charis­ matic interpreter such as Peter Waldo or Bernard of Clairvaux. These textual communities developed a sense of moral behavior as reasonable, i.e., as guided by systematic norms. There is thus "a link between tex­ tuality, as the script for'the enactment ofbehavioral norms, and rationality, as the alleged reasonableness ofthose norms." This reasonableness permit­ ted norms to be internalized, and social control was transformed, as Weber would have put it, from a law ethic to an ethic of responsibility. "As...