Orality and Literacy

This book aims to provide the reader of Homer with the traditional knowledge and fluency in Homeric poetry which an original ancient audience would have brought to a performance of this type of narrative. To that end, Adrian Kelly presents the text of Iliad VIII next to an apparatus referring to the traditional units being employed, and gives a brief description of their semantic impact. He describes the referential curve of the narrative in a continuous commentary, tabulates all the traditional units in a separate lexicon of Homeric structure, and examines critical decisions concerning the text in a discussion which employs the referential method as a critical criterion. Two appendices deal with speech introduction formulae, and with the traditional function of Here and Athene in early Greek epic poetry.

Tsagalis, C., Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2008.01.25
Heath, M., Greece & Rome 55 (2008) 111–12
Clackson, J., Times Literary Supplement October 17 (2008) 33
Strauss Clay, J., Religious Studies Review 34 (2008) 289
Huxley, G. L., Hermathena 184 (2008) 93–5
Cook, E., Classical Review 59 (2009) 14–16
de Jong, I., Mnemosyne 62 (2009) 478–80
Blanc, A., Revue des études grecques 122 (2009) 237–9

Na segunda metade do século XI, um áspero conflito entre a igreja romana e a
corte germânica levou o papa Gregório VII a decretar a deposição e excomunhão do
sucessor imperial. Tido pelos historiadores como o capítulo central da chamada
“Reforma Gregoriana”, este evento é usualmente encarado como um importante
marco de ascensão política do papado na História Ocidental e da instauração de um
amplo processo de institucionalização da igreja romana. O maior emblema desta via
de “estatização” pela qual teria enveredado o poder pontifício foi, afirmam os historiadores, a expansão do direito canônico, cujo avanço teria assentado as bases do trato legal que nos séculos seguinte se apoderaria do Ocidente. Portanto, um império da lei e das normas escritas teria sido ruidosamente anunciado através das ações gregorianas.

Rabbi Judah Leib Alter of Ger, a famed nineteenth-century Hasidic master, wrote an influential collection of Hebrew homilies. But it seems that R. Judah Leib’s sermons were also transcribed by his students, some of whom recorded their teacher’s words in the original Yiddish rather than Hebrew translation. This monograph builds upon a newly-discovered Yiddish manuscript of sixty pages. It presents a synoptic edition of the Yiddish text alongside the Hebrew version, thus enabling comparison of the witnesses and demonstrating the development of the various texts. The introduction uses this manuscript to explore broader historical and theoretical issues such as the relationship between written texts and oral culture, the development of written Yiddish, the nature and boundaries of translation, and the complex pathways of transmission from teachers to their students.

This celebrated book is a significant resource on how to enhance the capacity of your memory to make it remember more than the average person. Written in the style of a fascinating nonfiction novel, Joshua Foer takes the reader on an adventurous journey with his personal exploration on the terrains of memory building.

(Chapter 1 from 'The Given Note': Traditional Music and Modern Irish Poetry) Music and poetry have often been viewed together as both are considered “auditory, temporal and dynamic art forms”. Studies of the relationships between these arts have grown throughout the twentieth century. This was underscored in 1997 with the foundation of The International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA), dedicated to the promotion of “transdisciplinary scholarly inquiry devoted to the relations between literature/verbal texts/language and music”. However, its relative youth as a field of enquiry is apparent in the disputed nature of its title. Sometimes referred to as “melopoetics”, this term, as Werner Wolf observes, appears “somewhat arcane […] because it implies, or at least suggests, a questionable, not to say misleading, privileging of some aspects of the interrelations between music and words/literature”. Wolf suggests, therefore, that “word and music studies” seems to have gained the upper hand over “melopoetics” in recent years. The use of the term “melopoetics” does indicate, nonetheless, a major focus of the discipline which has often tended to be from a musical, rather than a literary, perspective. It is also, as Wolf notes “a discipline in which the construction of a theoretical and terminological framework has not received due attention”. Where a framework has been suggested, it is focused primarily on the relationship between classical music and literature and gives little consideration to how the performance of music and song of an essentially oral character or in non-classical forms (such as traditional Irish music) may influence a poet’s work. This essay will examine the existing schemas and argue for a more flexible framework, cognisant of research in orality studies, ethnomusicology and recent literary theory, which may offer a more discerning appreciation of how Irish poets are influenced by traditional music.

"My Father Was Told to Talk to the Environment First Before Anything Else" Arctic Environmental Education in the Language of the Land, Chapter 16 (pp 285-298)
in
Fields of Green: Restorying Culture, Environment, and Education”
by Marcia McKenzie, Paul Hart, Heesoon Bai, and Bob Jickling (Eds.).
Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, Inc.

This essay examines an instance of the use of folklore by writers in postcolonial African societies to problematize postcolonial systems in fiction. The essay discusses how Benjamin Kwakye exploits the trickster character as a semiotic figure to construe the themes of survival and social and economic insecurity in The Clothes of Nakedness. The features of the trickster deployed include the spider imagery and his webbing across geographical margins, the use of trickery and manipulation as survival and power-building strategies, and the role of the trickster as a “hero-scamp” and villain. Towards the end of the narrative, the trickster is removed from focalization, and villainous events he engineers are construed as happening in spite of him. He remerges at the end as the ubiquitous spider in whom all mysteries make sense. These strategies are related to postcolonial issues of corruption, socioeconomic marginalization, and international aid.

https://www.amazon.it/Scripta-volant-telefoniche-cifratura-messaggi/dp/3639779819

In 1992, the first SMS was sent from a computer to a mobile phone. Since then, text messages have changed our communications. Instant messaging applications (such as WhatsApp and Telegram) are their heirs and are widespread worldwide. Yet, the possibility of tracking them with extensive surveillance led to privacy issues, which were only partially solved with cryptography. Indeed, the writing is losing its sacrality.

The ebook is in Italian.

The writing, reading and reception of a crusade-story in medieval Flanders, Norway, and Iceland.

This book relates a story about the writing, reading, and reception of one text in three different cultural and political contexts across Europe. The focus is on the story of the Christian knight Elye and his Saracen princess Rosamunde, which was translated into Old Norse in the thirteenth century. This is a study of three of the manuscripts in which the work is preserved: one Old French manuscript from Flanders (BnF, fr. 25516, c. 1280) and two Old Norse manuscripts, one from Norway (DG 4–7 fol., c. 1270) and one from Iceland (Holm Perg 6 4 to, c. 1400). These manuscripts represent three different rhetorical and communicative situations and show how the writing and reading of the same text was conditioned by the respective cultural and political environment. The book innovatively conveys Old Norse culture as an active respondent, participant, and thus modulator of European literary tendencies. Tracing the translation, transmission, and transformation of the text throughout Europe redefines aspects of the Latin-vernacular nexus in the Middle Ages, and thus presents a new and valuable voice in the discussion of medieval European literary and cultural systems.

The oral re-telling of traditional tales, modelled by a storyteller and taught to children in school, can be understood as ‘non-instrumental’ practice in speaking and listening that emphasises oral language over the reading and writing of stories. While oral storytelling has significant benefits to children’s education and development, it is under-utilised within Primary Education in the UK. This interview and library-based study explores participant perceptions of oral storytelling and the barriers to the utilisation of such non-instrumental practice in school. In addition, observation of an oral storytelling initiative provides a research context through which such perceptions are understood. The findings suggest that speaking and listening is implicitly devalued as a result of the elevation of instrumental literacy-based practice in the primary curriculum. In addition, enquiry into the specific effects of engaging with orality as a precursor to literacy development is lacking. It is suggested that while New Literacy Studies has enhanced our understanding of the interrelationship between the written and spoken word, it is less helpful when considering language as a ‘continuum of spontaneity’. It is concluded that spoken language that is explicitly unattached to literacy-based outcomes should be strongly encouraged in school. In addition, it is important to understand on an empirical basis whether the attachment of a written outcome affects the way that spoken language practice is engaged with in the classroom.

Το θέμα της εργασίας είναι η προφορικότητα στον γραπτό λόγο μαθητών του Δημοτικού Σχολείου. Η προφορικότητα έχει ποικίλα στοιχεία-χαρακτηριστικά γνωρίσματα που, εκτός από τον προφορικό λόγο, είναι δυνατόν σε διάφορες περιπτώσεις να εντοπιστούν και σε γραπτά κείμενα. Ο προφορικός λόγος προϋπήρχε του γραπτού. Είναι γνωστό ότι ένας μικρός αριθμός ανθρώπινων γλωσσών γνώρισαν τη γραφή και ότι οι πρώτοι άνθρωποι δε γνώριζαν τη γραφή. Ο προφορικός λόγος υπήρξε και υπάρχει τις περισσότερες φορές χωρίς τη γραφή ενώ, αντίθετα, η γραφή ποτέ χωρίς τον προφορικό λόγο. Εύκολα γίνεται λοιπόν κατανοητό πόσο σημαντικός υπήρξε ο προφορικός λόγος -και η προφορικότητα- για τον άνθρωπο διαχρονικά. Από τα παραπάνω συνάγεται ότι ο προφορικός λόγος είναι «ζωντανός», συνεχώς εξελισσόμενος και «πανταχού παρών» στην ανθρώπινη ζωή. Για τον λόγο αυτό, μία εργασία που μελετά στοιχεία προφορικότητας στον γραπτό λόγο των παιδιών, δεν μπορεί παρά να εξετάζει την «συνύπαρξή» του προφορικού λόγου με τον γραπτό, μέσα στα κείμενα που κατασκευάζουν τα ίδια τα παιδιά. Πιο συγκεκριμένα, η παρούσα εργασία εξετάζει το «πέρασμα» της προφορικότητας, δηλαδή στοιχείων του προφορικού λόγου, από το πεδίο της προφορικής επικοινωνίας στο πεδίο του γραπτού λόγου, δηλαδή στα γραπτά κείμενα των μαθητών και το κατά πόσο αυτά επηρεάζουν τη γενικότερη εικόνα του κειμένου τους.

For researchers of Greek traditional music, 1988 is regarded as a landmark year, as it coincides with the founding of the first public Music Secondary School in Greece. One of the innovations of these schools was the inclusion of Greek traditional instruments in their curricula, for the first time in a state educational institution. By September 2019, there were 47 such schools operating in most major Greek cities. During the first 30 years of their existence, Music Secondary Schools seem to have made an important contribution to the field of traditional music, as reflected by the significant number of graduates who are professionally active today –either as performers or teachers. It should be mentioned that the first teachers of traditional instruments in these schools were professionally active folk musicians, who had “learned” their art orally. Interestingly, as most of them had no previous formal training in music or pedagogy, they were given the title empirotechnis (εμπειροτέχνης), which can be translated as “craftsperson by experience”. A second attempt at the “institutionalization” of traditional music in Greece took place in 2000, when two university schools of music started offering bachelor’s degrees with this specialization, meeting a work-force need for “formally trained” teachers of traditional instruments. This paper explores the shift from informal to formal music teaching and learning of traditional Greek instruments by examining related studies over the last 30 years, with a special focus on methods of transmission.

Communicating the gospel across cultural barriers is an essential element of the Great Commission. Jesus mandated that his followers should go and make disciples of all the nations (Matt. 28:19a). The gospel was not limited to Israel, but it was good news for all peoples in all lands. Thus, beginning with Paul, Christians continue to take the gospel to πάντα τὰ ἔθνη.
Fluency in language and culture traditionally have been the benchmarks of  effectively engaging cultures in the task of teaching them to observe all that Jesus commanded (Matt. 28:20a). Missionaries have endeavored to inhabit the milieus in which they labor in order to transpose the message of the gospel in such a way that indigenous Christianity resulted with minimal levels of syncretism and apostasy. In recent decades, however, missionaries have been confronted with a another facet contextualizing the gospel into a culture.
More than 80 percent of the world’s population function within the orality framework. The prevalence of oral learners alone is sufficient stimulus to analyze the nature of orality. However, when one apprehends the extensive effect orality possesses in evangelization, discipleship, and church planting, impetus to address this issue becomes critical. Orality’s sweeping implications for missions cannot be ignored. Efficacious engagement of oral learners reaches beyond Bible storying to include an embodiment of the oral framework through deliberate adjustment of cognitive process, media selection, relational emphasis, and content structure.

DEVADASI LITERACY  - edited
The Subburatnamma Manuscript (ca. 1880) on the devadasi ritual repertoire in the Subrahmanyasvami temple in Tiruttani, and, its continued performance by Smt.P. Ranganayaki (*1914) until 1947.
This is the first lecture in the Online thematic weekend DEVADASI LITERACY organised by NrityaBodha SPARC Swarada Perfoming Arts and Research Centre, March 20 and 21, 2021 -  presented by Dr. Saskia Kersenboom on March, 20, 2021; the second lecture on Bhama Kalapam ad Golla Kalapam was presented by Dr. Yashoda Thakore.

The full Video recording containing the ritual song repertoire in Smt.P. Ranganayaki's voice, and voice over by Saskia Kersenboom, can be accessed at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4EdHg2sRho

INFO: https://www.paramparai.eu

Chronological Bible Storying is a young discipline in the field of missiology. Using narrative to communicate with primary and oral preference learners is a model older than the Bible. Jesus used oral models when He told narratives and parables to His audience of first-century Palestine because this is how they learned.

Textual based communication models have steadily increased in dominance since Gutenberg's invention of the moveable typeface printing press. This has led to the Bible being translated into many languages. Bible translation history shows that the primary purpose for translation was to communicate the Gospel in the vernacular for wider communicative impact on audiences. The purpose of Bible translation is clearer communication of God's Word.

Over the past hundred years, Bible translation has matured. Eugene Nida and others built upon the dynamic equivalence translation models of Martin Luther and established best practices of Bible translation, checking, and testing. Checking also included the role of translation consultants. These outsiders provide a third-party assessment of the translation principles used and the checking of written translations. Consultants play an integral part in the Bible translation process.

Chronological Bible Storying and other storying models have historically lacked the rigorous checking, testing, and consultation required by written Bible Translation. This dissertation explored and described the factors involved in the testing, checking, and consultant checking Bible translations and proposed a model for checking Bible stories and story sets based upon the best practices of written Bible Translation consultation.

Edited by John Miles Foley, 1986  As scholars discover the extent to which oral composition and transmission lie behind such works as the Bible, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the Anglo- Saxon Beowulf, the medieval Spanish Poem of the Cid, the Old French Song of Roland, the Middle English Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and many others, it has become crucial that we develop methods for reinterpreting these works. In this ground-breaking collection of essays, a group of eminent scholars, including Walter Ong and Albert Lord, takes up the challenge of reinterpreting these and other works in the light of what has lately been learned about their origins in oral tradition, pondering questions that are becoming increasingly important to the study of world literature. How do we “read” works of literature whose roots are firmly planted in oral tradition? What difference does a work’s orality make to its effective criticism, explanation, and study? By exploring these questions, the six essays included in this volume recapture essential meaning in our most cherished religious and literary works, looking at them in contexts that have been lost for centuries, reinvigorating the works with their original verbal energy. (This book was made available at the following website: https://www.pdfdrive.com/oral-tradition-in-literature-interpretation-in-context-d187560171.html)

In Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (1999), Peters charts the arc not of communication methods or technologies, but the way in which we conceive of communication. Not how do we communicate, but how have we thought about communicating. Hawking is invoked, on the one hand, because contemporary conceptualizations of narrative, in particular their trajectories through the 20th century, are the progeny of multifarious efforts to develop a science of narrative. On the other, Hawking’s seminal monograph, A Brief History of Time (1988), distills an impossibly immense subject -- the history of the universe -- into an impossibly compact space. Narrative may not be so sprawling an object of study as the entire cosmos, but it is, nonetheless, an expansive topic.
This paper represents an attempt to trace the variegated, interrelated, evolving, diffuse, and sometimes circuitous ways in which we conceive of narrative. This effort begins with a dispute between (who else?) Aristotle and Plato. Whereas Aristotle provided a rudimentary codification of narrative as form, Plato critiques its use. We then spring forward several millennia to find Georg Lukacs challenging the dominance of the Aristotelean framework, and anticipating by nearly a century Marie-Laure Ryan’s call for a “media-conscious narratology” (Ryan and Thon 4). I traverse the well-trod terrains of Russian Formalism and French Structuralism, and investigate how these movements and their devotees aspired to develop scrupulous empirical principles that would transform the study of narrative and literature into a science: narrative’s scientific turn. A Structuralist splinter faction turned their attention to temporal dynamics, laying the groundwork for narratology. Narratology focuses on the centrality of time (as both interior and exterior to narrative), narrative as a coagulant of historical and temporal coherence, and the twin influences of tradition and cultural context. As an important tangent to print-centric narratology, I discuss the recuperation of orality both as a formidable field in its own right, and as implicative of the importance of identifying medium-specific narrative affordances. In their indispensable accounts of oral storytelling systems, Albert Lord and Walter J. Ong illustrate how narrative, media, and cognition interrelate. Following orality, I provide a brief overview of how narrative theories and epistemologies filtered into other fields and disciplines such as postmodernism, historiography, and cognitive science. In the penultimate section, I will explore the dramatic narrative transmutations prompted by the ascendance of the computer, and the (still acrimonious) collision of stories and games. In closing, I will examine recent attempts to (once again) formulate a “unified theory” of narrative that can account for its protean, media-inflected instantiations, and I suggest several lines of inquiry for how the study of narrative might proceed from this point forward.

"The oldest records indicate that the performance of poetry in Gaelic Ireland was normally accompanied by music, providing a point of continuity with past tradition while bolstering a sense of community in the present. Music would also offer, particularly for poets writing in English from the eighteenth century onwards, a perceived authenticity, a connection with an older tradition perceived as being untarnished by linguistic and cultural division.

While providing an innovative analysis of theoretical work in music and literary studies, this book examines how traditional Irish music, including the related song tradition (primarily in Irish), has influenced, and is apparent in, the work of Irish poets. While looking generally at where this influence is evident historically and in contemporary Irish poetry, this work focuses primarily on the work of six poets, three who write in English and three who write primarily in the Irish language: Thomas Kinsella, Seamus Heaney, Ciaran Carson, Gearóid Mac Lochlainn, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Cathal Ó Searcaigh."

Al nome di Teognide di Megara è legata l’unica ampia raccolta di poesia monodica arcaica e classica a noi giunta per tradizione diretta: un insieme di elegie per un totale di poco più di 1400 versi, ai quali si devono aggiungere, per tradizione indiretta, almeno altre 4 elegie monodistiche (non considerando altri versi di dubbia attribuzione). Il testimone più antico di questa raccolta è il cod. A (Parisin. Bibl. Nat. Suppl. Graec. 388), del X secolo, pubblicato nel 1815; nella cosiddetta elegia del "sigillo", collocata più o meno all’inizio della raccolta (vv. 19-26), esso presenta l’affermazione: «sono versi di Teognide il Megarese» (v. 22 sg.). Il cod. A appare diviso in due libri A e B, di cui il secondo scompare nei testimoni recenziori della tradizione manoscritta: oggi si ritiene che il libro B sia una selezione delle elegie erotiche, operata in età bizantina (IX-X sec. d. C.). Teognide è noto come autore di elegie, radunate in una raccolta scritta, almeno a partire dal tardo V secolo a. C.: suoi versi vengono citati o imitati da Ferecrate, Crizia il tiranno, Senofonte, e da Platone, che ne parla come di un autore ben conosciuto e stimato. Secondo la Suda (X sec. d. C.), Teognide è vissuto nel VI sec. a. C. e ha scritto elegie per un totale di 2800 versi, come ammaestramenti morali per il suo giovane amante Cirno. È solo a metà del 1500 che si notano dei difetti nella raccolta di Teognide: alcune elegie sono assegnate dalla tradizione indiretta ad altri autori (Tirteo, Mimnermo, Solone), un certo numero di poesie è stranamente ripetuto due volte nella raccolta, e il disordine tematico regna ovunque. Si comincia dunque a dubitare che quanto tramandato sotto il nome di Teognide sia effettivamente tutto suo, e nasce la moderna Questione teognidea. La raccolta viene interpretata come un corpus, dal momento che non tutte le poesie possono essere del poeta Teognide, e il problema cui si cerca a lungo di dare risposta (principalmente nel XIX e nel XX secolo) è quello di come questo corpus si sia costituito: la risposta che generalmente viene data è che il corpus teognideo è un’antologia, formata per aggregazione di due, o tre, o quattro, oppure molteplici fonti, in un’epoca variamente identificata (le proposte vanno dallo scorcio del VI sec. a. C. alla tarda età bizantina). Sono state però individuate anche sequenze di elegie che devono ricondursi alle recitazioni simposiali dell’età greca arcaica: esse mostrano che la costituzione di almeno buona parte del corpus si deve ad un apporto simposiale molto antico, e possono far interpretare l’intero corpus come una raccolta nata dalla registrazione scritta di varie elegie eseguite oralmente nei simposi.
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The relation between Mark and John, the Bi-Optic Gospels, is one of the most difficult and most important subjects in biblical studies. Upon correct inferences of this set of intratraditional and intertraditional relationships many other judgments falter or stand. Seeking to make an advance over monodimensional source- and redaction-critical theories, an overall theory of Markan-Johannine interfluentiality identifies at least six stages in the developments within and between these two traditions, seeking to make the best sense of their textual similarities and differences. Along the way, several advances are argued over prevalent critical approaches, leading to an assessment of John’s relation to Mark as being interfluential in the oral stages of their traditions, augmentive and corrective to Mark in John’s first edition as “the second gospel”, and harmonizing - in that the final edition of John tends to reconcile itself with the other Markan Gospels. As the final Markan interpolation includes Johannine content, interfluentiality indeed continues. In service to an overall theory of interfluentiality stands Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of polyvalent dialogism, applicable to historical narratives as well as fictive ones, wherein answerability within the cognitive experience of authors seeks to reconcile disparities between life and art. In that sense, an ongoing history of dialectical engagement between these bi-optic renderings of Jesus’ ministry inform also a broader understanding of John’s distinctive relations to the Lukan, Q, and Matthean traditions, and most importantly to their common subject: Jesus.

This article is the second part in a series. It shows that the Old Norse term hrímþurs, often translated 'frost-ogre' or 'frost-giant' in English, was a poetic term as a variation on the archaic and obscure poetic term þurs (addressed in part I) that was employed for h-alliteration. After reviewing the limited poetic examples, the article shows that this term was strategically correlated with hrím ['rime, frost'] as a prime element of the world-creation in Snorri Sturluson's 13th century mythography, where hrímþurs is otherwise uniquely elevated to a distinct ethnonym. This construction of a mythic ethnic category is placed in
dialogue with other places where Snorri seems to have elevated or created a term and constructed a mythic ethnos in Edda. This discussion is put forward as a frame for considering whether Snorri also constructed the category of gods called ‘Vanir’, the controversial topic of the so-called Vanir Debate.

The following is a pre-distributed paper discussed in the Gospel of Mark Section at the 2018 National Meeting of the SBL in Denver, CO.

The publication of Werner Kelber’s The Oral and the Written Gospel was a watershed moment not only for media-critical approaches to Mark, but for the study of the gospel generally. Kelber’s seminal monograph, however, has often been charged with propagating the so-called Great Divide approach to orality and textuality. Recent interpreters have distanced themselves from any perspective that claims that these modalities of communication are mutually exclusive or competing. Instead, these interpreters emphasize that orality and textuality interfaced in a complex manner in both the production and reception of texts. Yet there is little clarity about how this plays out at the ground level. The question of how a text like the Gospel of Mark simultaneously exhibits evidence of both oral and textual influence often goes unanswered. This paper aims to answer that question at the levels of both production and reception. It suggests that Mark existed (and still exists) at the borderland of orality and textuality. It is a “textualized oral narrative” composed via dictation. As such, there will have been multiple receptions of it, oral, aural, and literary, in antiquity. By proposing this thesis, I attempt to move further beyond the dichotomous terms that theories about the production and reception of Mark are often constructed in. The paper suggests that Mark will have been read performatively to groups and will also have been literarily received by individuals, rather than suggesting one mode of reception over and against the other. This thesis is argued on four counts. First, the linguistic style of Mark resembles spoken narratives, and this can be substantiated by modern sociolinguistic research. Second, the opening words of Mark, and specifically the term “gospel,” indicate that it is orally proclaimed news. Only after Mark was committed to the textual medium did this term come to refer to a literary genre. Mark’s existence at the borderland between orality and textuality helps to explain this development of the word. Third, early historical testimony from the likes of Papias, Clement, and Eusebius alleges that Mark was both produced and received as a tertium quid between writing and speaking. And fourth, several Markan exegetical “problems,” such as the location of the swine miracle in Mark 5 and the mix-up of Ahimelech and Abiathar’s names in Mark 2, and the solutions provided by the later Synoptic authors are less problematic when one understands Mark as a textualized oral narrative.

Il presente contributo intende sviluppare alcune riflessioni storiografiche riguardanti il modo in cui il rapporto tra predicazione e Inquisizione è stato affrontato negli ultimi decenni dagli storici italiani e stranieri in riferimento alla prima età moderna. Allo stesso tempo si prefigge di mettere a fuoco alcuni dei problemi metodologici con cui la storiografia si è misurata e dovrà in futuro confrontarsi per sfruttare a pieno le potenzialità di un campo, quello della relazione tra predicatori e inquisitori, ancora in parte da esplorare. In alcuni casi il saggio affronta direttamente, in maniera direi più tradizionale, le questioni storiografiche e metodologiche; in altri casi, la maggior parte, introduce il lettore ai temi del dibattito storiografico e della riflessione metodologica attraverso il filtro degli avvenimenti della storia religiosa del Cinquecento e dei personaggi che ne hanno animato la vicenda. Per necessità di spazio e per le limitate competenze dell'autore l'oggetto delle pagine che il lettore ha tra le mani è circoscritto al Cinquecento, il secolo peraltro in cui il rapporto tra predicazione e Inquisizione si fece più stretto e problematico. Senza la minima pretesa di esaustività, l'intento è dunque quello di tracciare alcune linee di sviluppo storiografico e indicare all'attenzione del dibattito scientifico alcuni nodi problematici che tale campo di studi solleva.

This article for the first time gauges traces of orality in the 13th- and 14th-century Frisian law texts with the help of Ong's nine features. Ample attention is also paid to riddles,  wise men, proverbial wisdom, remembrancers, performance, ritual, teaching the law, communal traditions, appealing to the past and identity.

This contribution aims to establish a graphematic theory of medieval writing and to demonstrate that the graphic signs admit, like any other level of language, a historical analysis through the parameters of variational linguistics. This work defines four areas of language where the variation of spelling and punctuation occurs and puts forward the example of several manuscripts, covering the periods of the Old and the Middle French. The diamesic axis refers to the relations of correspondence or autonomy between the phonic and the graphic substances of language. The enunciative parameter concerns the relations of the written form to the recording of reported speech. The diastratic parameter is related to the variation of register between prestigious graphs or less valued graphs. The conceptional parameter allows for the classification of the punctuation traditions in relation to the textual typology established by Koch and Oesterreicher  (2001), which opposes the linguistic forms proper to immediate communication and those specific to language of distance.

Talk given at the 1995 Kirchberg am Wechsel International Wittgenstein Symposium. Attempting to answer the question why Plato was so significant for Wittgenstein. An expanded version of this talk was published in *Grazer Philosophische Studien*, 1996/97.

We will probably never know if Homer has existed of not. But the question of how Iliad and Odyssey were composed it not an idle one. Those epics are probably the collective work of illiterate singer who, generation after generation, have transformed what had been transmitted to them. Their songs came to be dictated to scribes and eventually given a more or less fixed form by Alexandrine grammarians. Hence the importance of comparing Homeric epics and other oral poetries. IT is the aim of this book, in which, after a critical reappraisal of Milman Parry’s and Albert Lord’s works, evokes Arabian archaic poetries, touaregs contemporary poetries, and medieval troubadours lyrics.

In Charlemagne’s Survey of the Holy Land, Michael McCormick rehabilitates and reinterprets one of the most neglected and extraordinary sources from Charlemagne’s revival of the Roman empire: the report of a fact-finding mission to the Christian church of the Holy Land. The roll of documents translated and edited in this volume preserves the most detailed statistical portrait before the Domesday Book of the finances, monuments (including exact dimensions), and female and male personnel of any major Christian church.

Setting these documents in the context of economic trends, archaeological evidence, and a comparison of Holy Land churches and monasteries with their contemporaries west and east, this study shows that the Palestinian church was living in decline as its old financial links with Byzantium slackened. In recounting Charlemagne’s move to outflank the Byzantine emperor, McCormick constructs a microhistory of the Frankish king’s ambitions and formidable organizational talents for running an empire.

Supplementing McCormick’s major synthesis, The Origins of the European Economy, this volume will be indispensable reading for anyone interested in medieval rulership and economics, and in the history of the Holy Land, its Christian communities, and its late antique monuments.


"At its worst, microhistory is merely antiquarian button counting. But at its best, as exemplified here, small things serve as touchstones for studies of wider-ranging significance. McCormick examines the Basel Roll, a ninth-century manuscript relating the information gathered by envoys of Charlemagne, who inquired into the financial needs of churches in and around Jerusalem. The roll preserves three documents that provide personnel numbers and sizes of building roofs in area churches and monasteries, as well as partial annual expenditures for the patriarch of Jerusalem...McCormick shows that the Jerusalem church had shrunk since late antiquity; that contemporary Frankish houses were larger and richer; and that Einhard did not exaggerate Charlemagne's interest in faraway Christian communities. Among the many strengths of the book is the full-size facsimile of the Basel Roll included as a stand-alone poster. (C. J. Chandler Choice 2012-11-01)"

In recent years, evangelicals have gained greater appreciation for the needs of oral learners. In particular, people increasingly realize the importance storying in theological instruction. This contrasts traditional, reading intensive methods. In effect, evangelical ministries, such as the International Orality Network (ION), shift our focus from the “what” question to the “how” question.  Rather than debating the content of our message (“what”), we now consider the way (“how”) we convey the truth.

Although communication and application are critical, they are not most fundamental to contextualization.  As I have argued elsewhere, contextualization begins at the level of interpretation, which is dependent on worldview. How often do we overlook the cultural lens through which we reach our theological conclusions? We desperately need humility to acknowledge how denominational and organizational subcultures can mislead us into “theological syncretism,” whereby we confuse the gospel with our theological tradition.

We address worldviews by asking “why” questions. Worldview questions involve our rationale (Why do we believe this?) and heart (Why is this important?). We need to consider a number of more basic issues before asking, “What stories should we tell?” (information) or “How do we tell them?” (technique). “Why” concerns understanding; thus, it determines and shapes application (i.e. what? how?).

Oral cultures tend to share certain characteristics. For instance, many oral learners have an “honor-shame” worldview. By contrast, western missionaries are likely to emphasize themes like law and guilt. Even if the latter have good doctrine (“what” should we believe?) and strong communication skills (“how” to tell a story), a more basic problem remains. They do not speak the same “worldview language.” Therefore, missionaries may not answer the key “why” questions that matter most to oral learners. Worse still is that the missionaries potentially convey the notion that the Bible mainly speaks about Western concerns.

In this paper, I will briefly answer two important “why” questions. First, why do oral learners think the way they do? Second, why are honor and shame important for gospel ministry? I will conclude by suggesting a few applications for theological education.

Nel passaggio dal mythos al logos è un intero polimorfo universo a eclissarsi, popolato da divinità, culti, epifanie, riti, preghiere e canti, che lasciano il posto al muto e silenzioso rigore della ragione, motore di un sapere laico e secolarizzato. Questo passaggio di consegne -con cui il sacro si ritira da un'ampia parte della sfera pubblica sempre più colonizzata da una cultura e da una logica profane -prende avvio in un'epoca e in una regione determinate. Il pensiero razionale, come noto, sorge in Grecia circa due millenni e mezzo fa. Nasce con la filosofia, che scalza l'antica sapienza mitologica, per poi svilupparsi nei secoli attraverso la scienza e la tecnica, sino a diffondersi su scala planetaria. Là dove il logos si fa strada, miti e riti scompaiono oppure sopravvivono nel ristretto ambito della «religione». A cosa è dovuta questa profonda trasformazione culturale che fa tutt'uno con la perdita del sacro? Per comprendere le ragioni della secolarizzazione, processo che si muove di pari passo con la diffusione e lo sviluppo della logica e della cultura occidentali, conviene prendere le mosse dall'originario senso sacrale che permea la vita e la cultura delle civiltà più arcaiche. Se risaliamo all'esperienza dei primordi ogni cosa è un'epifania divina, una manifestazione del sacro, e non c'è attività umana che non ne sia coinvolta. Agli albori della civiltà non esiste dunque la «religione», come insieme di precetti, dogmi e credenze, né come sfera del culto distinta da attività profane. Nel mondo dei primordi tutto è originariamente una ierofania, una «rivelazione» dell'ordine cosmologico-sacrale insito nelle cose. Qualche breve esempio può essere utile a rievocare l'esperienza primordiale del sacro, così come era vissuta dall'uomo arcaico. Il cielo e la terra sono sacri. Sacra, dunque, è anche la città, concepita come punto di contatto tra il mondo celeste degli dei e quello terreno degli uomini mortali (uno dei tanti nomi dell'antica città di Babilonia significa appunto «legame tra cielo e terra»). La città è una imago mundi, una rappresentazione in piccolo del mondo, un microcosmo che ripete al proprio interno le leggi del macrocosmo. Perciò, fondare una città non consiste semplicemente nell'erigere case e palazzi, ma richiede un insieme di formule e rituali caratteristici, a partire dal sulcus primigenius con cui vengono tracciate le prime fondamenta. Grazie a Plutarco sappiamo che nella fondazione di Roma fu probabilmente tracciato, come modello primitivo, un quadrato iscritto in un cerchio: si tratta di figure concentriche di valore cosmico-sacrale che troviamo non solo alla base delle città dell'Italia antica, ma anche in quelle dell'Africa settentrionale e occidentale e dei monasteri del buddhismo tibetano. Le figure vengono tracciate attraverso un cerimoniale che, nel caso della popolazione africana Mande, ad esempio, prevede il sacrificio di un toro e l'erezione di un altare. Poiché la città è un'immagine del mondo, la sua fondazione richiama la creazione del cosmo e il centro a partire da cui la si erige è simbolicamente il centro dell'universo. Come ha osservato Mircea Eliade, «la cosmogonia è il modello tipologico di tutte le costruzioni, e ogni città, ogni nuova casa che si costruisce, imita ancora una volta, e in un certo senso ripete,

Anlatı, zaman, mekan, hatırlama, söz, yazı, bellek, kültür, bilinç, değişim ve benzerleri ve diğerleri... Yirminci yüzyılla beraber sosyal bilimlerde bu kavramlardan azade kalabilmiş bir çalışma ve çalışma alanı bulabilmek güç. Bunlar arasında son kuramsal bakış açılarını ifade eden bir deyim olarak kabul edilebilecek “bellek”, “küçük” anlatıların, sözlü tarihin, geleneğin, geçmiş ve gelecek tahayyülünün dikkate değer bulunduğu bir zamanda, sosyal bilimlerin bakiyesini bütünüyle içerebilecek bir kavram olma iddiası ile gün yüzüne çıkmıştır. Beden, imge, söz ve yazıdaki temsil biçimlerinin bellekle olan ilişkisinin inceleme alanı olarak önemsenmesinin yanısıra yeniden temsil özelliği kazanması da bellek çalışmalarını önemli kılmıştır.

Bu çalışmada halkbilimi, felsefe, antropoloji, sosyoloji ve psikoloji gibi birçok farklı disiplinden hareketle sözlü-yazılı kültür, hatırlama ve bellek kavramlarına yaklaşılıyor. M. Emir İlhan, imge, dil, zaman ve mekân algısındaki; bilinç ve düşünme biçimlerindeki ve bellek kullanımlarındaki değişimleri tespit etmeye koyuluyor. İlk defa “hatırlama”yı bireysel-toplumsal-kültürel-halkbilimsel bir model inşa ederek irdeliyor. Sözlü kültürden yazılı kültüre bilincin yaşadığı dönüşümleri, hatırlamanın zaman, mekân, anlatı, anlatıcı ve anlatının araçları ile ilişkisi üzerinden çözümlüyor. Ayrıca kültürel süreklilik bağlamında sözlü ve yazılı kültürün gelenekle olan karşılıklı ilişki biçimleri ile hatırlamanın gelenekle kurduğu bağa; kolektif bellekten kültürel belleğe geçişin gelenek kavramı üzerindeki etkilerine değiniyor.