Listening For The Text: On The Uses Of The Past

Listening for a wide range of medieval and modern texts, Stock studies the ways in which the growth of interest in language in the Middle Ages forms the background to the contemporary study of oral and literate culture. He discusses the possibilities opened by new forms of cooperation between history and literature and explores the role that medieval linguistic theory played in shaping modern social categories; the legacy of Romanticism in our conceptualization of the Middle Ages; the use of literary discourse in the writing of social history; the problem of textual communities in early Christianity and Judaism; and the concepts of tradition and modernity that emerge from cultural anthropology.

"Ours is largely an ahistorical world. And yet we take history very seriously. The more remote the past becomes, the more we seem to concern ourselves with understanding it. We are no longer linked to our ancestors through common material conditions. If earlier ages still have a hold on us, it is through our thoughts about them.
"The essays in this volume are about a segment of the past that runs roughly from the end of antiquity to the thirteenth century. More generally, they are about recollecting the past by putting words into writings. They are equally about the past that is written about and the writing that brings it to life. In other words, they deal with the creation of the past as text."--from the Introduction