Abstract
What forgotten forms can philology assume anew? Reassessing how early medieval writers loved words differently than we do reveals significant gaps between past and present senses of the physical phenomena that words can index. In Old English texts, for example, language serves as a gateway for a largely unmapped network of sounds, senses, bodies and media: how the mute sound of a bell and the crook of a silent finger come together in monastic sign language, or how the Old English word for ring becomes a weeping, poetic gasp within a heaving breast. Such early medieval moments of communication survive because of language and in spite of language; they qualify the visualist framework through which we reconstitute the medieval past, calling, sotto voce, for more than lovely words.
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Notes
‘Tunc vero illa nausea ac vomitio laborata in omnigenum copias convertitur literarum. Cernere erat, qui libri quantaque volumina, quot linguarum opera ex ore virginis diffluebant. Alia ex papyro, quae cedro perlita fuerat, videbantur, alii carbasinis voluminibus implicati libri, ex ovillis multi quoque tergoribus, rari vero in philyrae cortice subnotati.’ Unless otherwise noted, all translations of Latin and Old English are my own.
Analogously, see Evans (2010) and Seaman (2007).
Other relevant sections of the Rule include De Taciturnitate [‘Silence,’ Section 6] and Ut Post Completorium Nemo Loquatur [‘Nobody is to Speak After Compline,’ Section 42].
Sidwell, 1995, 12n7. Venarde makes a similar note: ‘since there is to be complete silence, the sound must be metaphorical’ (2011, 263n56). Bruce discusses the possibility that the use of sonitu in the Rule derives from an earlier practice of auditory signals and perhaps sound-making devices to communicate (2009, 60–61). The hand-signals in the Monasteriales Indicia, however, indicate sonitu in medieval England refers to less overtly auditory phenomena.
For example, Boniface Verheyen’s popular English version: ‘If, however, anything should be wanted, let it be asked for by means of a sign of any kind rather than a sound’ (1949, Chapter 38, ‘Of the Weekly Reader,’ 93); or a French version of the Rule [Saint Benôit Règle] (2007, Chapter 38, ‘Le Lecteur de Semaine’), accessible through the Order of Saint Benedict’s website: ‘Pourtant, si on a besoin de quelque chose, on le demande par un signe plutôt que par la parole’ (Chapter 38, ‘Le Lecteur de Semaine’).
For example, Williamson, 1977, 313; Krapp and Dobbie, 1936, 357; Bitterli, 2009, 129; Muir, 2006, ‘Riddle 59, Sources and Solutions.’
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Foys, M. A sensual philology for Anglo-Saxon England. Postmedieval 5, 456–472 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2014.37
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2014.37