Brian Stock is Professor of History and Comparative Literature, University of Toronto. He is author of The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries; Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation; and After Augustine: The Meditative Reader and the Text, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

"A challenging and informative work." (South Atlantic Review) "Indispensable as a case study of the problems and promise of writing cultural history from a truly comparative and interdisciplinary point of view." (Comparative Literature Studies)

• PrefaceAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Orality, Literacy, and the Sense of the PastCh. 1. History, Literature, TextualityCh. 2. Medieval Literacy, Linguistic Theory, and Social OrganizationCh. 3. Romantic Attitudes and Academic MedievalismCh. 4. Literary Discourse and the Social HistorianCh. 5. Language and Culture: Saussure, Ricoeur, and FoucaultCh. 6. Max Weber, Western Rationality, and the Middle AgesCh. 7. Textual Communities: Judaism, Christianity, and the Definitional ProblemCh. 8. Tradition and Modernity: Models from the PastNotesIndex

Brian Stock is Professor of History and Comparative Literature, University of Toronto. He is author of The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries; Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation; and After Augustine: The Meditative Reader and the Text, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

"A challenging and informative work." (South Atlantic Review) "Indispensable as a case study of the problems and promise of writing cultural history from a truly comparative and interdisciplinary point of view." (Comparative Literature Studies)

• PrefaceAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Orality, Literacy, and the Sense of the PastCh. 1. History, Literature, TextualityCh. 2. Medieval Literacy, Linguistic Theory, and Social OrganizationCh. 3. Romantic Attitudes and Academic MedievalismCh. 4. Literary Discourse and the Social HistorianCh. 5. Language and Culture: Saussure, Ricoeur, and FoucaultCh. 6. Max Weber, Western Rationality, and the Middle AgesCh. 7. Textual Communities: Judaism, Christianity, and the Definitional ProblemCh. 8. Tradition and Modernity: Models from the PastNotesIndex