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.