Yes ... I remember President Clinton carrying one when he went to church. You bind them in black leather; I think their purpose is to enable the Worshipper to check that the homilist is not pulling a fast one.
In 1998, an English Anglican academic called Catherine Pickstock published a book called After Writing; on the Liturgical Consummation of Philosphy. Described brutally, it upholds Orality as against Literacy. The spoken word has priority over the written. Using the tools generated by her philosophical discussion, she argues for the profoundly flawed character of the 'Liturgy' which emerged in the West after Vatican II. She exhibits the laudably oral character of the previous Classical Roman Rite. And, in doing so, she writes "In the Middle Ages, 'the Bible' was not conceived as a singular entity but was dispersed into several manuscripts, often surrounded by commentaries and allegorical representations. However, printing allowed the emergence of the Bible as a discrete written artefact, which encouraged a Protestant sense of it as an authority over against the Church."
After all, the very word 'Bible' comes from a Greek plural indicating a plurality of 'books'. We need to remember that the 'codex' ... our 'book' with leaves or pages ... can encompass very considerably more text than a poor old-fashioned scroll.
Pickstock, I'm afraid, rather likes Greek jargon and neologisms. She enjoys handling Plato. So she writes "the written word will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it. It is an aid to reminding (hupomneseos) and not to memory (mnemes)". She refers to "Plato's preference for the oral word", and to "the oral mythic tradition, with all its chains of supplementation, alteration, and arrival from without".
The Socrates of the Phaedrus, she argues, "supplies a myth to illustrate the dangers of displacing speech by writing, as inimical to the philosophic exercise of memory of the good and the practice of dialectic. The critique of writing is therefore closely linked with an assault upon the sophists ...".
Before printing, medieval man and woman lived in, swam in the waters of, were deeply marked by, gobbled up, couldn't get enough of, a profoundly and inescapably oral culture. The devotion to the Holy Cross offers an example of how such a culture, in practice, really could and did work. So, on May 3, si vivimus, we shall break off, for a moment, from celebrating Mary's Month of May, so as to enjoy the exquisite festival of the Inventio of the Holy Cross. No; I am not going to thrust a lot of Dream-of-the-Rood stuff down your throats, splendid though it all is. You probably know it already.
Instead, on this blog it will be something that I think is perhaps a tadge jollier.
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