The Orality of Knowledge
Throughout the later Middle Ages both the formation and the transmission of knowledge were typically oral. The obverse of this coin is that an extremely small number of written texts were recognized as speaking with authority.
At the head of this list were the Gospels, which, as both “Scripture” and “scripture,” were writing par excellence. “Holy Writ” was placed on the altar as an expression and confirmation of the idea that those writings were the books of the faith, sacred for their stamp of divine authority and for the precious truths they contained and preserved. Next to the books of the Truth were the books of Justice. In both cases, these works merited their place out of the conviction that those books, those “scriptures,” gave at least a glimpse of the eternal dimensions of the Truth and Justice whose foil understanding and total admiration would be the reward in Heaven of only the best of humankind.The jurist’s books were those of the Corpus iuris civilis. Soon, however (around the mid-twelfth century), the list began to grow, because Gratian’s Decretum was awarded the same dignity. It was followed, somewhat later, by some of the church codifications that eventually went into the Corpus iuris canonici.
Thus an utrumque ius (“the one” and “the other” law, civil and canon) was enclosed within a limited number of volumes, while all around them there was an irrepressible, rampant, and necessarily oral interpretation.
On the one hand, there were the authoritative sacred books, works worthy of a place on the altar. Legend even has it that one famous jurist, Jacopo Baldovini (Jacobus Balduini), intent on understanding a passage in Justinian’s compilation, placed the book of human laws beside the divine book on the altar and spent the entire night before them on his knees praying to God for guidance and comfort.[116]
On the other hand, there was the spoken word, free or guided by schemes of argumentation, by “forms,” and by molds, but always unmediated and always essential for the construction and diffusion of knowledge. As Rofffedus Beneventanus put it,[117] the spoken word had something magical about it because it permitted an immediate, ready communication, whereas an inert and cold written text might act as a resistant, difficult screen between the person thinking and attempting to communicate and the person reflecting and attempting to understand.
This conviction was no less widespread than the habit itself: “From what one hears,” Humbert de Romans stated as early as the thirteenth century, “one obtains an excellent result, which is sapientia. In no other way, in fact, can man make himself more wise than by what he listens to.”[118]
An acute sensitivity to oral communication inspired brilliant investigations. Reading, Hugo of Saint Victor wrote, is of three sorts: it is one thing for the person who is teaching, another for the person who is listening, and yet another for someone who meditates on the writings. None of these three moments was independent of the others, because each one adjusted to and was shaped by their three-way relationship. The person speaking addressed the person listening, the listener selected what he could apprehend, and anyone reflecting on the few authoritative written texts available knew that both his reading and his reaction to what he read would correlate with those of others.[119]
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