LITERACY AND LATINITY IN ANTIQUITY AND THE MIDDLE AGES
Organized by Maura Lafferty, Villanova University

[Panel as described in Call for Papers]
One major area in which medievalists (for example, Saenger, Clanchy and Stock) and classicists (for example, Parry, Lord, Havelock, Harris) have engaged in fruitful debate has been the study of literacy. Theoreticians of literacy, most notably, perhaps, Ong, have combined ancient and medieval material to form the basis for their theories.  Antiquity and the Middle Ages have many commonalities which set them apart from modernity and which, together, puncture many modern assumptions about the nature of literacy and illiteracy.¹ These commonalities include the co-existence of a strong oral culture and a literate one, a population combining numerous illiterates mixed in with a relatively small number of literates, and an association of literacy and of certain forms of Latinity with power and the power-wielding institutions of each period. The differences between the periods have seemed great -- most notably, some have argued, in the Christians' emphasis on Scripture, and thus reading, as central to religion. Even here, however, there has been fruitful debate.² Moreover, recent studies, among them the collections of essays in Bowman and Woolf, Literacy and Power in the Ancient World, McKitterick's Carolingians and the Written Word, the essays collected in Britnell's Pragmatic Literacy, East and West (1997), as well as Youtie's work on the evidence  of papyri in Egypt, suggest that scholars of both fields are grappling with similar issues, among them the differing roles of literacy for the poor and the elite, for native Latin-speakers and for non-native users of Latin, the use of literacy for pragmatic, non-literary purposes by both the elite and the lower classes, not to mention the complexities of the relationship between oral and written cultures and languages. Indeed, with the movement of classicists into the Late Antique period and beyond, the temporal span covered by classicists and medievalists who work on literacy increasingly overlaps. This session will provide a comparative forum for students of Latin literacy in both periods.

Christos Nifadopoulos, University of Cambridge
Priscian in Constantinople: Transforming Hellenismos into Latinitas

Jocelyn Penny Small, Rutgers University
Artists and Literacy: The Vatican Vergil

Dorothy Verkerk, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Early Medieval Learning, Literacy, and Looking

Michael C. Tinkler, Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Reading the Writing on the Walls of Carolingian Francia

Sarah Powrie, University of Toronto
Oral and Literate Traditions in Twelfth-Century Scholastic Traditions

Respondent: John Miles Foley, University of Missouri, Columbia