Orality and Scribal Culture in the High Middle Ages

New guidelines for editing, reading, and interpreting Scholastic texts of the High Middle Ages.This book highlights the interplay between vestigial orality and scribal culture in Scholastic texts of the High Middle Ages. Apart from Thomas Aquinas and a few others who exercised complete control over their texts, the surviving works of most medieval Scholastic masters – copied and recopied many times – retain traces of the oral settings in which they originated. This book presents hundreds of examples from texts spanning the entire High Middle Ages, showing editors and readers of Scholastic texts how to recognize and account for difficulties arising from the vestigial orality embedded in them, and how to recognize and interpret textual anomalies attributable to multi-stage copying following original lectures.