Textual Communities, Textual Selves

Textual Communities, Textual Selves assembles a collection of studies investigating ways that textual practices in the classical and medieval periods generated collective and individual expressions of identity. Engaging in dialogue with Brian Stock's contributions to the history of literacy, the essays initiate new conversations about models of interpretation, habits of reading, textual communities, and forms of self-writing.

The first group of essays, featuring Seth Lerer, Paul Saenger, and Sarah Spence, not only reflects upon the influence of Stock's Augustine the Reader, but also examines Augustine's innovative handling of texts within the literary culture of Late Antiquity. The following group, authored by John Magee, Constant J. Mews, and Marcia L. Colish, responds to The Implications of Literacy by examining ways that the reinterpretation of inherited texts can generate philosophical schools, social reformists, and textual communities. Subsequent contributions by Willemien Otten and Sarah Powrie investigate textual expressions of created nature and thereby build upon the work of Myth and Science in the Twelfth Century.

The last three essays by Gur Zak, Jane Tylus, and Catherine Conybeare explore Augustine's enduring influence beyond the medieval period, as evidenced in the writings of Giovanni Conversini, Catherine of Sienna, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. In so doing, these authors advance the frameworks of After Augustine and Listening for the Text. Personal tributes by Aviad Kleinberg and Natalie Zemon Davis bookend the volume, with each author recollecting fragments of conversations that have shaped a decades-long friendship with the honoree.