The Ethnography of Scribal Writing and Anglo-Saxon Poetry: Scribe as Performer

Abstract

What is the nature of writing and what is the role of the scribe in a culture in which speech has not lost its primacy? If we think of Anglo-Saxon scribal writing in terms of "ethnopoetics," we can think of human responses to the voice, of a scribe obeying the somatic imperatives voice imposes, with text being as much act, event, gesture, as it is thing or product, with its origins not just in prior texts, but in memory and context.