Mystic Writing and the Science of the Letter: Anglo-Saxon Literacy and the Materiality of the Sign

FAIN: FT-54804-07

Edward John Christie
Columbia College, Missouri (Columbia, MO 65216-0001)

This project examines important literary representations of writing that have remained unusually unstudied in the orality-literacy debate. By analyzing representations of the materiality of writing in hagiography, legal documents, literary riddles, and grammatical treatises, this project demonstrates the depth and consistency of the Anglo-Saxon preoccupation with writing as a sign-system which is at once conventional and absolute, material and transcendent.