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Mark Amodio’s book focuses on the influence of the oral tradition on written vernacular verse produced in England from the fifth to the fifteenth century. His primary aim is to explore how a living tradition articulated only through the public, performance voices of pre-literate singers came to find expression through the pens of private, literate authors. Amodio argues that the expressive economy of oral poetics survives in written texts because, throughout the Middle Ages, literacy and orality were interdependent, not competing, cultural forces.
After delving into the background of the medieval oral-literate matrix, Writing the Oral Tradition develops a model of non-performative oral poetics that is a central, perhaps defining, component of Old English vernacular verse. Following the Norman Conquest, oral poetics lost its central position and became one of many ways to articulate poetry. Contrary to many scholars, Amodio argues that oral poetics did not disappear but survived well into the post-Conquest period. It influenced the composition of Middle English verse texts produced from the twelfth to the fourteenth century because it offered poets an affectively powerful and economical way to articulate traditional meanings. Indeed, fragments of oral poetics are discoverable in contemporary prose, poetics, and film as they continue to faithfully emit their traditional meanings.
Writing the Oral Tradition will appeal to specialists and students interested in medieval literature, medieval cultural studies, and oral theory.
“Mark Amodio charts fascinating continuities and fragmentations between Anglo-Saxon oral poetics and those of the 12th and 13th centuries. Beginning with an overview of the expressive economy central to Anglo-Saxon oral poetics—for example, how a simplex such as belgan + mod functions in terms of conventional expectations and within an affective dynamics that can override some conventional details—Amodio shows in small ways and in large how an oral poetics influences the stylistic character of Old English verse no matter what the source texts might be. However, that only generates the beginning of this remarkable foray into continuities between Anglo-Saxon and post-Conquest poetics. The study's heart is its exploration of manuscript appearance (as with pointing) and poetical texts exhibiting Anglo-Saxon kinds of practices, thematics, metrical arrangements and lexical collocations. One of the key texts here is Layamon's Brut and some of the thematics and collocations involve words for rage, boasting, ritual behavior in the hall, leadership and anger. The continuities Amodio explicates are compelling, as are the eventual departures he documents. More than a major contribution, Writing the Oral Tradition is an exciting renovation within the burgeoning field of English 12th and 13th-century studies.” —John M. Hill, U.S. Naval Academy
Mark C. Amodio is professor of English at Vassar College.