This book gathers essays in dialogue with the writings of Brian Stock, many first presented at a colloquium held in his honor in 2019. Each maintains its originality while making clear the debts owed to Stock’s capacious output. Taking her inspiration from Stock’s first monograph, Myth and Science in the Twelfth Century: A Study of Bernard Silvester (Princeton, 1972), Willemien Otten responds to Stock’s resistance to treating myth and science in theCosmographia in either/or terms. Otten affirms Stock’s more fluid conception of these categories, understanding myth and science to offer a porous view of nature that thrives on creative tensions. In the Philosophia, the Dragmaticon, and in his glosses on the Timaeus, William of Conches understands nature to be a conduit per creaturas ad creatorem, while Hildegard of Bingen’s visions in the Scivias reveal nature’s potentials and flaws within an unbroken whole. Both thinkers gesture toward an integrative view of the macrocosm and the microcosm, allowing for varied correspondences between human and cosmic life. Examining the workings of nature energizes the equilibrium of inner and outer worlds, and human selfhood is thus illuminated in fresh ways.
Stock’s intuition about the fluidity of myth and science runs in tandem with a notion of “reform” in the Cosmographia explored by Sarah Powrie, who argues that the metaphysical allegory of Bernard’s Megacosmus stages a psychological drama attending to the personal struggle for self-reform. In this fashioning, Bernard relies on the Confessions, in which the progressive unfolding of the universe is paired with a self-reflexive spiritual autobiography. The narrative of cosmic reform in the Megacosmus has ethical implications that become clear in the Microcosmus, where the disorder of Silva betokens human error. Bernard’s allegory of creation, therefore, like Augustine’s exegesis on Genesis in the Confessions, demands an ethical reorientation and a spiritual receptivity to self-betterment.
Seth Lerer responds in his chapter to Stock’s reflections on selfhood in The Integrated Self: Augustine, the Bible, and Ancient Thought (Philadelphia, 2017), and emphasizes the definitive contributions Stock has made to our understanding of late antiquity writ large, especially in the ways in which Stock’s thinking about Augustine offers a Christian self mediated through exegesis, sermon, colloquy, and the epistle. Lerer contrasts Stock’s textual emphases with Peter Brown’s focus on the body in measuring the temptations and transiency of corporal attachments. Lerer wishes to reinscribe Stock into the current narrative of late ancient culture, dominated still by Peter Brown. The period is, he argues, as much Stock’s creation as Brown’s. Both ponder the ways in which Christian readers make meaning out of pagan and scriptural texts, and both think about the move from ancient orality to late ancient textuality. In his own thinking about Brown and Stock, too, Lerer draws inspiration from Stock’s The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton, 1983), while noticing the important impetus provided to both thinkers by Pierre Hadot’s Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique (1972). Brown would have us move out, toward the edges of the old empires and the grammars of long-untaught languages, while Stock would have us move in, toward the workings of the Christian soul and the deeper spaces of self-reflection and moral resolve.
Lerer emphasizes in his chapter the ways in which notions of vision and visualization inhabit Augustine’s Confessions, and capture the imaginations of Brown and of Stock in their treatments of late ancient culture. Paul Saenger thinks about a different sort of eye as he locates in late ancient reading practices a shift from orality to a reliance on the eye of the mind or soul. Saenger relies on Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation (Cambridge, MA, 1996), in which Stock draws attention to the ways in which Augustine relies on verbs of vision to betoken reading. Visual changes in manuscript culture support these shifts in diction, signaling an altered graphic format that engaged the reader’s mind in a manner physiologically and neurologically different from the earlier practices of Greco-Roman readers, who had interpreted texts of scriptura continua either aloud or with muted voice. A sensitivity to these changes can reveal their cognitive effects on readers encountering the new Latin page in late antiquity and beyond, and help us better understand, too, the role Augustine played in regularizing these changes.
Sarah Spence reads Augustine’s Confessions against the backdrop of Listening for the Text: On the Uses of the Past (Johns Hopkins, 1990), drawing interpretive energy from Stock’s view of the interplay of experience and the literary accounting of it. This more complicated scene of reading leads Spence to reconsider Confessions 5.18.15, in which Augustine abandoned his mother in Carthage as he made his way to Rome. This well-known moment is further controlled in Spence’s reading by the opening paragraph in Augustine the Reader, in which Stock articulates the ways in which re-reading and memory play on our recollection and understanding of experience. Spence proposes a new reading of Augustine’s sorrowful scene. We have, she notes, tended to over-emphasize its literary qualities especially as they are owed to Aeneid 4. To the normal connections of Dido as a stand-in for Monica can be added the landscape that Augustine conjures through allusion to the underworld. It is not just Monica as Dido that matters, but also the spaces of Carthage arrayed through linkages to Aeneid 6 that make clear the lived stakes of this moment.
The notion of textual communities comes into play in John Magee’s chapter, which seems also reliant on Stock’s Listening for the Text and on The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton, 1983). Magee ponders Boethius’s double commentary on Aristotle’s De interpretatione 10, 19b22-24, which includes in its elementary portion an extended review of an interpretation owed to Alexander of Aphrodisias. This is unexpected, since beginners are not normally exposed to doxographical reporting of this kind. Boethius’s move thus betrays the different textual communities that inhabit his commentary. Despite its fulsome nature, Boethius’s treatment of Alexander’s words gesture students toward an understanding of Aristotle appropriate to their stage of learning, while Porphyry and Plato loom large as sources of a more authentic treatment of Aristotle’s thought, suitable for advanced work. The double commentary on this passage thus tolerates forms of expression sensitive to the separate needs of beginning and advanced readers, and students progress to the truth as shifting members of textual communities.
Constant Mews’s chapter is controlled by The Implications of Literacy, in which Stock emphasizes the creative and the social aspects of reading that generate a textual community. Such communities are the subject of Mews’s interrogation of The Twelve Abuses, a seventh-century text that articulates ethical principles underpinning a legal and political project specific to Ireland. Its diffusion to the continent can especially be seen in the influences it had on Hugh of Fouilloy, who used it in the twelfth century to craft his critique of monastic abuses, On the Twelve Abuses of the Cloister. The Irish Twelve Abuses, which treats injustices in seventh-century Irish society writ large, is thus modified in Hugh’s hands to expose twelfth-century monastic corruption specifically. Hugh did not have the social vision animating the Irish Twelve Abuses, and the textual community he creates takes in a more focused reader, affirming the complicated gathering of textual communities that had developed by then, as Stock makes clear in The Implications of Literacy.
Marcia Colish also relies on Stock’s notion of textual communities in her chapter on self-baptism in the Middle Ages. With Innocent III’s seemingly supportive comments as touchstone, Colish turns to the Acts of Paul and Thecla, which includes a vivid description of Thecla’s self-baptism. Innocent III and other ecclesiastical figures ignore her example, relying on a tranche of written texts apart from the Acts, while Thecla’s fame as an exemplary virgin gives rise to textual communities parsing her story according to taste, geography, epoch, and the social status of believers, and including visual, aural, and popular materials. Thecla’s preeminence reaches new heights in medieval Tarragona, where, in Stock’s imagining of textual communities that often respond to local conditions, Thecla becomes the patron saint of the city. The visual art devoted to her in the rebuilt cathedral of Tarragona draws attention to Thecla’s historical and spiritual importance, while the text of the liturgy devoted to Thecla’s feast day brings her into a textual community of readings, prayers, music, and sermons.
Gur Zak’s chapter is controlled especially by After Augustine: The Meditative Reader and the Text (Philadelphia, 2001), and Augustine’s Inner Dialogue: The Philosophical Soliloquy in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 2010), in which Stock emphasizes Augustine’s expansion of the ancient philosophical tradition, understood as a way of life (in Hadot’s influential formulation), to include literary activity. The spiritual exercises of ancient philosophy thus become in Augustine’s hands an exercise in self-knowledge constructed through a narrative patterned on the Christian story of salvation, while theConfessions models meditative and spiritual reading and writing that gesture toward, while helping to attain, an integrated Christian self. Augustine’s reformulation of ancient philosophical traditions had a long afterlife, as Stock makes clear in After Augustine, influencing Petrarch, whose self-examination includes a dialogue with Augustine in the Secretum, but Zak focuses on the Rationarium vite of Giovanni Conversini da Ravenna. He emphasizes Conversini’s use of self-writing as a spiritual exercise, his development of a uniquely humanist way of life, and his insistence on living the best life. Zak argues that Conversini carries forward Petrarch’s transformation of Augustine’s spiritual and philosophical traditions, classicizing and secularizing them in important ways, especially in the Rationarium, which points unambiguously to a secular view of human experience centered on restlessness.
Jane Tylus begins her chapter by parsing the words of Catherine of Siena as she pondered the completion of her writerly project at the end of her life. Her large output, gathered by her friends, will now seek new readers who can understand and engage her words, but also add something to them through the act of reading. Taking her cues especially from Listening for the Text, Tylus analyzes the implications of literacy for Catherine, who sought to move from the oral world of conversation with God to the act of inscription provided by the book. Stock’s words help to make sense of Catherine’s readerly and writerly goals. In the Middle Ages, Stock says, there was no orality without textuality, and no literacy absent the power of speaking. Stock’s fluid and dynamic conceptions of reading and writing in Christian culture work against a separation of oral and written. We can thus see in Catherine’s writing an act of speaking, and vice versa. Reading, as Stock would have it, recapitulates the experience of speaking and hearing the word of God, and each reading is a new speaking. More than this, these acts lead to action. For Catherine, as for Augustine, reading and writing, speaking and listening, come together as a way of knowing and of living. Writing, on this view, can never be considered “dead,” and thus Catherine can gain comfort, as she seemingly did, in expressing her farewell to the world, knowing that she will live on in the reading, writing, and living of generous readers. In this, as Tylus goes on to suggest, Catherine keeps illustrious company, not least Petrarch, Ariosto and Montaigne.
Augustine’s Inner Dialogue inspires Catherine Conybeare’s chapter, but her starting point is a letter Stock wrote to her in 2019 about the loss of Wittgenstein’s library, which, Stock suggested, could have contained Wittgenstein’s translation of the Confessions into German, or other writings on Augustine’s autobiography worth having. One of Conybeare’s conclusions in this chapter is to aver that the Philosophical Investigations is in fact in its own way a commentary on the Confessions. That the opening of the Investigations features a quotation from Confessions 1.8.13 makes the pairing of these thinkers all the more compelling. More specifically, Conybeare is interested in the pleasures of dialogue so important to both Augustine and Wittgenstein, not least because they were at ease with aporetic inquiry. Both felt that, given human limitations, aporia was the best result that could be expected of philosophical inquiry. Both thus exploited the dialogue because it offered spaces for play, indeterminacy, and the exploration of the variability of contact between interlocutors. Conybeare is especially interested in the inner dialogue, in which speakers or writers attend to their own consciousness. Such a dialogue seems to hover between inner and outer voices as it seeks to make the mind present to itself. But the scene of understanding is complicated, leading in the end seemingly to defeat. There is a sense, however, in which both thinkers reveal a fundamental truth in their defeats. Words and self are in alignment in Augustine’s declaration atConfessions 11.25.32 of language’s failures to reveal the self, while Wittgenstein admits in the Preface to the Investigations that his words are inconclusive, producing only “sketches of landscapes,” that nonetheless strive to stay true to what the self can know, or say, of itself.
This beautifully produced volume, representing the highest qualities of academic publishing in place at the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, includes an editors’ Introduction, a bibliography of Stock’s writings, an index, and two poignant reminiscences. Aviad Kleinberg opens the volume with a “Life of Brian,” bowing to Monty Python’s movie in his title, and in his conclusion, where the phrase “always look at (sic) the bright side of life” invokes the song from that movie. Kleinberg writes with the humor, affection, and devotion of a student, creating a moving dialogue with, and for, Brian Stock, as a way to honor his teacher. At the volume’s end, Natalie Zemon Davis’s touching reflections are as colleague and friend, and recall her fifty-plus-year relationship with Stock that began with their appointments at Toronto in the 1960s, and which led down the decades to on-going conversations both personal and scholarly--now sadly ended with Davis’s recent death.
Any book (or conference) hoping to do justice to Brian Stock’s capacious intellect will be rich, difficult, and wide-ranging. This book is all that and more. The dividends of reading it are many: not least, it creates for readers multiple dialogues with its contributors, but also connects those dialogues across the chapters to Stock’s own writings, and thus keeps him, and his manifold intellect, front and center. In this way the volume is a powerful honorific for one who has been teaching us about dialogues of many stripes for sixty years. I hope that this review in its own small way participates in these dialogues. It betokens in any case my respect and admiration for the volume’s honorand--who put in a good word for me at a critical time, and taught me about dialogues of a different sort in so doing.