Medieval perspectives in Europe: Oral culture and bodily practices

Prior to the invention of book printing, Western culture had no efficient storage medium that served to unburden human memory. Instead of writing a mnemotechnics based on the visual perception of bodily movements, took over the functions of orienting, identifying, and stabilizing the social order in the medieval period. In medieval instructions on ecclesiastic and secular norms of behavior, the categorization of the most wide-spread and relevant bodily practices was ordered according to the various functions of the body parts involved, such as neck, back, and knee muscles, arms, hands, lips, and facial muscles. Naturally, such a system of signifiers (like the prostration, the genuflection with inclined body, the genuflection with erect body, bowing to the waist, bowing to the chest, the foot kiss, the knee kiss, the shoulder kiss, the hand kiss, etc.) which will be reconstructed here on the basis of various source corpora, could not encompass all the motion sequences that took place in the context of different interactions. Nevertheless, it has proven useful to treat socially meaningful actions as communicative acts within the contexts of 1) religion, 2) law, 3) ceremonial and 4) etiquette. 1. Oral culture in the Middle Ages Prior to the invention of book printing, Western culture had no efficient storage medium that served to unburden human memory. Based on this observation, Walter Ong constructed his theory of orality, according to which orally communicating peoples know only what they can bear in memory. According to Ong (1982), oral culture is a form of culture in which “no one can ‘look up’ anything.” Its members “perceive words as sounds” that exist only in the moment of their emergence. Primary orality is thus organized “situationally rather than abstractly” (Ong 1982: 11; McLuhan 1960: 207). As soon as one attempts to grasp Ong’s notion of orality through theories of cognition and communication, however, one invariably encounters a series of inconsistencies. To begin with, Ong’s distinction between “literate” and “pre-literate” applies to material types of media, whereas his dichotomy of “seeing” vs. “hearing” refers to the nature of human channels of perception. It would be definitely a wrong assumption that our ancestors’ sensuous intake capacities differed from ours. In the hierarchy of the channels of perception and communication, sight is accorded a leading role because it expands and defines the physiological and cognitive functions of other sensomotoric subsystems, such as hearing, taste, smell, and touch (Loenhoff 2001: 171). The eye, which enables such different functions as planning, programming, and geographic 343