An Archival Reading of the Venerable Bede

THE AMERICAN ARCHIVIST

"Commendatory Letters": An Archival Reading of the Venerable Bede Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article-pdf/61/2/266/2749128/aarc_61_2_f7455003g0277314.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 James M. O'Toole

Abstract

This essay explores the role of writing, records, and documents as depicted in the Eccle- siastical History of the English People, a landmark of western historiography completed by the Venerable Bede in the year 731. Bede's purpose was to narrate the early history of Chris- tianity in Britain, but he also made numerous references to writing and the role of documents in human affairs. Because he was preparing his history at a time when writing itself was a relatively unusual phenomenon, Bede offers a singular view of such larger questions as the uses of literacy and documentation, the shifting dynamics among different forms of communication, and the larger cultural meanings in records beyond die information they contain. A study of these forces at work in Bede's time gives contemporary archivists a perspective on the revolutionary changes in the technology and the uses of records in our own age.

t was a terrifying scene. A horde of evil spirits "with horrible faces" visited a dying man, surrounding his entire house. The man, originally a soldier, Iwas a public official who had pleased the king by his devotion to duty, but morally he was rather lax. He also had a reputation for seeing visions which benefitted many people but not, the teller of his story remarked, the man himself. In this particular vision, the chief of the devils came forward to the deathbed, carrying a truly frightening object: a book, one "of enormous size and almost unbearable weight, horrible to behold." Another demon presented it to the man and ordered him to read. On doing so, the visionary was shocked at what he found on its pages: "all my sins written down very clearly but in hideous handwriting: not only my sins of word and deed but

This article was written as a product of the author's participation in the 1997 Research Fellowship Program for the Study of Modem Archives, administered by the Bentley Historical Library of the University of Michigan and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the University of Michigan.

266 The American Archivist, Vol. 61 (Fall 1998) : 266-286 AN ARCHIVAL READING OF THE VENERABLE BEDE

even my slightest thoughts." While the devils chortled over the reader's an- guish, the man saw two handsome youths standing off to one side. They too were holding a book, but this one, though beautiful, was "exceedingly small," for in it were recorded all the good deeds the man had ever done—and these

were "very few and trifling." The prince of the demons demanded of the Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article-pdf/61/2/266/2749128/aarc_61_2_f7455003g0277314.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 two angels, "Why do you sit here since you know that this man is certainly ours?" They concurred, saying, "You speak the truth; take him away to help make up the number of the damned."1 Thereupon, the wretched man died and went off to his unhappy eternal fate. The narrator of this morality tale was the Venerable Bede, an English monk of the early eighth century, whose Ecclesiastical History of the English People, from which the story came, has become a landmark in western historiography. Scholars and students have studied Bede for centuries, mining his text for information about the early Christian church and about England in the centuries before the Norman Conquest. Archivists too will find in Bede much that is relevant to their professional concerns. Records, documents, books, and writing all figure prominently in his history, and his work thus presents an opportunity to reflect on the nature and purposes of the everyday stuff of archives. What might be called an archival reading of Bede shows that he was working in a time that is very much like our own. That seems a curious thing to say. The restricted physical and mental world of eighth- century Britain was very different from our own expansive global culture at the dawn of the twenty-first century. He was compiling and composing his history at a time when writing and recordkeeping were still relatively unusual phenomena. Literacy was not widely distributed through society, and there were few mechanisms for systematic instruction in the abilities to read and write. His world was one which still relied extensively on the oral transmission of information. His society was adapting slowly and imperfectly to a new way of capturing and using information. Today, literacy is much more widely diffused and highly valued. Even those who cannot read and write themselves—or who do so imperfectly— usually think literacy a skill they should want to master themselves and to pass on to their children. But just as Bede and his contemporaries were coming to terms with the new information technology that was writing, so we are trying to come to terms with new information technologies. He lived in a

1 Unless otherwise noted, all quotations will be from the standard modern translation of Bede's Eccle- siastical History of the English People, Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969). This edition, hereafter cited as "Colgrave and Mynors," provides the Latin and English texts on facing pages. It was reprinted in 1991 to coincide with the appearance of J. M. Wallace- Hadrill, Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People: A Historical Commentary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), hereafter cited as "Wallace-Hadrill." For comparative purposes, readers should also consult the older translation, A History of the English Church and People, translated by Leo Sherley- Price (Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1955). All citations to Bede will be identified by book and chapter number, and the citation will be given in parentheses in the text. The story of the man confronted with the two books is in 5.13.

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world in which animal skins and handmade inks were the latest innovations for the acquisition and transmission of information; we live in a world in which electronic hardware and software are the rising technologies. What we have in common with him is the fact of change in the means by which in-

formation is captured, stored, used, and preserved. Just as the new technol- Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article-pdf/61/2/266/2749128/aarc_61_2_f7455003g0277314.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 ogies were spread unevenly through his society, so they are unevenly accessible in ours, with only about a third of American households currently owning a computer and even lower percentages elsewhere in the world. A study of the transition Bede's society was experiencing may therefore give us an important perspective on the transitions we face. With him, archivists can explore several relevant aspects of the role of writing, records, and information in human affairs.

Bede's Life and Work

Our knowledge of Bede is confined largely to what he wrote about himself, and the scanty evidence suggests that he lived the uneventful life of a scholar. His birth date is generally given as 673. Perhaps orphaned as a child, he was placed at the age of seven in the monastery at Wearmouth and Jarrow in Northumbria, where his later status as a priest entitled him to the epithet by which he is commonly known—"Venerable"—and which was accorded to churchmen generally at the time. "From then on," he wrote at the end of the Ecclesiastical History, "I have spent all my life in this monastery, applying myself entirely to the study of the Scriptures; and, amid the observance of the discipline of the Rule and the daily task of singing in the church, it has always been my delight to learn or to teach or to write." His work included copying a wide range of texts from the Bible and the church fathers, "for my own benefit and that of my brothers." His original compositions were no less impressive. These included works of scriptural exegesis and commentaries on biblical texts, together with commentaries on the commentaries of others. He also produced two books of sermons on the gospels, and he en- thusiastically contributed to that most popular of medieval literary genres, the lives of the saints. He produced poems, hymns, and epigrams, some of them in "heroic and elegiac metre," and he compiled studies of natural science and the rules of grammar. He taught other monks at Jarrow how to write, and he even participated in the scholarly disputes of his day, mention- ing in particular that he reissued "a book on the life and passion of St. Anastasius which was badly translated from the Greek by some ignorant person, which I have corrected as best I could." (5.24) By the time of his death in 735, he had left his mark as one of the earliest and greatest English writers.2

2 The secondary literature on Bede is, of course, enormous. For useful overviews, see Bertram Col- grave's "Historical Introduction," in Colgrave and Mynors, xvii-xxxviii; George Hardin Brown, Bede

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Apparently renowned in his own day for his theological works, Bede has since been remembered primarily as a historian. His greatest achievement may be his least recognized: though the idea was not original to him, he is credited with systematizing the conflicting methods for establishing chronol-

ogy into the custom of dating history from the birth of Christ, the basis for Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article-pdf/61/2/266/2749128/aarc_61_2_f7455003g0277314.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 the current usage of the Common Era. His earlier hagiographies and the lives of the first abbots of his own monastery prepared him to undertake what would be the crowning work of his career, "the history of the Church of our island and race, in five books." (5.24) Completed in 731 when he was fifty- nine years old, the Ecclesiastical History began with a description of Roman times, but quickly came to focus on what was still the relatively recent past. His proximity in time to the events he described means that we can study both his past and his present in this work. By then, a degree of political stability had been achieved on the island following the turmoil that came with the collapse of Roman Britain. Christianity had been planted (or, better, replanted) only seventy-five years prior to Bede's own birth when Pope Greg- ory the Great sent the missionary bishop Augustine to evangelize the Anglo- Saxons, and widespread conversion followed speedily. Monasteries flourished, some (such as the establishment at Jarrow) deriving from this "Roman" mission, others from an older Irish monastic tradition. As he worked, Bede had access to an extensive library, first assembled by the abbot Benedict Biscop, the man who had received him into the community as a boy, and he was also able to draw on a selection of documents from other monasteries in preparing his historical account. As a scholar, Bede was among the first in England to rely self-consciously on historical sources and to set down what was known so that others could learn the lessons of the past. Dedicating the History to his king, Bede said that he hoped to satisfy the desire on the part of many "to learn the sayings and doings of the men of old, and more especially the famous men of our own race." The purpose of such study was not mere information or amuse- ment, however; it was edification. Studying the past had a direct bearing on life in the present, for "should history tell of good men and their good estate, the thoughtful listener is spurred on to imitate the good," he wrote. When, by contrast, history recorded "the evil ends of wicked men, no less effectually the devout and earnest listener or reader is kindled to eschew what is harmful and perverse, and himself with greater care pursue those things which he has learned to be good and pleasing in the sight of God." (Preface) Modern-day readers will, for the most part, probably forgo this expressly didactic moral

the Venerable (Boston: Twayne, 1987); and Peter Hunter Blair, The World of Bede (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1990). "Venerable" subsequently became a designation for holy men and women before their formal canonization as saints, but it did not carry that connotation in Bede's day.

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purpose in approaching Bede's work, but they nonetheless may use it to understand the deeds—good, evil, and otherwise—of men and women. Examining the role of writing, records, and documents in the Ecclesias- tical History is particularly useful to present-day archivists and other informa-

tion professionals. It would be wrong, however, to suggest that such matters Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article-pdf/61/2/266/2749128/aarc_61_2_f7455003g0277314.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 were of paramount concern to Bede. He was not expressly interested in these subjects as such, and whenever he talked about them they were seldom the main point of the story he happened to be telling. It is precisely this absence of special interest in the details of information storage and exchange, however, that makes his observations useful to us as windows into a world in which literate means for conducting human affairs were just beginning to take hold. His descriptions of the creation and use of documents often seem incidental and off-the-cuff. When he wrote about writing and records, he was describing something that had become for him part of the mental woodwork, things he had stopped noticing explicitly. Because writing was still unusual in society at large, however, his observations on this subject are potentially quite valuable to us. By attending to his scattered and unsystematic comments on such matters, we may get an insight into their wider role at a critical, formative period. Given the explosion of historical interest in the subject of literacy (and medieval literacy in particular) in the last twenty years, an archival reading of Bede in the context of that literature may illuminate present-day concerns.3

The Role of Writing and Records

It is a bias of literate people to think that writing is inherently ' 'better'' than purely oral forms of communication and that literacy, once introduced into society, brings the efficacy of oral communication largely to an end. In fact, as scholars such as Walter Ong, Jack Goody, and others have shown, literacy and orality coexist, bound together in a changing dynamic. Oral forms endure even as society is shaped increasingly by writing. So it was in Bede's world. In the account of the man confronted with his sins in the "hideous handwriting" of the "horrible" book, for example, Bede knew that oral forms were still important. The story was being told "for the benefit of those who read or hear it" (5.13), an indication that some might be able to read the history for themselves, but that others would learn its lessons only when they heard it, presumably when someone else read it aloud. More broadly, the traditions of oral poetry and recitation, stretching back in the West at least to the time of Homer, were still very much alive in the period Bede described. In his History we meet, for example, Brother Caedmon, the resident of a monastery who possessed a talent for poetry, which he had

3 For a summary of some tides on this subject, see James M. O'Toole, "Toward A Usable Archival Past: Recent Studies in the History of Literacy," American Archivist 58 (Winter 1995): 86-99.

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acquired not "from men nor through a man," but rather as a gift given "freely by the grace of God." Caedmon achieved some local fame because ' 'whatever he learned from the holy Scriptures by means of interpreters, he quickly turned into extremely delightful and moving poetry, in English, which was his own tongue." (4.24) Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article-pdf/61/2/266/2749128/aarc_61_2_f7455003g0277314.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 Bede was obviously impressed by the bilingualism of this feat: the man could hear the scriptures expounded as they were translated from Latin, the only language in which they were generally available, and he could then recapitulate them delightfully in the vernacular. What commands our attention here, however, is what Goody called the "interface" between the oral and the written. That the scriptural passages first had to be "interpreted" to Caedmon seems to indicate that he himself could not read, or at least could not read Latin. Instead, he rendered his poetic version of the scriptures through the ancient means of oral memorization and delivery: "He learned all he could" by listening to the biblical text, "and then, memorizing it and ruminating over it, like some clean animal chewing the cud, he turned it into the most melodious verse; and it sounded so sweet as he recited it that his teachers became in turn his audience." (4.24) Caedmon was using the ancient techniques for remembering long and detailed narratives described by modern-day scholars such as Milman Parry, the first to demonstrate the fundamentally oral quality of Homer.4 The methods of a world that had no writing were still useful in a world that did, though the relationship between orality and literacy was changing. Like an animal chewing its cud, Caedmon knew how to turn things over in his mind before he re-presented them, and the results were pleasing to all concerned. In Saxon England, however, orality was coming to operate in a culture that was increasingly shaped by literacy. Oral forms for the transmission of information still performed important societal functions, but they did so in a context governed now by literate means for accomplishing those ends. The notions of reliability, authenticity, and accuracy were all in a state of flux, moving slowly toward the more precise meanings of the those terms which would come with literacy.5 The composition of works of history and devotion, for example, still depended in important ways on orality, even as they solid- ified into fixed texts intended to be read. Bede told the story of Adamnan,

4 Milman Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry, edited by Adam Parry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971); G. S. Kirk, The Songs of Homer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962); Alfred B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960). See also Jack Goody, The Interface Between the Written and the Oral (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). The reference in Bede's text to "clean" animals refers to the Mosaic law (Leviticus 11:3 and Deuteronomy 14:6) that only animals with cloven hooves that also chewed their cud were religiously clean, and thus could be eaten. 5 On the idea of a new literate context for enduring oral forms, see Brian Stock's description of a later period, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).

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the abbot of a community of monks on the island of Iona, who wrote a book about the holy places in Jerusalem which "proved useful to many readers." The abbot himself had never visited the holy city, but rather used as his principal source a bishop from Gaul who had spent many years there. As this bishop talked about what he had seen, Adamnan would "quickly" write down Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article-pdf/61/2/266/2749128/aarc_61_2_f7455003g0277314.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 what he said for the benefit of those ' 'who live very far from the places where the patriarchs and the apostles lived, and only know about them what they have learned from books." The resulting book was given to the king and was subsequently even "circulated for lesser folk to read." (5.15) Here were the oral and the literate side by side, but writing had some advantages. In written form, information achieved a stability and durability it would not have so long as it remained only in the mind or in spoken words. What is more, writing was in itself coming to be recognized as an effective way for gathering and sharing information: some people would now learn things only from books, Bede realized. It was also a means of communicating across physical space, permitting those "very far" away to learn things that would otherwise be unavailable to them. Finally, writing also opened the possibility that dis- tinctions of social status might be bridged: kings could have access to information, but "lesser folk" might too. Widespread social leveling of this kind was far in the future, to be sure, but it was possible with writing as it had not been before. The cultural advantages were not all on the side of the written word, however, and the conventions for preserving and transmitting written information had not yet entirely coalesced. Bede gave perhaps unwitting testimony to this when he reproduced some of Adamnan's work in his own narrative. Two entire chapters (numbers 16 and 17) of Book Five of the Ecclesiastical History were devoted to presenting extended quotations from Adamnan's work on the Holy Land, describing Bethlehem, the places associated with Christ's passion, the site of the ascension, and the tombs of the Jewish patriarchs. Only at the end of this travelogue did Bede confess that these were not precise quotations at all. "I determined to add to this History excerpts from these writings," he said, "for the benefit of readers. They contain the sense of his words but put more briefly and concisely." (5.17) For a modern- day historian, this would be an unacceptable practice: if one is to present direct quotations or excerpts, one must be sure that the transcription is exact, word for word. In a purely oral word, by contrast, such precision was less important: both a longer and a shorter oral version of The Iliad, for example, were equally true and accurate presentations of the story. In Bede's world, which straddled the line between oral and literate forms, word-for-word reproduction had not yet achieved the normative status it has today. Bede saw nothing problematic in presenting the "sense" of the words rather than exact quotations. He did say that anyone who wanted to know more could study

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the original book of Adamnan or consult yet another abridgement that Bede himself had compiled. (5.17) The incomplete transition from one standard to another is apparent here: the "sense" of a passage was still acceptable, but those who wanted a more precise standard of accuracy could also be satisfied by finding and using the written text. Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article-pdf/61/2/266/2749128/aarc_61_2_f7455003g0277314.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 Though oral means of communication remained potent for Bede and his contemporaries, writing's power and usefulness were expanding. In particular, this society was discovering a growing number of practical uses for writing, finding that it could accomplish individual and collective tasks more easily in writing than it could orally. As in the case of Adamnan's descriptions of the Holy Land, writing could be used to transmit information across dis- tances more easily and reliably. (5.15) Writing could also be used to confirm authority, and this was evident in an expansion of what we would recognize as bureaucratic uses for writing. When a new archbishop of Canterbury was appointed in the late 660s, for instance, documents were used to confirm the designation and to smooth his path back to England. The new archbishop, Theodore, was consecrated by Pope Vitalian at Rome, and he then set off across the continent with a companion, carrying "commendatory letters." On arriving at Aries, Theodore presented these letters to the local bishop, who thereby accepted him as the pope's representative and extended hos- pitality to him. The travelers also acquired a kind of permit from the mayor of the palace, allowing them to travel "where they pleased" in the vicinity. (4.1) Both documents illustrate emerging administrative uses of writing and records. The papal document served as a letter of introduction, and it may also have been intended as an official testimony that Theodore had indeed been appointed to his position by the pope.6 How could those who encoun- tered the wandering bishop know who he was or that his passage through their territory contained no nefarious intent? The documents which he car- ried provided this reassurance. They were portable endorsements he could show to anyone who demanded to know who he was and what he was doing there. Since Bede reported (4.1) that a companion of Theodore was detained by authorities in another locality until they were satisfied as to his identity and intent—they suspected him of being on a secret political mission—the practical advantages of carrying documents as testaments of good faith were especially clear.

5 On the emerging role of documents in the affairs of the medieval church, see Thomas F. X. Noble, "Literacy and the Papal Government in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages," in The Uses of Literacy in Early Medieval Europe, edited by Rosamund McKitterick (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 82-108. See also Lawrence J. McCrank, "Documenting Reconquest and Reform: The Growth of Archives in the Medieval Crown of Aragon," American Archivist 56 (Spring 1993): 256- 318. Colgrave and Mynors translate this passage to say simply that Theodore was "given leave" to travel locally by the mayor. Sherley-Price uses the word "permit," which suggests a written document, though this seems a rather free translation of the Latin wording of the passage.

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Other aspects of administration were also coming under the sway of writing, as records and documents became an important part of the way in which the church and other institutions did their business. When Theodore got to England, he found a number of doctrinal and practical matters that had to be settled. To restore and preserve orthodoxy, he called together a Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article-pdf/61/2/266/2749128/aarc_61_2_f7455003g0277314.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 synod of bishops at Hatfield to confirm their support of the official position. In the meeting, consensus was readily achieved, but what kind of lasting proof of this could be made, against the possibility that someone not present might challenge it? A new range of possibilities available through writing offered a solution. Remarking on the synod's unanimity, the archbishop "took care to have this recorded in a synodal book to serve as a guide and a record to their successors." (4.17) Bede reproduced portions of this document, a copy of which he evidently had access to at the time he was writing, about fifty years later.7 The memories of those in attendance might fade or perhaps even change deliberately if the meeting's decisions were subject to later dispute. Those who had not been there might doubt the substance, or even the fact, of the agreement. Archbishop Theodore guarded against these eventualities by recognizing that a written document, a deliberately created and preserved "record," would convey the decisions of the synod and thus "guide" all "successors." As a further proof of authenticity, the participants in the coun- cil also subscribed their names to this record. These practices were becoming increasingly common as literacy itself spread. A later synod held in York followed the same procedures, and its conclusions were summarized in a written record and "confirmed" by its presiding bishop "with his signature." (5.19) The synodal documents were themselves strong evidence of authenticity, but the affixing of signatures, just emerging as a personal ratification of authenticity based on the skills of literacy, redoubled that authority.8 Even so, oral means for transmitting information could retain their force. Even though these official documents were codified in writing and sealed with signatures, they might still be used in ways that relied less on writing than on oral presentation. Five years after the synod at York, one of its participants, a bishop named Wilfrid, was accused of irregularities and removed from his position. Successfully appealing his case to Rome, he was restored to office by a public "reading of the acts" of yet another synod in which he had participated. This took several days as the record was read aloud "in the presence of the nobility and a large crowd of people at the command

7 The synodal document itself may have conformed to an emerging formula for the preparation of such official church records; see Wallace-Hadrill, 157, and W. Levison, "Bede as Historian," in Bede, His Life, Times, and Writings: Essays in Commemoration of the Twelfth Centenary of His Death, edited by A. Hamilton Thompson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), 148. The Latin word Bede used for "record" here was "memoria." 8 On the emergence of signatures, see M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066— 1307, 2d ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1993), 304-8.

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of the pope." Apparently, this was a normal procedure, since it was undertaken, Bede said, "as the case required." It may also have been part of an elaborate ritual, common enough then and since, in which documents achieved their full effect and potency only when read, as we would say, "into the record."9 At a critical juncture in the reading, "amazement fell on those Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article-pdf/61/2/266/2749128/aarc_61_2_f7455003g0277314.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 who heard," for they realized that the accused had been wrongly caricatured as a heretic and was instead "a man of uncorrupt faith and honest mind." He was immediately restored to his position. (5.19) This episode says much about the coexistence of older, oral forms and newer, written ones. Written records could be admitted to such proceedings, but only if they were read aloud, no matter how long it took. The evidence from writing could "speak" to a matter under dispute, but only if it was made to do so literally when someone read that writing for others to hear. The words actually had to be heard, not simply seen, for them to have their proper impact. Seeing was not believing in this case—hearing was. The outcome of the decision-making pro- cess still depended as much on orality as on literacy. Other uses for written records and books were also becoming common. For the church, written documentation offered the possibility of greater uni- formity of practice, especially in the liturgy of the mass and the sacraments. When Gregory the Great sent Augustine to England in 601, he made sure that the missionary bishop was supplied with things he would need. These included not merely an official letter of appointment (which Bede reproduced, right down to the date), but also vestments, altar cloths, church or- naments, the sacred vessels needed for communion, and most notably "many books." (1.29)10 Another missionary, arriving about eighty years later, came similarly armed with documents which "committed to writing all things necessary for the celebration of festal days throughout the whole year." (4.18) Later still Aldhelm, an orthodox missionary in Dorset, wrote "a remarkable book" denouncing a number of local religious "errors"—including a faulty date for observing Easter, a subject of tremendous interest to Bede—and the treatise had a powerful effect. "By means of this book," Bede wrote, "he led many of those Britons ... to conform to the catholic celebration of the Easter of the Lord." (5.18) In all these cases, writing served as a check against local variation, and it became a guardian against unorthodox practices. We can thus see writing's contributions to a growing sense of precision. If priests simply learned the practices of religion from one another, without any fixed

9 On this subject, see Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 266-78, and Susan Kelly, "Anglo-Saxon Lay Society and the Written Word," in McKitterick, Uses of Literacy, 44—45. '"The Latin here is "codices plurimos." While Colgrave and Mynors have translated this as "many manuscripts," I have preferred Sherley-Price's "many books." To be sure, a codex was almost certainly in manuscript form at this time, but specification of the codex implies a format that we are inclined to think of as a book. Reliable means for dating documents was an essential aspect of coming to trust the information in them; on this subject, see Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 299-304.

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standard, unwanted variations were sure to multiply. Rather like the child's game of telephone, in which a message is passed from ear to ear, becoming ever more garbled as it goes along, oral means for conveying information were always subject to variation, whether conscious or unconscious. Writing, however, was a more precise tool in what were deemed to be important matters. Writing could nail down critical details in the governance of the insti- Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article-pdf/61/2/266/2749128/aarc_61_2_f7455003g0277314.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 tution that was the church. As literacy became more and more a part of the way that society oper- ated, the ability to read and write came increasingly to be valued. Time and again in Bede's narrative, we see the skills of literacy identified as commend- able for those in positions of leadership. In the selection of bishops, for example, literacy was often listed as an important qualification. Before decid- ing on the appointment of Theodore as Archbishop of Canterbury, for example, the pope made a "careful enquiry" into the abilities of several candidates, asking widely for advice. One potential nominee was very learned in sacred and secular subjects and was "equally skilled in the Greek and Latin tongues," in addition to having experience in church administration. An- other candidate was similarly "well trained in secular and divine literature, both in Greek and Latin," and these skills, combined with his "upright character and venerable age" (he was sixty-six), eventually gave him the appointment. (4.1) Neither candidate was a native of Britain, but that perceived deficiency was more than overcome by their literate abilities. The learning they had acquired, especially in literature and encompassing Greek as well as Latin, mattered more than native birth. Bede returned several times to these literate skills as ranking among the highest compliments one could pay to a person. A monk named Oftfor, for example, "devoted himself to the reading and observance of the Scriptures," and these provided the foundation for his "singular merit and holiness." (4.23) Reading alone was not a substitute for good character, of course, an important distinction that was noted in the discussion of one bishop who "depended more on his innate love of virtue than on what he learned from books." (5.18) Still, because they could command the written means for storing and transmitting information, literates stood out, and this skill was increasingly identified as not only desir- able but also necessary for administration. If literacy was thus increasingly in demand, a more systematic way of teaching people to read and write was needed. Since ancient times, the spread of literacy had been slowed by the absence both of schools to convey these skills and of a societal conviction that doing so was a good thing in itself. The modern-day belief in universal basic literacy was entirely absent.11 Haphazard education was still the norm in Bede's time, but he did present

11 On the absence of schools, the most efficient means for sustaining and extending literacy, see William V. Harris, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), esp. 306—12.

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several cases in which people were instructed in the elementary skills of literacy. In one instance, the connection between literacy and orality was preserved, with orality turned to the purpose of promoting literacy. An abbot from Rome named John was sent to England, among other things carrying a written document from the pope certifying the independence of the mon- Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article-pdf/61/2/266/2749128/aarc_61_2_f7455003g0277314.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 astery that Bede himself would eventually join at Wearmouth. A more important part of his mission was to teach the monks there how to read, specifically how to read aloud.12 John taught oral reading to his charges, a task that was also linked to a second goal, that of teaching them how to sing. (4.18) This too had to be a fundamentally oral procedure, since systematic written musical notation would not be invented for another century or so.13 John succeeded at both tasks, and before leaving he "committed to writing" enough ritual and liturgical information so that services could be properly celebrated thereafter. Here again, a written record was left behind for future reference, and the expectation that it might indeed be referred to later on, now that the monastery had newly literate inhabitants, had only grown. Apart from this practical usefulness of written records, Bede also recognized that documents which survived from earlier times could be used to write history. Since that was Bede's own calling, we should not be surprised that he appreciated the way in which they could become source materials for history. He was careful in the preface to his history "to state briefly from what sources I have gained my information." In the early portions of his work, especially Book One, while describing the ancient and Roman history of "Britain, once called Albion,... an island of the ocean," he drew on a number of classical authors, including Pliny and Orosius. (1.1) As he reached the point of describing what were to him more recent times, he had access to many written sources, some of them original, some of them copied by other scholars or by himself. For his description of the original mission of Archbishop Augustine, for example, he used a collection of documents assembled at a library in Kent. Some of these Bede had used before, especially in the composition of his life of Saint Cuthbert, which he had written ten years before the History, but some of them were new. There were about thirty extant letters from Gregory the Great and other popes pertaining to Augus-

12 On the tradition of reading aloud in ancient and medieval times, see Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, esp. 267-71. Silent reading was still practically unknown. In describing an incident in the life of his mentor, Saint Ambrose of Milan, Saint Augustine found it remarkable that the older man could read silently to himself, without pronouncing the words aloud as he did so; see Henri-Jean Martin, The History and Power of Writing, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 67—68. For this subject generally, see Paul H. Saenger, Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), and Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (New York: Penguin, 1996), 41-53. 13 See Wallace-Hadrill, 158—59, and M. H. King, '"Grammatica Mystica': A Study of Bede's Grammat- ical Curriculum," in Saints, Scholars, and Heroes: Studies in Medieval Culture in Honour of Charles W. Jones, edited by M. H. King and W. M. Stevens (Collegeville, Minn.: Saint John's University Press, 1979), 1: 145-59.

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tine's mission, and Bede used sixteen of them. Such sources, combined with elements that he had gleaned from the oral tradition, provided the basis for his story. "I, Bede, servant of Christ and priest of the monastery of St. Peter and St. Paul which is at Wearmouth and Jarrow," he said in his conclusion, "have, with the help of God and to the best of my ability, put together this Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article-pdf/61/2/266/2749128/aarc_61_2_f7455003g0277314.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 account of the history of the Church of Britain and of the English people in particular, gleaned either from ancient documents or from tradition or from my own knowledge." (5.24)14 Because the actual citing of sources for history was still relatively new, Bede also on several occasions broke the flow of his own narrative to repro- duce the texts on which he was relying. This practice sometimes may seem intrusive to the modern reader, since the story Bede was really telling had to be put on hold temporarily while he copied out important documents, in whole or in part. A modern commentator on Bede has said that these sources embedded in his text are frequently "out of proportion" to the rest of the work.15 In Book One of the History, for example, Bede devoted six chapters (numbers 27-32) to presenting copies of some of the letters that passed back and forth between Britain and Rome in the early days of Augustine's mission. He repeated this practice later: the synodal documents (4.17) and descriptions of the Holy Land (5.16-17) already noted, together with excerpts from a book of miracles ascribed to an abbess (4.10-11). Despite the breaks these embedded sources create, Bede probably had several reasons for including them. His motivations were partly religious, showing the concern which church leaders of the past had had for the Eng- lish people and thus serving as expressions of Bede's own devotion to Au- gustine, Gregory, and the other patrons of Christianity on the island. Beyond that, in a world in which the very survival of documents was always a bit uncertain, inclusion of these sources might make their preservation more likely. What a much later generation of scholars and archivists would call "multiplying the copies" was a practical benefit of Bede's practice here. Most important, however, was Bede's reliance on the emerging air of authority that surrounded written records and sources in an increasingly literate world. Laying out his sources could reassure readers that Bede's history was an accurate one, not the product merely of his own imagination. He was including these assurances of authenticity "in order to remove all doubt about those things I have written, either in your mind," he explained in his preliminary address to the king, "or in the minds of any others who listen to or read this history." (Preface) In an oral world, authority had come from the teller of the tale and the story's conformity with established traditions. In Bede's

"For a more detailed discussion of Bede's sources, see the "Historical Introduction" by Bertram Colgrave in Colgrave and Mynors, esp. xxx-xxxiv. 15 Wallace-Hadrill, 37-38.

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world, just beginning to absorb the new standards of literacy, those safeguards were no longer entirely sufficient. How could a reader "remove all doubt" as to what Bede had to say? Why, because he had sources to back him up, and here they were. "See for yourself," Bede was effectively saying to his

readers or hearers. The later maxim—"no documents, no history"—was still Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article-pdf/61/2/266/2749128/aarc_61_2_f7455003g0277314.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 a long way off, but Bede was beginning to forge a connection that would remain important to historians. The penetration of this kind of literate mindset is even evident in subtle ways in Bede's text. In particular, writing was becoming a familiar enough activity so that metaphors involving literacy were entering the collective dis- course of Bede's audience.16 We have already noted the contrast between the "innate love of virtue" demonstrated by Haedde, bishop of the West Saxons, a genuine concern that was contrasted with "what he had learned from books." (5.18) Books were essential, but they could simply remain "dead letters." One might learn things from reading them, but if one did not in- ternalize their lessons and act on the basis of what one read, their impact would be limited. Bede's use of this imagery, which remains common enough today, suggests that even those committed to literacy and the learning it helped advance knew that there was a difference between reading and doing. The images of writing conveyed clearly and emotionally the power of literacy, but more effective yet in that regard were the stories Bede repeated on the magical and mystical powers of writing. In circumstances where writing is just starting to penetrate, where only certain members of elite groups (especially religious elites) have the ability to read and write, writing itself often retains the aura of a magical act. Bede's Britain was such a place. In the very first chapter of Book One, he related a story of the magical effects of written words. Surveying the geography of Britain and Ireland, he included a description of conditions in Ireland, a place that was "healthier" than Britain, especially because "almost everything that the island produces is efficacious against poison." There were no snakes in Ireland, for example, Bede reported, not (as later pious legend would have it) because the missionary Saint Patrick had driven them out, but because any serpents traveling aboard ships to Ireland from Britain took one breath of the fragrant Irish air and immediately died. More significant for our purposes, Bede also described a particular Irish remedy for poisoning. The pages of manuscripts were "scraped," he said, "and the scrapings put in water and given to the sufferer to drink. These scrapings at once absorbed the whole violence of the spreading poison

3 Both of the standard modern translations of Bede introduce a false image dependent on writing in their rendering of a passage in the History at 1.10. At this point, Bede was reproducing a poem by an earlier writer, who denounced the heretic Pelagius. The original Latin identifies Pelagius simply as a "writer" {"scriptar"), but he gets elaborated by Sherley-Price into "this wretched scrib- bler with his pen of gall" and by Colgrave and Mynors into "some hack." Both translations seem to be more the product of a fully literate modern sensibility than of Bede's own imagination.

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and assuaged the swelling." (1.1) The written words on the page, even tiny shavings of the skin and the ink used to write those words, were so powerful that they could restore a person to health.17 Apart from a generalized folk belief in the powerful magic of written

letters, there was also a biblical basis for belief in such cures, and both Bede Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article-pdf/61/2/266/2749128/aarc_61_2_f7455003g0277314.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 and his audience would have been familiar with them. The healing power of a paste of dust and spittle which Jesus used to cure a blind man in John 9:6- 7 and Christ's idly tracing letters in the dirt before forgiving an adulterer in John 8:6 were earlier versions of the curative elixir made from the Irish manuscripts. Though it stretches modern sensibilities, Bede never doubted that what he was describing had actually happened: indeed, he even said that he himself had seen the scraped manuscripts work against poisoning. From its earliest appearance, writing was a solemn act, one that conveyed control over the thing written and the thing written about. In ancient Egypt, for example, scrolls with the name of a dead pharaoh were buried with him, hidden care- fully in the tomb so that grave robbers might not find and destroy them, thereby impeding his entry into the afterworld. Early Chinese writing was apparently intimately connected with rituals of divination, with the earliest writings used not for practical interpersonal communication but rather for transmitting messages between humans and the gods. In Greece, writing was seen as the most effective means for dedicating people and things to the gods, and even curses were thought to increase in potency if they were committed to writing rather than remaining simply spoken.18 All these precedents for the mysteries of written documents were still very much alive in Bede's day. Learning to read and write could also have miraculous effects. Bede included a story of the visit to a bishop by "a dumb youth," a lad "who had never been able to utter a single word." The holy man effected a cure on this unfortunate by telling him to stick out his tongue. After he had done so, the bishop made the sign of the cross on it and told the boy to say the vernacular word for "yes." This he immediately was able to do. The real power at work here, in Bede's view, was obviously the sign of the Christian cross, but literacy also played an important part in the story. Having mirac- ulously said a single word, how could the youth learn to talk on his own? The miracle continued with the help of the letters of the written alphabet. "The bishop then added the names of the letters," Bede went on. " 'Say A,' and

17 Some scholars have argued that Bede's story of these miraculous manuscripts was intended to suggest that Ireland somehow prefigured Paradise, in which the snake responsible for the fall of Adam and Eve would finally be vanquished by the words of holy books. For a short review of these arguments, see Wallace-Hadrill, 9-10. 18 For discussions of the mystical and religious powers of writing, see Martin, History and Power of Writing, 8-25, and Rosalind Thomas, Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 56-61.

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he said it. 'Say B,' and he said that too," the boy then going on to repeat each letter of the alphabet after the bishop. The letters of the alphabet ex- isted only in writing, of course: in a purely oral world, though the sounds they represented are familiar, the letters themselves have no independent existence. Here writing was being used to extend the miracle and to complete Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article-pdf/61/2/266/2749128/aarc_61_2_f7455003g0277314.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 the young man's cure, and they accomplished their intended purpose. With the boy proceeding next from letters to words to sentences, "those who were present related that he never ceased all that day and night, as long as he could keep awake, to talk and to reveal the secrets of his thoughts and wishes to others as he could never do before." Like the biblical lame man, healed by Peter in Acts 3, who then leapt in praise to God, Bede pointed out, this boy was totally changed, and in his case the transformation came in part through the intervention of literacy. The lad's skin even cleared up, Bede reported, and he grew a head of "beautiful curly hair"! (5.2)19 There were many practical uses of writing in Bede's world, but the symbolic and mystical uses of writing things down retained their efficacy and their power as well.

Bede and Present-Day Archivists

Bede's Ecclesiastical History continues to appeal to readers across nearly a millennium and a half. Even if we do not take everything he says as a literally true and accurate representation of some sort of "objective" historical reality, we can still learn from his narrative much about the events and conditions that shaped western culture. But what do his occasional and sometimes amus- ing tales of writing, records, and books have to say to those whose profession it is to care for such things and to facilitate their use? What does his experience of change in the means for information storage and transfer have to say to us? Several aspects of that experience merit our particular attention and reflection. First, the emergence and eventual success of a new information technology was an important feature of Bede's world. The transition he and his contemporaries were experiencing—from orality to literacy—seems today a simple one, but that is only because we live in the aftermath of the "literate revolution" and are framed by a literate world. For Bede and others in eighth- century Britain who were actually living through the change, however, that transition was by no means easy or comfortable; nor was the final triumph of writing a foregone conclusion. Literate ways of conducting human affairs were still relatively unusual, and society had not yet come to a consensus that writing would be normative. Even though some individuals and groups, most notably the clerical and monastic elites of which Bede himself was a part,

19 Wallace-Hadrill points out (pp. 175-76) that this method of proceeding from letters to syllables to words to sentences, had been identified by Quintillian and other classical rhetoricians as the proper approach to successful instruction in literacy.

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preserved the written words of both the classical past and their own present, literate ways did not yet pervade society as a whole. The crucial matter of "trusting writing," for example, described for a later period by M. T. Clanchy, had yet to be entirely resolved in Bede's era. Beyond that, just exactly what "literacy" meant was not at all clear, and it took many different forms: prac- Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article-pdf/61/2/266/2749128/aarc_61_2_f7455003g0277314.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 tical literacy (the simple ability to read and/or write); cultural literacy (the generation and circulation of literature and scholarship); literacy in Latin or in the vernacular; and the ability to write or perhaps simply to recognize one's own name, as distinct from more general orthographic skills.20 Like most revolutions, this one seemed more inevitable after the fact than it did to those who were actually living through it. Moreover, the conventions for preserving, transmitting, and using information in written form had not yet entirely coalesced. Adamnan's written version of another's oral description of the Holy Land and, even more significant, Bede's own conveying of the "sense" of Adamnan's text rather than an exact transcription of it demonstrate that writing still depended in significant ways on speaking. At critical moments in human affairs, writing had to be made oral, as in Wilfrid's trial: written words, apparently "dumb," were fully effective only when they were actually brought to life and made to speak. In the dialectic between orality and literacy, the balance was still tipped in favor of the former; oral forms did not yet exist in a world "governed," in Brian Stock's phrase, "by texts."21 Writing was indeed assuming a greater role in administration and other practical business, but its effects could still be spotty. When Archbishop Theodore and his companions made their way across the continent with a papal letter of introduction, they might be well received in one place but not in another. Official records as memoranda of events were becoming more common, and procedures for authenticating these were also emerging. The proceedings of church synods, for example, were being set down in writing so that successors might refer to them at some unspecified future time, and these records were increasingly invested with enduring authority by means of various procedures, such as signatures, which confirmed their veracity. The particular details aside, these examples show the sometimes halting accommodation which Bede's world was making in its transition from a purer form of orality to literacy. The transition which we at the end of the twentieth century are experiencing is no less thoroughgoing than that described by Bede, and it is certainly proceeding much more rapidly. Archivists are at the center of this transition, if only because they are the ones who seek to manage the stuff of

' Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, esp. ch. 9. See also C. P. Wormald, "The Uses of Literacy in Anglo-Saxon England and Its Neighbours," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 27 (1977): 95-114. 1 See the summary of his argument in Stock, Implications of Literacy, 3-11.

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information collection and exchange. Like Bede's contemporaries, we who are living through our own revolution have at best an imperfect notion of how it will turn out. Also like Bede's contemporaries, we have a keen aware- ness of the complexity of the change. Rather than a deceptively simple bi- polar shift from orality to literacy, our world recognizes many new forms of Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article-pdf/61/2/266/2749128/aarc_61_2_f7455003g0277314.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 literacy. We speak casually of "computer literacy," for example, but what does it mean? The phrase, hardly an uncontested term, is loosely applied to a host of very different skills and capacities: the ability to play Nintendo games; the use of basic word processing; more sophisticated manipulation of databases; and even the ability to engage in "hacking," the deliberate interference with someone else's electronically generated records and information. Similarly, we also hear increasingly of "visual literacy," the ability to "read" pictorial images—still and moving photographs, for example—to answer the surpris- ingly difficult question of what they are "about."22 Our new methods for capturing and transferring information together with the newer forms of literacy remind us that, as with the new technology of Bede's day, transitions from one form of information transmission to another are complex. The shift from one form of literacy to another does not operate in a single direction, and the change is incorrectly characterized as "progress" from a more primitive state to a more advanced one. Some have argued, for example, that "electronicity" is actually a kind of secondary orality. Think of the now ubiquitous e-mail message. It is both written and read in the form of typed letters on a screen, and thus it seems like simply another form of literacy; it appears to be merely what one archivist has called "fast paper." Yet most observers seem to agree that e-mail communications are less formal than their counterparts, the written or typed hard-copy letter, that their content and style are more fluid, more immediate, and more conver- sational—that they are, in fact, more like speaking than writing. Thus, the better parallel for e-mail, some maintain, is the telephone conversation rather than the written letter.23 Just as Bishop Wilfrid lived in a world in which a written record might also become an oral one and Adamnan lived in a world in which the spoken word might become a written word, so we live in a world in which an electronic record might be written, oral, both, or neither. The boundaries between one form of information storage and another are every bit as fluid as they were in the period Bede described, and archivists need to pay attention to them. What archivists do with such stuff—how it is appraised,

22 Elisabeth Kaplan and Jeffrey Mifflin, " 'Mind and Sight': Visual Literacy and the Archivist," Archival Issues 21 (1996): 107-27. 231 first heard the phrase "fast paper" from Kathleen Roe of the New York State Archives, though the coinage may not be original to her. Gregory Sanford of the Vermont State Archives has reported to me—in an e-mail message, of course!—that he recently conducted an informal experiment with about a dozen colleagues, sending each of them both an e-mail message and a written letter. The response rate to the e-mails was twice as high as that for the hard copy correspondence. He and I are still pondering what this means.

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arranged, described, used, and so on—will surely depend in part on what we think it is in the first place. A second "lesson" contemporary archivists might take from the experience of Bede's society relates to the uses to which information technology is put and how those uses change. In the circumstances described in the Eccle- Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article-pdf/61/2/266/2749128/aarc_61_2_f7455003g0277314.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 siastical History, the practical usefulness of records for accomplishing particular tasks was just becoming established. The ability of records to leave behind evidence for such matters as the proper calculation of Easter and "all things necessary for the celebration of festal days" were examples of the administrative usefulness of records, one of the traditional justifications for archival programs, especially in organizational and institutional settings. In their way, many of Bede's examples may be seen as predecessors to all kinds of routine contemporary records. The use of records in judicial proceedings also has a long lineage from Wilfrid's trial to more contemporary cases. The creation and preservation of the transactions of synods is an entirely familiar impulse in a world in which committees and boards preserve the minutes of their meetings and legislative assemblies publish their journals. The authentication and confirmation of documents by the use of signatures and seals in Bede's day finds its parallel in the authentication of documents—birth cer- tificates, for instance—in our own. We even preserve the forms of many of these authentication methods in the absence of their substance: obviously nonoriginal reproductions of signatures underline and validate the phrase "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private" which appears on United States currency.24 Living as we do in a world in which literacy is so pervasive, we are surrounded by examples of the practical usefulness of records. Still, the new forms of information exchange present us with challenges just as those of Bede's day did. In law, for example, the admissibility of these new types of records is problematic. All documentary evidence in court proceedings is by its very nature an exception to the rules excluding hearsay: since a document cannot be cross-examined as a live witness can, a special provision must be made to permit its introduction at trial.25 The advent of newer forms of records has further complicated this problem, and only grad- ually has provision been made for the legal admissibility of, for example, microform copies of records. The same issue is now being raised in many political jurisdictions regarding the legal admissibility of electronic records, and the standard applied to microforms—that the electronic records be pro-

24 On the reproduction of signatures that are obviously not original, see James M. O'Toole, "The Symbolic Significance of Archives," American Archivist 56 (Spring 1993): 244. 25 The inability to cross-examine constituted the principal objection of Socrates to written language, as recorded in Plato's Phaedrus, 274C-275D: "Written words . . . seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you the same thing forever."

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duced in what is called "the normal course of business," that is, before they become material to any particular case—may well provide the key to its res- olution, but the difficulties do not stop there. When dealing with traditional paper-and-ink written records, there is at least a material object which is, in some sense, the record, but this may no longer be the case. As the ongoing dispute over the White House e-mail (the so-called PROFS case) shows, con- Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article-pdf/61/2/266/2749128/aarc_61_2_f7455003g0277314.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 temporary society has by no means settled the question of just exactly what an electronic record is or when electronically stored information is "a record." The work undertaken at the University of Pittsburgh and elsewhere to define the "functional requirements" of records—what elements does an electronic record have to have to be a record?—are only the first steps toward addressing this question.26 As in Bede's day, so today do the means for cre- ating records run ahead of society's ability to know precisely what to make of them. For the present and immediate future, we may well sympathize with the twelfth century litigant, described by Clanchy, who scorned the evidence offered by "the skins of wethers blackened with ink and weighted with a little lump of lead."27 Present-day disputants may feel the same contempt for thin sheets of plastic with invisible magnetic bumps on them. The evanescence of the emerging information technologies of the present may also remind us of the mystical powers of writing and records which Bede described. As self-proclaimed modern sophisticates, of course, we can be smug in dismissing his tales of miraculous cures attributable, at least in part, to writing. Surely no one today would scrape fragments off a manuscript and blend it into a cure for snakebite; nor, we presume, would anyone drink the liquefied shavings of a floppy disk. But do computers not occupy some of the same mysterious territory that written documents inhabited in Bede's day? Do not many moderns look on computers as fundamentally magic de- vices? Just as his world divided itself between those who could use this complicated new thing called writing and those who could not, so our world divides itself between those who use these complicated new machines and those who do not. Just as some people in his world feared the magical power of written words on animal skins, so in our world are there people who remain "techno-phobic," certain that they will never understand the computer. Just as only an elite few could master the techniques and uses of literacy in his times, so it often seems that only true initiates can master the techniques

26 For an early discussion of the continuing PROFS case, see David Bearman, "The Implications of Armstrong v. Executive Office of the President for the Archival Management of Electronic Records," American Archivist 56 (Fall 1993): 674-89. See also Richard J. Cox, ed., University of Pittsburgh Record- keeping Functional Requirements Project: Reports and Working Papers (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh School of Library and Information Science, 1995), and Margaret Hedstrom's very helpful, "Building Record-Keeping Systems: Archivists Are Not Alone on the Wild Frontier," Archivaria 44 (Fall 1997): 44-71. 27 Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 260-61. On this whole question, see Donald Skupsky, Law, Records, and Information Management (Denver: Information Requirements Clearinghouse, 1994).

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of today. To those not in the know, computer technology for the storage and dissemination of information will always remain as inaccessible and inscru- table as the letters of the alphabet were to the once-mute boy described by Bede, before the miraculous freeing of his tongue. In sum, Bede's time and our own, for all their obvious dissimilarities, Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article-pdf/61/2/266/2749128/aarc_61_2_f7455003g0277314.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 have many points of intersection, and his narrative can still speak to archivists across the centuries. It is a truism to observe that we all live our lives forward, unaware of how things will turn out, and that history alone permits a back- ward vision. As a result, though we can see now how the information revolution of his time played out, we cannot know what the end of our revolution will be. Even so, reflection on the nature and meaning of the transitions of his day can reassure us that we can survive our own if we study and reflect on them in a larger context.

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