created and consulted documents is vital, of course, but just how persons
read, cited, and interpreted documents and how those interpretive prac-
tices changed over time remains largely unexplored. It remains to be seen if
such written documents were, in fact, an invitation to diverse modes of
interpretation and modes of thought in ways that oral discourse was not—
as many have conjectured beginning with Vico’sNew Science(1744/1970)
and continuing through Havelock’s more recent writing. It is a compelling
fact that the religious heretics of the late medieval and early modern period
were often, if not always, readers (Ginzburg 1982; Stock 1983).
Understanding literacy whether in classical antiquity or in modern
times requires not only a grasp of the spread of literacy and its increasing
use in social arrangement but also an understanding of how the concep-
tual and cognitive resources of those readers and writers evolved to take
advantage of the resources offered by written documents. Although it is
manifestly true that thought and discourse have become in some sense
more abstract and elaborate as written documents have come to occupy a
more important place in certain social practices, the more urgent question
is to address just how writing something down could change our mental
representation of it (Carruthers 1990). That is, we have only begun
to examine how our literate practices in particular domains such as
literature, science, and politics altered those domains and at the same
time the intellectual habits of the persons who participated in them. In
fact, this was the challenge set out by such theorists as Jack Goody and Ian
Watt, Eric Havelock, Marshall McLuhan, and Walter Ong in the 1950s
and ’60s. Although somewhat tainted by a cultural chauvinism and an
overemphasis on the uniqueness of the alphabet, the central claim was
eloquently expressed by Eric Havelock in a lecture delivered at the
University of Toronto in 1976 and later republished in hisThe Literate
Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences:
The civilization created by the Greeks and Romans was the first on the
earth’s surface which was founded upon the activity of the common reader;
the first to be equipped with the means of adequate expression in the
inscribed word; the first to be able to place the inscribed word in general
circulation; the first, in short to become literate in the full meaning of that
term and to transmit its literacy to us. (Havelock 1982, 40)I shall refer to the general claim relating writing to particular forms of
social organization and particular forms of discourse and thought as the
‘‘literacy hypothesis.’’
THE LITERACY HYPOTHESIS
The literacy hypothesis was the bold claim that the invention, adoption,
and application of a new mode and technology of communication, namely
writing, altered the social practices of the society as well as the cognitive
386 Epilogue