bibliography and discussion see Harris 1989. Street 1984, Literacy in
Theory and Practice, should not be overlooked for its own analysis as
well as its critique of some of the theories just mentioned. Olson and
Torrance (eds.) 2001,The Making of Literate Societies, discuss the role
of literacy in social development, shifting away from the traditional
focus on personal literacy to a focus on what makes a society a literate
society, and including comparanda from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the
Americas with one chapter on ancient Greece (by Thomas 2001a).
Other theoretical work includes Barton, Hamilton, and Ivanicˇ (eds.)
2000,Situated Literacies: Reading and Writing in Context, and Collins
and Blot 2003, Literacy and Literacies: Texts, Power, and Identity.
Memory in medieval societies has been addressed by Carruthers 1990,
The Book of Memory(cf. the anthology by Carruthers and Ziolkowski
[eds.] 2002,The Medieval Craft of Memory), Clanchy 1993 (1st ed.
1979),From Memory to Written Record, Stock 1983,The Implications
of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the
Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries, and Mostert 1999,New Approaches to
Medieval Communication. Scribner and Cole 1981, The Psychology
of Literacy, describe the unique writing system invented by the Vai
people in Liberia for their commercial and personal affairs. Boone and
Mignolo (eds.) 1994, Writing Without Words: Alternative Literacies
in Mesoamerica and the Andes, discuss ancient systems of record
keeping in the New World that did not make use of writing, and argue
interestingly that our conception and definition of literacy should take
these wordless archival systems into account. The massive, two-volume
collectionSchrift und Schriftlichkeit,byGu ̈nther, Ludwig, et al. (eds.)
1994–1996, contains both theoretical and comparative work on the
material, formal, general, psychological, and linguistic aspects of writing
and its use; the history of writing; literate cultures; functional and
social aspects of literacy; the acquisition of literacy; and special writing
systems.
Inevitably there remain areas and topics related to literacy that
cannot be addressed here. There is insufficient space to include work on
Roman recitation. Nor have I tried to embrace comprehensively the
abundant scholarship on performance—in whatever theoretical sense
the word is intended (although the rubric ‘‘Performance’’ in the biblio-
graphical index points to some work having specific relevance to literacy
or to the genesis of written texts). The same statement holds for literacy
as a component of ‘‘Education,’’ a large topic not adequately covered here.
Orality in terms of the Homeric Question could not be treated here:
for a lucid, helpful discussion of this vast subject, see the bibliographical
essay in Thomas 1992. Also not discussed is ‘‘song culture’’ (a term
invented by C. J. Herington,Poetry into Drama: Early Tragedy and the
Greek Poetic Tradition1985: 3–4; cf. ‘‘Literate/Literary Culture’’ in the
bibliographical index and my remarks onmousikeabove). Editions of
Literacy Studies in Classics 341