The Invention of the Oral

Print Commerce and Fugitive Voices in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Paula McDowell

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780226457017
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Just as today's embrace of the digital has sparked interest in the history of print culture, so in eighteenth-century Britain the dramatic proliferation of print gave rise to urgent efforts to historicize different media forms and to understand their unique powers. And so it was, Paula McDowell argues, that our modern concepts of oral culture and print culture began to crystallize, and authors and intellectuals drew on older theological notion of oral tradition to forge the modern secular notion of oral tradition that we know today.
 
Drawing on an impressive array of sources including travel narratives, elocution manuals, theological writings, ballad collections, and legal records, McDowell re-creates a world in which everyone from fishwives to philosophers, clergymen to street hucksters, competed for space and audiences in taverns, marketplaces, and the street. She argues that the earliest positive efforts to theorize "oral tradition, " and to depict popular oral culture as a culture (rather than a lack of culture), were prompted less by any protodemocratic impulse than by a profound discomfort with new cultures of reading, writing, and even speaking shaped by print.
 
Challenging traditional models of oral versus literate societies and key assumptions about culture's ties to the spoken and the written word, this landmark study reorients critical conversations across eighteenth-century studies, media and communications studies, the history of the book, and beyond.
 

CHAPTER ONE

Oral Tradition in the History of Mediation

As for oral Traditions, what certainty can there be in them? What foundation of truth can be laid upon the breath of man?

—Joseph Hall, The Old Religion (1628; repr., 1686), 179

I was in a Printing House in Hell & saw the method in which knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation. . . . In the fifth chamber were Unnam’d forms, which cast the metal into the expanse. There they were receiv’d by Men who occupied the sixth chamber, and took the forms of books & were arranged in libraries.

—William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790)1

In 1699 an anonymous member of the Royal Society of London published a mathematical formula for assessing the credibility of oral tradition. In “A Calculation of the Credibility of Human Testimony,” printed in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the author opined that “Oral Tradition . . . is subject to much Casualty,” losing much of its reliability within twenty years. Meanwhile, “written Tradition, if preserv’d but by a single Succession of Copies, will not lose half of its full Certainty, until . . . Seven Thousand, if not Fourteen Thousand Years.”2 This paper has been attributed to John Craig (c. 1663–1731), an Anglican clergyman and mathematician who published at least eight papers in the Philosophical Transactions between 1697 and 1710. The same year that “A Calculation” appeared, Craig published Theologiae Christianae Principia Mathematica (Mathematical principles of Christian theology), an attempt to use mathematical reasoning to determine the reliability of human testimony. Craig calculated that several factors affect the trustworthiness of an account passed down by tradition, such as the number of original eyewitnesses, the spatial and geographical distance from the event related, and the elapsed time since the event took place. Addressing the question of miracles, Craig acknowledged that the miracles recorded in the Bible tested the faith of Christian believers, but he argued that the apostles were original eyewitnesses, and therefore their oral testimony could be believed. Alarmingly, though, Craig also calculated that the credibility of the story of Jesus, insofar as this story had been passed down by tradition, had expired around 800 CE. Not surprisingly, given this verdict, some of Craig’s Royal Society colleagues questioned his wisdom in subjecting apostolic testimony to probabilistic analysis. More strikingly, though—and more significantly for us in this chapter examining the long eighteenth-century scrutiny of the idea of tradition—other colleagues simply questioned his math.3

Today, the idea of tradition is evoked in the service of diverse sociopolitical arguments. It is commonly used to evoke some kind of reassuring continuity or collective experience at times of perceived rapid change. But as sociologist Edward Shils pointed out, “in its barest, most elementary sense, [tradition] means simply a traditum; it is anything which is transmitted or handed down from the past to the present. It makes no statement about what is handed down.”4 The Oxford English Dictionary defines tradition as “I. The action or an act of imparting or transmitting something; something that is imparted or transmitted” and as “1. a. A belief, statement, custom, etc., handed down by non-written means (esp. word of mouth, or practice) from generation to generation; such beliefs, etc., considered collectively.”5 In the Christian church, traditio refers to “the delivery of God’s truth to His people through the apostles” and, by extension, to “the continuity of orthodoxy in the Church.”6

In the eighteenth century, the question of tradition was a key issue of doctrinal differentiation between Protestants and Catholics. Since the Reformation, theologians debated the relative authority of the scriptures as compared with tradition as the “rule of faith.” For Catholics, the tradition of the church is of equal authority with scripture. Tradition is manifested in the rituals, spoken words, and gestures of religious worship: it is the “Living Voice and Practice of the Church.”7 Catholic theologians argued that the transmission and interpretation of the scriptures were subject to endless human error. Accordingly, it was safer to “shift meaning, and authority, away from the text itself, and place both in the hands of Rome.”8 Meanwhile, Protestants promoted Luther’s doctrine of sola scriptura. They acknowledged that Christ’s teachings were oral, and that “the Old and New Testaments . . . had been preserved orally . . . for . . . centuries before being immortalized on paper.” But they argued that this tradition was now safely preserved in the Bible, that the basic truths necessary to salvation were sufficiently clear, and that writing was potentially the most reliable method of preserving and communicating knowledge.9

As the epigraphs to this chapter suggest, the Enlightenment saw a profound interrogation of what William Blake called “the method[s] in which knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation.” It saw an examination of the reliability of different modes of transmission of divine and secular wisdom and the implications thereof for knowledge, government, and faith. Enlightenment theologians voluminously debated the relative reliability of oral tradition, writing, and, sometimes, printing. Surveying the arts of transmission from Moses to modernity, they compared oral tradition with these other modes. The author of “A Calculation” compared the transmission of knowledge in “Oral Tradition” and “Written Tradition,” especially “since the Invention of Printing”:

In Oral Tradition as a Single Man is subject to much Casualty, so a Company of Men cannot be so easily suppos’d to join. . . . But in Written Tradition, the Chances against the Truth or Conservation of a single Writing are far less; and several copies may also be easily suppos’d to concur; and those since the Invention of Printing exactly the same. (363)

Similarly, Anglican divine Edward Stillingfleet (1635–99) devoted sections of his more than six-hundred-page book Origines Sacrae (1662) to the history of writing systems, considered in relation to oral tradition. Later, another eminent Anglican clergyman, William Warburton (1698–1779), built on Stillingfleet’s arguments in his own nearly thirteen-hundred-page book, The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated (2 vols., 1738–41). Both of these authors were widely read throughout the Enlightenment, and Warburton’s work was celebrated by philosophers for its groundbreaking contribution to the study of “hieroglyphics”—a term then used to describe forms of picture-based writing used not only in Egypt but also in China and the New World. In debating the relative reliability of oral tradition, writing, and printing, these and other clergymen were discussing what we would now call issues of mediation. In the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Britain, the most influential histories of mediation were arguably written by theologians. In turn, questions of divine intercession and the human transmission of God’s Word were central to Enlightenment debates about what we would now call “media.”10

Throughout the seventeenth century, Anglican theologians argued in texts and sermons for the centrality of the scriptures as the “rule of faith.” But in Restoration England, this debate suddenly became a matter of urgent national importance, as two kings sympathetic to the Catholic cause assumed the throne: Charles II (1660–85) and James II (1685–88). From 1660, the question of tradition was widely debated by poets and philosophers as well as priests. In Paradise Lost (1667), John Milton excoriated appeals to “Traditions” by corrupt clergy, whom he represented as “grievous Wolves” (bk. 12, l. 508). Like Milton, John Dryden argued for “tradition written” as the rule of faith in Religio Laici Or a Layman’s Faith (1682). But unlike Milton, Dryden later changed his views. Shortly after the succession of James II, he converted to Catholicism, and in The Hind and the Panther (1687) he argued in favor of the (unwritten) tradition of the church. Meanwhile, an anonymous Protestant author who described himself as “an obscure man” published a 236-page book titled An Enquiry Whether Oral Tradition Or The Sacred Writings, Be the Safest Conservatory and Conveyance Of Divine Truths (1685). This author pointed out that the official Roman position as determined by the Council of Trent (1545–63) was that truth lay in both the scriptures and “Oral Tradition” as preserved by the church. But in the heated environment of political debate, he lamented, “Oral Tradition has quite carried away the Credit” (A4v).

In this chapter I examine the long eighteenth-century scrutiny of tradition, considering both the theological debates and the “historical processes by which non-religious uses emerged.”11 I argue that over the course of this 140-year period, the idea of oral tradition was scrutinized, debunked, and reconstituted in its modern form. Furthermore, the emergence of our modern secular notion of oral tradition was at once a break from and an outgrowth of earlier dominant theological meanings. Throughout the eighteenth century, the preeminent understanding of “tradition” remained theological, but a gradually shifting political and religious climate increasingly allowed authors to address the question of tradition from a protoethnographic standpoint (rather than a purely doctrinal one). From about the 1730s, one increasingly detects “oral tradition” used in strikingly new ways in a wide range of literary, historical, and philosophical writings and debates.

When philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon discussed “the organ of tradition” in The Advancement of Learning (1605), he was not necessarily referring to oral tradition. Bacon was addressing the passing down (tradere) of knowledge in the university curriculum. Accordingly, he classified “Speech,” “Writing,” and “gestures” under this rubric:

[T]he organ of tradition, it is either Speech or Writing . . . but yet it is not of necessity that cogitations be expressed by the medium of words. For whatsoever is capable of sufficient differences, and those perceptible by the sense, is in nature competent to express cogitations. And therefore we see in the commerce of barbarous people that understand not one another’s language, and in the practice of divers that are dumb and deaf, that men’s minds are expressed in gestures, though not exactly, yet to serve the turn.12

By “organ of tradition,” Bacon meant something like our “modes of transmission.” Today, one meaning of “organ” is “a means or medium of communication.”13 In the passage quoted above, Bacon initially states that “the organ of tradition . . . is either Speech or Writing,” but he then adds that any “medium” capable of expressing “differences . . . perceptible by the sense” can be an “organ of tradition.” Along with what he calls the “medium of words,” he includes “gestures”—a means of “express[ing] cogitations” that is used with special facility by the “dumb and deaf.”

For Bacon, then, “tradition” did not necessarily mean oral tradition. But by the mid-eighteenth century, I argue, widespread debates concerning the scriptures versus tradition as the “rule of faith” had forged so strong a link between tradition and oral transmission that by this time, “tradition” typically implied oral tradition. In 1755 Samuel Johnson defined “tradition” as “1. The act or practice of delivering accounts from mouth to mouth without written memorials; communication from age to age; 2. Any thing delivered orally from age to age.”14 As is now well known, Johnson was highly skeptical of contemporary appeals to oral tradition—especially appeals made by Scottish nationalists to advance their diverse political and personal goals after the Union of England and Scotland in 1706/7. While Johnson’s skepticism is commonly ascribed to his bias against the Scots, I would argue that much greater attention needs to be paid to the role of his Anglicanism in shaping his attitudes toward tradition. It is no accident, I would point out, that in defining “tradition,” “traditional,” “traditionally,” “traditionary,” and “traditive” in his Dictionary of the English Language (1755), Johnson took most of his usage examples from Protestant authors who excoriated or critiqued Catholic appeals to “Tradition.” Johnson’s definitions of “tradition,” “traditional,” and so on comprise a veritable Protestant catalog of anti-Catholic quotations. He provides usage examples from polemical works by Anglican divines such as Stillingfleet and from Protestant arguments by Milton and Dryden. All of these diverse authors addressed the question of tradition in a theological context. Johnson was outspoken and belligerent in many ways, but his concept of and attitudes toward tradition were entirely typical of learned Protestants of his era.

At the same time, though, while Johnson’s definition of “tradition” participates in long-standing theological debates, it also exemplifies gradual change. Johnson’s explication of tradition as oral links oral tradition to the larger category of oral discourse more generally, and his emphasis on the mechanisms of oral transmission exemplifies what I see as the heightened eighteenth-century interest in the phenomenon of oral communication. Johnson highlighted the uniquely physical nature of oral communication, for instance, when he defined tradition as “the act or practice of delivering accounts from mouth to mouth.” Eighteenth-century discussions of tradition were about Protestant ideology, but they were also, increasingly, about oral communication more generally and about the changing uses and meanings of oral communication in a print society.

Johnson’s usage examples reflect the critique of tradition in Protestant theology, but by 1700 the unreliability of tradition was also axiomatic in other related realms of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1.  Oral Tradition in the History of Mediation
• 2.  Oral Tradition as A Tale of a Tub: Jonathan Swift’s Oratorial Machines
• 3.  The Contagion of the Oral in A Journal of the Plague Year
• 4.  Oratory Transactions: John “Orator” Henley and His Critics
• 5.  How to Speak Well in Public: The Elocution Movement Begins in Earnest
• 6.  “Fair Rhet’ric” and the Fishwives of Billingsgate
• 7.  “The Art of Printing Was Fatal”: The Idea of Oral Tradition in Ballad Discourse
• 8.  Conjecturing Oral Societies: Global to Gaelic
• Coda: When Did “Orality” Become a “Culture”?
• Notes
• Index