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Rabbinic documents present themselves to some extent as having their root in the oral transmission of information. This chapter attempts to summarize some important aspects of the rabbis' own explanation of this, nowadays treated under the label ‘oral Torah’. It then explores the hermeneutic effect of oral contexts, as well as the constitution of ‘social texts’ in the interaction of several voices in conversation. For the latter, two scenarios are considered: the selective use of an existing text in a discussion setting; and a kind of ‘committee’ meeting in which a record of rabbinic information is created from scratch. The chapter concludes with a critique of the idea that rabbinic texts were shaped by or for oral performance.

This chapter investigates recitation's progress within the mass educational systems that developed in Great Britain and the United States over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Thus, this historical survey begins by scrutinizing the experiences of partial populations of individuals at relatively elite levels of society. First, it considers the utility of verse and memorization for very early learners, examining the service role played by poetry and poetic devices in the extended period during which rudimentary education in English was understood primarily as a necessary tool to unlock the Bible and Christian scriptures. It then proceeds to the era in which certain kinds of schools began to assign the memorization and recitation of vernacular literary and oratorical extracts as a task for their advanced readers. The chapter concludes with a brief consideration of the factors that affected the constitution of juvenile recitation canons over the years.

This chapter examines the Letters of Pliny the Younger to understand better both the ways in which Pliny constructs a reading community and the particularities of that community. Pliny’s construction of literary culture is found to have a broad basis in regular, balanced ideals of daily regimen. Also explored is the relationship between Pliny’s deliberate highlighting of the institution of recitation and the reading community he seeks to construct, as well as other aspects of Pliny’s construction of community around literary ideals.

This chapter examines discourses about recitation in Zoroastrian and Christian literature. It first considers a Zoroastrian distinction similar to the one the Babylonian Talmud makes between the reciter and the scholar. It then looks at a Christian author who is also using a negative portrayal of Zoroastrian recitation and argues that in both the Talmud and the Christian text, the representation of Zoroastrian practice is employed to promote particular visions of Judaism and Christianity and dehabilitate others. Both texts contrast the performative, embodying practice of recitation with the scholarly approach that they promote, and by associating that recitation with Zoroastrian ritual they seek to mark it as foreign, as non-Jewish or non-Christian. It is possible that the encounter with Zoroastrian culture, in which recitation took a central role as a main component of ritual and as the exclusive interface to sanctified traditions, increased the importance of recitation for some Mesopotamian Jews and Christians.

This chapter considers Hekhalot literature to show that the Sar ha-Torah narrative from this corpus responds to the Talmudic academies‘ ideology of Torah study, presenting an alternative vision for Jewish culture in which retention and recitation are central rather than marginalized. It argues that this response correlates with other Hekhalot texts that recruit powerful images such as heavenly vision, transformation, and angelic liturgy to the project of memorizing and reciting the Oral Torah. It also contends that there is some evidence that the individuals whom the Babylonian Talmud marks as its opponents—the tanna'im—had a role in the shaping of Hekhalot traditions. Finally, the chapter suggests, based on the fact that the Hekhalot texts enter Jewish history as texts transmitted by Babylonian reciters, as well as on other connections between the tanna'im and Hekhalot texts, that the Babylonian reciters took active part in the shaping of Hekhalot traditions.

This book has argued that it is precisely when the Babylonian Talmud's creators seem most conservative—when they preserve traditions rather than reject or revise them—that we find their most profound break with tradition. It has examined recitation as a practice against which the Talmud's creators shape their own literary practice, as well as the authority of the Talmud as an important factor in the reception of the layered structure. This conclusion recapitulates the book's central arguments and considers their implications. It also offers some reflections on developments in Jewish history that directed rabbinic culture away from the concerns and contexts studied in this book. It suggests that even if the Talmud's negotiation of tradition and its ideology of scholarship were born out of a particular historical dynamic, they still belong in the longer intellectual history of Judaism.

This introductory chapter briefly discusses the history of verse recitation and poetry memorization in Great Britain and the United States and how their societies have come to perceive such practices, as well as the role poetry plays within both the British and American imaginary. It also provides an overview of the case studies to be undertaken in this volume, and the ways in which they will be approached for study. In addition, the chapter goes on to embark on brief explorations of the felt, internal aspects of memorized poetry in British and American society. These, as the chapter attempts to show, combine to tell a story that both augments and to an extent challenges the arguments put forward elsewhere in this book.

This concluding chapter focuses upon two works that were written during recitation's heyday and that currently hold preeminent status both as, and among, memorized poems in popular culture on both sides of the Atlantic. Positioning W. E. Henley's “Invictus” (1888) as an American national favorite and Rudyard Kipling's “If –” (1910) as a British poem of poems, the chapter conducts a consciously allegorical reading to orchestrate a return to the topic raised in the introduction. The memory of mass juvenile recitation arouses very different feelings in the United States and Great Britain. To close the book, the chapter considers in what ways this might be connected to how individuals in these two countries regard not only their nation's educational past, but also their relationships with poetry, with society, and with themselves.

This chapter offers a challenge to the classification of Seneca's tragedies as ‘rhetorical tragedies’ or declamations. Although the idea that Seneca's tragedies might have been partially danced had been suggested as early as the 1920s, the chapter argues that Seneca's tragedies contain several types of passage that point precisely to the character of a fabula saltata (‘danced story’), and that this suggests that even if Seneca did not write them specifically for pantomime performance, that is as libretti, he may have been influenced by the new aesthetics and conventions of the popular medium in the composition of these scenes. He may have been visualising, as he wrote, a theatrical performance with dance and music rather than a recitation. He may have hoped that his new kind of tragedy, suited to the taste of the Neronian period, could offer a substitute for the popular genres of theatre.

Recitation had become a strong venue for poets to reach a public in Augustan Rome. Horace, however, resists this medium on the grounds that it exposed a poet to the exigencies of the rat race. Epistles 1. 19 analyzes its own poet's hypocrisy in wanting to avoid social climbing while reserving his poetry for Augustus' ears.

This chapter spotlights the gestures (ishāra pl. ishārāt) which the teachers of Hadith (muḥaddithūn) performed while transmitting aḥādīth al-ṣifāt. The use of gestures in the context of aḥādīth al-ṣifāt entailed doctrinal and theological implications, and was in itself a matter of dispute. The performers of gestures among the muḥaddithūn of the seventh and eighth centuries, like Thabit al-Bunani (d. 740) and Harmala ibn ʿImran (d. 777) attributed the gestures to the Prophet and the ṣaḥāba. These muḥaddithūn perceived the gestures as iconic, namely gestures that display a concrete scene. The muḥaddith who in particular promoted the trend of performing gestures was Hammad ibn Salama (d. 784), and this chapter elaborates on his scholarly activity and public performances. Finally, this chapter evaluates the hermeneutical solutions to the gestures that accompanied the recitation of the anthropomorphic verses in the Quran and aḥādīth al-ṣifāt. These solutions were offered by the Hadith scholars who were active between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries. These scholars, who were mostly Ashʿarites, tended to interpret the gestures as metaphoric, namely gestures representing abstract concepts. The chapter concludes with the unique discussion of the Hanbalite Ibn al-Jawzi (d. 1201) on the topic of gestures and aḥādīth al-ṣifāt.

This chapter examines the assumptions underlying the production of “recitation poetry” as an object of literary discourse, as well as the breakdown of these assumptions in later war-period poems. On the one hand, early wartime recitation poems and wartime writing on poetry recitation amplified the notions of vocal aesthetics and national interiority invented in the preceding decades, and in the case of works labeled “recitation poems” even vocalized a poetic soundscape of wartime geography. Midway through the war, however, one finds poems by leading practitioners of poetry recitation, such as Guang Weiran (Zhang Guangnian) and Gao Lan (Guo Dehao), which complicate and even undermine the imagined powers of poetic voice and sound.

Thelwall could not escape the ghosts of his radical past as a political speaker who had been tried for treason. In reinventing himself as a speech therapist and lecturer on elocution he channeled his previous democratic commitments into teaching how to represent oneself through effective speaking. As he expanded the role of poetry in his elocution lectures, Thelwall developed a distinctive literary criticism that was particularly suited to public lectures. His key criterion for judging poetry was how well it lent itself to being read aloud or recited. At his London school he institutionalized this critical perspective, but his preference for extemporaneity left it vulnerable to loss in the historical record. Collecting the newspaper advertisements and other surviving texts of his literary lectures can help piece together a speculative account of his Romantic-era critical manifesto.

This chapter examines how ritual drummers fit into the larger sociocultural world of music making in South and West Asia. The Shiʻi wedding Muharram Ali attended in Lahore is an example of a ritual sequence with contrasting emotional overtones. The idea that individuals relate to elements in the ways that music might structure other such events and sequences raises the problem of reception. Before discussing how we understand musical meaning in complex events, the chapter situates the musical actors in the sociocultural structures and institutions of South and West Asia. It then considers the role of the individual in religious or other events that diverse populations attend and participate in, as well as the ways actors in such complex events bring forth emotionally coded musical components that themselves have a differential impact on participants' emotional conditions. It shows that the very performance of emotive acts such as music, recitation, sermons, and certain kinds of bodily practice have an effect on those who are collectively making that statement.

This and the following two chapters look at the reciters and storytellers who would frequent the coffeehouses of Cairo and other towns in the evenings, particularly during religious festivals. This chapter focuses on the poets (“shoara”) who would recite, by memory, tales of the adventures of Aboo Zeyd, a story based on events that supposedly took place in middle of third century AH, but were composed later. These tales are said to be informative on the subject Bedouin customs and traditions. The recitations were half prose and half poetry, with some music. The poet would play a few notes on a viol after every verse, and was sometimes accompanied by another instrument. This chapter includes a summary of a volume of the story, plus a translation of some of the poetry and musical notation.

The third type of reciters, along with the storytellers and poets of the previous two chapters, mainly told the story of ‘Antar (Seeret ‘Antar) and were therefore known as “‘Antariah.” They also told other tales, such as Seerat Delhemeh or stories from A Thousand and One Nights. There were around six of them in Cairo. They performed without music, chanting the poetry from memory and reading the prose. This chapter also includes summaries of some of the tales told and translations of some of the poetry.

Because social relations imply an individual’s vulnerability, ways must be found to protect oneself. Two possibilities present themselves: amassing power in oneself in order to make oneself resistant to outside attack; or subordinating oneself to concentrations of power (whether human or otherwise) from whom one will gain protection. This chapter enumerates some of the measures taken to foster invulnerability, including the use of amulets, daily Pali recitation, tattoos, and organized readings of particularly powerful Pali texts. It also describes the relations some people enter into with spirits (nat) and Buddhist saints (wei’za), entities whose power is believed to be available to supplicants who demonstrate their fealty to them, but who arouse considerable ambivalence among other, orthodox and reformist Burmese Buddhists.