In the chantry schools grammar served, above all, to establish 
oral fidelity.

*     Once it is understood that oral culture has many 
features of stability, quite non-existent in a visually organized 
world, it is quite easy to enter the medieval situation. It is also 
easier to grasp some of the basic changes in twentieth century 
attitudes.

     I turn briefly now to an unusual book by Istvan Hajnal 
(24) about the teaching of writing in medieval universities. I 
had opened this book in the expectation of finding, between 
the lines, as it were, evidence of the ancient and medieval 
practice of private reading aloud. I was not prepared to 
discover that “writing” to a medieval student was not only 
profoundly oral but inseparable from what is now called oratory