Dame Study and the Place of Orality in Piers Plowman.

Though manifesting the habits of literacy and relying on critical tools fashioned within it, PPl also expresses an ambivalence toward literacy, in a suspicion of the motives and goals of abstraction, a sense of the epistemological space between sacramentum and invisible reality, and an indecision regarding the advantages of literacy for salvation. Dame Study, preoccupied by the voice and partial to spoken texts, represents the teaching voice, equivalent in modern terms to the auditory memory, and is related to the lectio divina, which has for its chief purpose the increase of charity that leads to a modification of the will in the interiorization of the allegorical sense.