Ways of Reading, Models for Text, and the Usefulness of Dead People

The definition of text is still a live issue with important implications for emerging forms of digital textuality. This paper proposes that no single definition of text is sufficient to account for all manifestations of textuality. Medieval textuality is a test case: four different models for text are offered, corresponding to ways in which modern medievalists approach medieval texts. Studying medieval texts has value not only to support historically informed theories of reading and writing, but also to suggest alternative models of organizing, representing, and processing textual information.