Direct address in the tariff sections appears twice in this text.
The first addresses the priest:
On any one altar you may say two Masses in one day. He who eats before the Mass may not come for communion at the kiss. He who does not wish to take communion should not go to the priest's hand for bread, nor communion, nor go for the kiss.
The second addresses the penitent:
If you wish to alleviate a year's fast, set [a slave] free (redeem a captive), or donate 30 shillings, or sing the psalter thirty times.
In assessing these unusual departures, we must first consider the audience of each. The first seems to be addressed to the priest by his spiritual advisor or instructor--that is, the bishop. It alerts us to the role of the handbook in pastoral education and identifies it not as a text simply for use in determining penances but also for explaining liturgical obligations. The second quotation addresses a wealthy person who seeks to alleviate a long period of penance. Here we see the priest acknowledging the status of the penitent. It is a particularly important passage because it indicates the place of material circumstances in the confessional exchange.
Given that the Latin texts do not use the second-person pronoun, we have to consider the possibility that the vernacular text preserves something else: something like actual speech. Is it possible that a copyist, if not the author of the Scriftboc, slipped into direct discourse in the imagined act of speaking rather than writing? The second-person pronoun is used in these two sections of the Scriftboc in all three manuscripts, suggesting (if not proving) that the feature goes back to their common source. Such a "slip"--if it is one--would of course have been encouraged by the oral context governing the penitential and familiar to its author. Neither the author nor subsequent scribes were troubled by this departure from the syntactic norm. One possible explanation (apart from the often-invoked cure-all of scribal incompetence) is akin to what Goody calls "subvocal rehearsal," repetition of information that was not voiced but that was articulated and "heard" silently before it was committed to writing. We do this all the time. If you have read Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, you might recall Troilus rehearsing his first long speech to Criseyde at the start of Book 2--and could well imagine scribes repeating text to themselves as they wrote it. If they revocalized a penitential tariff or notice to the priest in this way, they could easily have "returned" the text to the fluid condition of oral recitation, at which point the second person would have been used rather than the third (oral performance was neither ad hoc nor free of improvisation). This return to subvocal, oral status creates what I mean by interface between the written and the spoken, a textual moment inseparable from its oral origin.
The mechanism of revocalization or subvocalization rewrites the text "in the scribe's head," so to speak, before the text is transferred to its new written environment. Use of the second-person pronouns in the tariffs evokes (by voicing) the immediate, oral context of confession, which survives as subtext in the scribe's mind (literally in his or her head) during the act of writing. The intimate conversation of monastic confession, the origins of Goody's "face to face" encounter, here meaning confession among the laity, is renewed in this text, which is far from monastic practice: the penitent and priest seem physically present--that is, present as "you"--to the copyist. Is this "you" an oral form resistant to writing? What might the significance of such an "oral residue" (to use Walter Ong's terminology) for our reading of the Scriftboc?
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