ABSTRACT
Ginzburg emphatically comments on the pamphlet literature of Mennochio's century, a print form that, in tandem with the sale of almanacs, ballads, and lives of the saints, constituted the bulk of Western Europe's book trade. In fact, 90 percent of the first 15 lines of the Iliad proved demonstrably formulaic-which is to say, scholars were able to match word clusters in them with others found elsewhere-identically-in Homer's corpus. Nevertheless, Beowulf relies on diction that is not only compositionally formulaic, but on topoi that are found in other Old English poems, as well as in other Germanic languages. So, words can hardly be mulled over, let alone relished the way a Shakespearean sonnet might be from a fixed point on a page. But in a prehistorical environment—which is to say, a prewriting one—listeners can hardly pause during the communication of a story to analyze or ruminate over its constituent parts.
