many long texts so that they could use them when they were far from books: Psalms, hymns and lists of various sorts were all items that a ‘well stocked mind’ just had available from memory—and it was not considered a great feat to be able to use these without a book. Then there were specialists who could commit whole books to memory and use them to entertain or instruct—people who had learned great long stories and could perform them when needed. We might think of these storytellers as those who