Later religious prose

Abstract

Prose is the index of civilisation, requiring literacy as verse does not. It both depends on and creates relatively settled conditions, an organised society, an education system, control of the technology required to produce writing materials, and capacity to store and utilise what is written. Prose is particularly concerned with utility, and is closely connected with the beginning of utilitarian documentation about 1200. It would be long before English culture would use prose for entertainment; but utility in a pre-scientific ‘archaic’ world includes religion and the life to come. Because religion also calls for imagination the most imaginative prose was for long religious, and of this the best is the prose of the mystics.