This talk will examine how practices of reading, writing, and circulating temple and shrine origin narratives influenced the development of shared bodies of knowledge about the myriad deities and sacred spaces spread across the Japanese archipelago during the 14th through 16th centuries. Scholars often examine origin narratives within larger studies about individual cultic sites and discuss them as stories strategically constructed to support the worldly needs of religious institutions. A different viewpoint emerges, however, when we shift our attention from recitations of origin narratives for popular audiences to their use by scholarly monks. I will argue that scholarly monks used origin narratives as scholarly sources—they compiled and compared different origin narratives in order to study local deities and sacred spaces. Additionally, I will use this discussion to raise larger methodological and disciplinary questions about studying the intellectual significance of origin narratives. Can such study be considered intellectual or cultural history even when the sources lack the types of details that are often central to such fields? Extant origin narrative manuscripts rarely inform us of who was involved in the texts’ production and later circulation, or when such events took place. This being the case, can we reimagine intellectual-cultural history without particular individuals and institutions being the key actors? I will suggest that the absence of these details can be, in fact, an opportunity for considering the agency of the texts themselves in the production of knowledge.