Literacy
More general subjects:
Graphic Practices and Literacies in the History of English
Graphic devices such as tables and diagrams and other visual strategies of organising text and information are an essential part of communication. The use of these devices and strategies in books and documents developed throughout the medieval and early modern periods as knowledge was translated and circulated in European vernaculars. Yet the use of graphic practices and multimodal literacies associated with them have mostly been examined in the context of Latin Greek Arabic and Hebrew and early vernacular writing remains an under-researched area. This volume brings together contributors from English historical linguistics and book studies to highlight multimodal graphic practices and literacies in texts across a range of genres and text types from the late medieval period until the eighteenth century. Contributions in the volume investigate both handwritten and printed materials from books in the domains of medicine religion history and grammar to administrative records and letter writing.
Diplomatics in the Netherlands
The Use, Editing, and Study of Charters by Dutch Historians from the Middle Ages to the Present
Charters and other administrative texts have long had the full attention of medievalists as primary sources in their historiographical work. This also applies to scholars from the Netherlands. Ever since the late Middle Ages they recognised the value of these sources included them as testimony in their historiography and gradually began to realise that charters and other documents required a specific form of textual criticism and a special way of editing. In this Dutch historians usually followed developments abroad. Sometimes as in the early seventeenth century they were ahead methodologically but for long periods they depended for new insights on developments elsewhere. This was especially true in the nineteenth century when scientific diplomatic methods and editing techniques emerged which would only be introduced and applied in the Netherlands in the next century. In the twenty-first century Dutch scholars are fully participating in the ‘digital turn’ that is creating new research tools in diplomatics.
Ultimately the history of diplomatics in the Netherlands is part of the broad development of historiography in the country and therefore a valuable aspect of the history of scholarship in general.
Accountability in Late Medieval Europe
Households, Communities, and Institutions
This volume brings together studies of late medieval accountability in both the domestic and the public realms. It traces practices of accountability across the social spectrum from households to small businesses to communal and regnal administrations highlighting the intersections between competing conceptions of personal and institutional responsibility. Focusing on France and Italy from the thirteenth to the early sixteenth centuries the case studies follow territorial officers consular agents and town notables co-opted into local governance from Avignon and Marseille to Tuscany and the Venetian and Genoese overseas territories. The studies explore both personal and institutional accounting registers as well as records of a textual nature such as rulebooks and inquests in an effort to reflect the range of records and procedures relied on to achieve a measure of accountability in late medieval Europe.
Pastoral Works
Priests, Books, and Compilatory Practices in the Carolingian Period
Much of the Christian empire established by the Carolingians in the eighth century was not only built through royal initiative but also through the work of local priests. Living among the laity these clerics provided pastoral care and religious instruction. Yet despite their vital contribution to the development of Christianity in Western Europe these clergymen and the communities they served remain understudied.
This book investigates the manuscripts they used offering a glimpse into everyday life around the local church. Far from being poor and illiterate priests had access to texts specifically adapted to their needs. By examining how these materials were compiled this study reveals what mattered most in the early medieval countryside. Drawing on excerpts from collections of liturgy canon law and patristic expositions — often preserved in the great monastic and court libraries — it uncovers the diversity of local religious practice. These texts reflect how the efforts instigated by Carolingians to foster ‘good Christianity’ were interpreted and implemented outside the centres of power. In exploring these seemingly modest manuscripts this study opens new pathways into the world of the Carolingian local church and the people who inhabited it.
Navigating Language in the Early Islamic World
Multilingualism and Language Change in the First Centuries of Islam
Traditional accounts of Arabicization have often favoured linear narratives of language change instead of delving into the diversity of peoples processes and languages that informed the fate of Arabic in the early Islamic world. Using a wide range of case studies from the caliphal centres at Damascus and Baghdad to the provinces of Arabia Egypt Armenia and Central Asia Navigating Language reconsiders these prevailing narratives by analysing language change in different regions of the early Islamic world through the lens of multilingualism and language change. This volume complicates the story of Arabic by building on the work of scholars in Late Antiquity who have abundantly demonstrated the benefits of embracing multilingualism as a heuristic framework. The three main themes include imperial strategies of language use the participation of local elites in the process of language change and the encounters between languages on the page in the markets and at work. This volume brings together historians and art historians working on the interplay of Arabic and other languages during the early Islamic period to provide a critical resource and reference tool for students and scholars of the cultural and social history of language in the Near East and beyond.
Inscrire l’art médiéval
Objets, textes, images
Ce livre est consacré aux relations entre écriture épigraphique et art médiéval. Il se propose de placer les inscriptions tracées sur la pierre le métal le bois la peinture ou la mosaïque dans le contexte des pratiques écrites et artistiques du Moyen Âge occidental et de signaler quelques pistes de recherche originales pour appréhender le statut la forme et la fonction de la rencontre entre l’écriture épigraphique et les oeuvres d’art médiévales.
Cet essai se situe à la confluence de l’histoire de l’écriture et de l’histoire des formes. Il est fondé sur l’analyse d’un certain nombre d’objets graphiques du Moyen Âge central produits en Europe occidentale. Il s’inscrit donc dans une pensée chrétienne de l’écriture et de l’image et accorde une place importante à la théologie. Il est moins pensé comme un manuel épigraphique à l’attention des historiens de l’art que comme un répertoire de questions à explorer à repenser ou encore à traiter et s’adresse à quiconque aspire à la réunion des cultures écrite visuelle et matérielle du Moyen Âge.
The Materiality of Medieval Administration in Northern England
In the late Middle Ages the Percy earls of Northumberland and the bishops of Durham were two of the largest landholders in the North East of England. This book is a study of their estate administrations based on the extant manorial accounts from the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. Examining the documents holistically it investigates the shapes of the records and the materials they were written upon as well as how they were used and stored to provide new insights into late medieval lordly administration. Such a material-focussed approach explores the concurrent use of rolls booklets paper and parchment for different types of manorial accounts and at different steps of the multistage production and audit process. It also examines the hands drafting editing and auditing the accounts in addition to the layout and presentation of the contents of the records to further our understanding of the written burden of proof required in the management and audit of large estates in late medieval England. Studying the financial accounts of the earls of Northumberland and the bishops of Durham from a material perspective reveals two highly sophisticated administrative systems and structures of accountability.
Translation Automatisms in the Vernacular Texts of the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period
The volume deals with the issue of translation automatisms in early vernacular texts predating 1650. It introduces the novel concept of ‘translation clusters’ first defined in machine translation theory but equally considering a wider array of situations that involve ‘translation units’ ‘language automatisms’ ‘culturemes’ and ‘formulaic borrowings’ in vernacular texts. Contrary to contemporary languages where translation units clusters and automatisms appear frequently due to the influence of standard language varieties or dialects the vernacular idioms of the Middle Ages and Early Modern period are often pluricentric. Consequently automatisms are limited to specific cases where diachronic diatopic diastratic and diaphasic variants align similarly in two otherwise different translations. This is a crucial topic for philology as it can explain accidents that ecdotic methods tend to mistake for variant readings of a single ‘redactio’. The volume aims to determine the organic interplay between three primary situations in which common coincidences between translations or texts occur. Firstly the volume explores the shared elements resulting from the transfer of textual units between multiple translations or adaptations (quotations corrections formulas). Secondly chapters study the shared elements arising from the existence of a common source text (translation clusters based on translation units); and lastly the volume questions the fixed inherent and unchangeable aspects of the target language (language automatisms often coinciding with translation units). The chapters of this volume focus on numerous vernacular languages and a multitude of case studies with a particular emphasis on biblical translation—a cornerstone of contemporary translation studies. The chapter format encourages diverse perspectives to push the boundaries of philology translation studies and “vernacular theologies”.
Literacy in Medieval and Early Modern Vilnius
Forms of Writing and Rhetorical Spaces in the City
Late medieval and early modern cities in Europe could not exist without the use of the written word. Based on a case study of Vilnius - the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the fourteenth -eighteenth centuries - this book shows how rhetoric influenced all the spheres of urban literacy: the rules of writing rhetorical genres and their functions and the social practices of producing preserving and disseminating texts. Vilnius was a multi-ethnic multi-religious and multi-scriptural city and its literary culture was particularly rich. What was the legal basis of the city? Who were the professionals of the written word? What was the role of schools and books in the literary culture of the city? How did women participate in Vilnius’s textuality? Which rhetorical genres were used? This study is based on research into the different types of texts used in Vilnius: contracts; last wills; sermons; municipal state and church records; primers; shopping lists; poetry; manuals; and letters in Polish Latin Ruthenian Lithuanian Yiddish and other languages written or printed in five alphabets. The rhetorical organization of Vilnius can serve as a model for examining other towns of the time. It also shows the complexity of the use of script in the multi-ethnic urban communities of North-Eastern Europe.
Scotland’s Royal Women and European Literary Culture, 1424–1587
Scotland’s Royal Women and European Literary Culture 1424–1587 seeks to fill a significant gap in the rich and ever-growing body of scholarly work on royal and aristocratic women’s literary culture in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. There has to date been no book-length study of the literary activities of the female members of any one family across time and little study of Scotland’s royal women in comparison to their European and English counterparts. This book adopts the missing diachronic perspective and examines the wives and daughters of Scotland’s Stewart dynasty and their many and various associations with contemporary Scottish English and European literary culture over a period of just over 150 years. It also adopts a timely cross-border and cross-period perspective by taking a trans-national approach to the study of literary history and examining a range of texts and individuals from across the traditional medieval/early modern divide. In exploring the inter-related lives and letters of the women who married into the Scottish royal family from England and Europe — and those daughters who married outwith Scotland into Europe’s royal families — the resultant study consistently looks beyond Scotland’s land and sea borders. In so doing it moves Scottish literary culture from the periphery to the centre of Europe and demonstrates the constitutive role that Scotland’s royal women played in an essentially shared literary and artistic culture.