Homo Legens: Styles et pratiques de lecture: Analyses comparées des traditions orales et écrites au Moyen Âge/ Styles and Practices of Reading: Comparative Analyses of Oral and Written Traditions in the Middle Ages (review)

The product of an interdisciplinary project on the study of written and oral communication in medieval texts, Homo Legens comprises six articles by scholars from various backgrounds. Each article investigates the interrelation between oral and written traditions by analysing selected texts ranging from the Levant, Anatolia, and Byzantium, to Iberia, and covering an early to late medieval timeframe.

The Introduction explains how this interdisciplinary project brought researchers together to study groups of analogous texts from various genres. Orality in texts is identified as posing a crucial problem for a number of social sciences, especially medieval studies, and particularly in relation to the rediscovery by historians of oral cultures. This challenges nineteenth-century historians’ perception of written texts as being more reliable. An overview of the evolution of oral and written theory, and the differing approaches to the study and understanding of these concepts is summarized, revealing the most important aspect of this project to be the study of transitions between oral and written tradition.

The methodology put forward for these studies is the understanding of history, of reading, the reception of texts, and the history of oral and memory culture. These studies approach this in two principal ways: the analysis of the practice of reading, of various modes of reading, and the connections between oral and written tradition; and in critical evaluation of narrative texts, rhetorical elements, literary elements, and elements pointing to intertextuality. These studies address the importance of following the continuity as well as the discontinuity of traditions to show how relations between oral and written merge in texts that are a valuable source of information for scholars.

The first article by Tivdar Palágyi, as if following in the tradition of the debate between Delbouille and Rychner on the nature of oral and written composition, compares two historical texts that were the subject of linguistic simplification in the thirteenth century in an attempt to render them more accessible to the public. This thorough investigation analyses the Byzantine Greek Alexiade of Anna Comnena, making a linguistic and stylistic study of its transformation and translation into vernacular Greek, divesting it of what was perceived as antiquated literary expression. Alongside Anna Comnena, three historical texts of William of Tyre as translated from Latin into Old French are analysed and compared. Palagyi presents well-selected textual examples throughout, and draws on his intimate knowledge of the texts, styles, affectations, and linguistic peculiarities to investigate the question of whether the vernacular necessarily signifies orality, and the nature of oral sources, such as conversations, in historical texts. An understanding is achieved of orality not strongly in terms of the circumstances of composition, but rather as referencing a literary tradition, and as a valuable tool for presenting a text to the public.

The imaginary dialogues between Christians and Muslims, fictional stories of what transpired in the camps during the First Crusade, are the subject of the article by Svetlana Loutchitsky. Loutchitsky considers the interaction of oral and written tradition as presented in textual examples from transpositions of these Latin chronicles into Old French texts, the chroniclers’ commentaries, and indications of orality in dialogues, monologues, and the use of first-person present tense, asking whether the chansons emulate the chronicles, or vice versa.

Marie-Christine Varol presents the Judeo-Spanish literary tradition of Alexander and glossed proverbs. In limbo between religious and secular, these texts attest to an absence of continuity in transmission due to the several historical crises that affected this geo-ethnic population in the Middle Ages. Varol reveals the identity of a cultural group as...