The Book and the Transformation of Britain c. 550–1050: A Study in Written and Visual Literacy and Orality (review)

The three chapters that make up this volume were first delivered as the Sandars Lectures in Bibliography at Cambridge University Library in 2009, and the many figures and illustrations that accompany the text give a good sense of the visual engagement and stimulation those lectures must have provided. Unfortunately, the format, which would have worked very well indeed as a public lecture series, results in some frustration for specialist readers, who might wish for a more focused and sustained discussion of the material from one of the world’s leading experts in medieval manuscripts. But I suspect that this is not really the intention of the volume. Although the book calls itself a “study,” it is really more of a survey of a vast amount of paleographical and codicological material from the British Isles, the Continent, and the Near East up to the end of the first millennium. As a result, there is some difficulty in offering a summary or overview of its contents. No single argument or theory is put forward and advanced through the course of the chapters, aside from the overarching claim that “literacy” in early medieval Britain is both more polyvalent as a concept and more widespread as a practice than modern assumptions generally allow. This is a crucial point for us to bear in mind, and Brown draws on firmly established principles from Brian Stock, Franz Bäuml, and Walter Ong to build her case in the brief introduction: “High level literacy is, and always has been, the preserve of an educated elite,” she reminds us, and ignoring “the complexity of the interaction of orality with other modes of communication,” including both the textual and the visual, runs an unacceptable risk (9). Her lectures aim to offer a “coherent insight into social perceptions of the book and its significance as an instrument of cultural change” (11). Without a doubt, the volume succeeds categorically in demonstrating the vast range of literacies available to, and used by, early writers and readers of the British Isles. The sheer range of examples and illustrations on offer here make for engaging and illuminating reading and will provide readers with ample food for further thought, as well as suggesting directions for future work.

Chapter 1 deals with the theme “Conversion” and aims to show how practices of written culture allowed scribes to transmit ideas and symbols from all over Christendom into early medieval Britain. Brown argues that, far from being an isolated backwater of the intellectual world, Britain had frequent and productive contact with the farthest reaches of Christendom. Her evidence allows her to posit connections not only with centers of textual production on the Continent and in Ireland but also with distant desert monasteries. The sources of this evidence work to refigure the definition of literacy; images, for example, can be used to establish relationships between manuscripts produced thousands of miles apart, and they can serve as citation and intertext in the same way that words do. The evidence for literate practices is also extended beyond manuscripts; archaeological data for the survival of literacy ephemera, such as inscribed objects, writing tools, and wax tablets, show that literacy was being used in diverse ways and at various levels throughout medieval British society. Not only that, but literacy was preserved even after the Germanic conquest of Britain through the auspices of Christian conversion. When vernacular literacy became widespread as a tool of government and administration in the late Anglo-Saxon period, it followed the models of earlier Insular religious texts, not Continental chancery style. Literacy in early medieval Britain was the preserve of, and preserved by, the scribes of the Church who forged bonds of continuity with their Roman forebears and incorporated cultural influences from around the world.

Chapter 2, “Creating Communities of Reading,” rehearses many of these...