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  • Die Predigt im Mittelalter zwischen Mündlichkeit, Bildlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit / La prédication au Moyen Age entre oralité, visualité et écriture ed. by René Wetzel and Fabrice Flückiger
  • Stephan Borgehammar
Die Predigt im Mittelalter zwischen Mündlichkeit, Bildlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit / La prédication au Moyen Age entre oralité, visualité et écriture. Edited by René Wetzel and Fabrice Flückiger. Medienwandel–Medienwechsel–Medienwissen, 13. Zürich: Chronos, 2010. Pp. 434; 28 illustrations. EUR 43.

The study of medieval sermons is an established field of scholarly endeavor, with its own international society and conferences and a journal called Medieval Sermon Studies. The present book, however, proceeds from another context: the study of [End Page 539] media and mediality. The articles it contains originated as papers at a conference in Geneva organized by the project “Mündlichkeit, Bildlichkeit, Schriftlichkeit” (“MüBiSch,” 2005–2009), which dealt with questions of the interaction between text and image in medieval culture, specifically in German-language sermons, and which was part of the larger ongoing (Swiss) National Centre of Competence in Research project called “Mediality—Historical Perspectives.” According to the web page of the NCCR, “The aim of the NCCR is a historical mediology which particularly examines change in communication practices, new dynamics in medial forms, and reflection on the conditions of communication.” The present book does not, it seems, contribute very much to the development of the theory of mediology, although some of the contributions explicitly lean on such theory. All contributions do, however, squarely address the intricate relations between oral and written word and/or word and image in medieval preaching, and in so doing fulfill one of the aims of the “MüBiSch” project, which was to present the concept of mediality and to promote discussion of it in wider circles than the sectors of German-language academia where it originated. In particular, the book aims to communicate with French-language scholarship, which is why it has Introductions in both German and French, and each article, regardless of the language it is written in, has a summary in both those languages.

As David d’Avray pointed out long ago, the medieval model sermon collection in Latin deserves to be called the world’s first mass medium. Written by some skilled preacher, it could be disseminated all over Europe in hundreds of copies and its contents delivered to large audiences in different vernaculars, thanks to the bilinguality of priests. The focus of the present volume, however, is not the Latin sermon or the sermon as a mass medium but rather, one may say, the multimediality of medieval sermons.

The two Introductions by the editors, in German and in French (pp. 13–23, 25–36), which cover the same ground but are not identical, provide a survey of the area of research and situate the various articles within that area. Much revolves around the terms “conceptional orality,” “conceptional scripturality” and “conceptional imageness” (imagéité, Bildlichkeit). Though similar, these terms refer to rather different things. “Conceptional orality” refers to features of a written text that evoke an oral situation; “conceptional scripturality” refers to features of a text that are typical of writing, such as headings and marginal notes; and “conceptual imageness” refers to the production of mental images by means of visual and aural media, which can occur either by appealing to remembered images or by presenting novel ones. The Introductions stress that mediology does not only register the occurrence of such phenomena but seeks to understand how they are used, to what effect, and how the strategies of authors, artists, scribes, and printers change with changing medial conditions.

The first article, “Predigtrezeption aus historisch-mediologischer Perspektive,” by Regina Toepfer (pp. 37–65), introduces four other basic tools from the mediological toolbox: media shift, media transformation, media merging, and media competence. Using early printed German translations of homilies by the Church Fathers, she analyses shifts from oral to written and from Greek original to German translation; effects of the transformation of the written medium from manuscript to printed book; the merging of text and paratext (title page, dedication, wood cuts, indices, etc.) in early prints; and the strategies used by editors and translators in order...

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