Learning and Literacy in Medieval England and Abroad (review)

In his introduction, Derek Pearsall explains that this collection forms part of the thirtieth-anniversary celebrations of the Centre for Medieval Studies at York (where, according to the preface, most of the contributors completed their postgraduate work). Pearsall believes that the essays demonstrate the 'generosity and openness to interdisciplinary and multicultural initiatives' that characterise 'the York experiment' (p. 1). He regards literacy 'in all its multiplicity of senses and valences' (p. 2), as 'the subject of nearly all the essays here, implying that the exceptions belong to the broader term of 'learning'. However, while the essays are indeed diverse in approach and subject matter, the collection's weakness is that a number of its contributions display only a cursory interest in either learning or literacy.

The most engaging essays in the collection live up to Pearsall's estimation. John Arnold investigates the relationship of power to literacy and orality in the records of the Cathar Inquisition, using Foucault to describe the exercise of power by inquisitors, and de Certeau to speculate on possible tactics of resistance by non-literate peasants. He also provides a concise and thought-provoking discussion of scholarship on orality and literacy from Jack Goody and Walter Ong through to recent critiques and reformulations of this binary. Linda Olson considers the relationship of women religious to Augustine's Confessiones, and finds in instructions by Goscelin, Aelred and Anselm that their female pupils were not excluded from the model, available to male readers of this text, of 'personal devotional literacy in which reading is a predominantly internal process laden with affection and undertaken to enhance the spiritual progress of the individual' (p. 92). Olson further connects the mode of interiority encouraged by the Confessiones with the affective piety predominantly associated with women in the Middle Ages.

Joyce Hill examines the means by which the Anglo-Saxons struggled to master Latin. She focuses on the work of Aelfric, providing a careful discussion of the textual histories of the Grammar, Glossary and Colloquy, including much detail on the misleading nature of modern editions. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton examines the signatures and names of women owners or readers in six manuscripts of Piers Plowman, and argues that the poem 'brought to women a kind of reading most were not doing before', which she further characterises as 'a new kind of politically and ecclesiastically controversial reading' (p. 122). Debbie Cannon makes the case that London custumal manuscripts, along with generically similar 'commonplace books', provide evidence of non-pragmatic use of literacy skills amongst London citizens in the early fourteenth century, contradicting some long-held assumptions by modern scholars that for the middle classes, literacy was closely concerned with conducting business during this period. Stacey Gee considers book collections available in pre-Reformation parish churches, whose 'libraries' have been generally overlooked in modern studies in favour of larger institutional collections. Her findings suggest that changes intended to improve clerical learning that are now attributed to the Reformation were already underway in the medieval period.

Katherine Zieman's exploration of gender, literacy and authority is perhaps the high point of the collection. Zieman argues that the liturgy is too often dismissed as mere recitation, when in fact 'the uses and purposes of liturgical performance within medieval culture [...], particularly in England, were often fraught and contested' (p. 98). Zieman goes on to demonstrate that women religious were closely associated with 'liturgical literacy'; thus, they were especially implicated in explorations of 'the ambiguous relationship between skill and performance, and between performance and understanding' (p. 106). She makes her case using not only texts directed at women religious, but also through compelling readings of Chaucer's 'Prioress' Tale' and his 'Second Nun's Tale'.

The concepts of literacy and learning are not always adequately developed in other contributions. Janet Burton argues that the Historia Selebiensis Monasterii 'throws considerable light on the cultural and intellectual milieu in which its monk-author was writing' (p. 50) at Selby...