Orality and Literacy in the Middle Ages: Essays on a Conjunction and its Consequences in Honour of D. H. Green (review)

This volume of essays, covering a broad geographical and temporal sweep of medieval Europe, explores the symbiosis of orality and literacy, and is conceived as a tribute to one of the chief exponents of this idea, Dennis Green. Hence, the various contributors focus on the constant interrelationship between spoken and written, aural and visual, immediate and distanced modes of communication, rather than telling a tale of the progressive victory of writing over speech. This is not a new approach, but in the main the essays presented here make a genuine contribution to the field, drawing out useful general observations from their respective case studies.

A key theme concerns unravelling evidence for the audiences and ways of reading envisaged by writers. Audiences could include private readers, 'corporate' readers engaged in listening and discussing, and the performative readers required to present written works to listeners. Any or all of these were assumed by writers according to period and context.

Individual reading is explored by Sylvia Hout and Jürgen Wolf. Wolf employs the evidence of vernacular instructions, preambles and marginal notes in Latin psalters to demonstrate that lay people as well as clerics understood and expected to use religious texts actively. Adopting a different approach, Hout examines pictorial evidence from religious books to show how individuals were encouraged to use the text before them as an imaginative and meditative springboard for contemplation. The written word was enhanced by visual references which coaxed a multitude of related stories, images and metaphors to the mind's eye.

Scenes of corporate reading, in which learned or noble men gather to hear and discuss texts are central, in different ways, to the articles by Katherine O'Brien O'Keefe and Joyce Coleman. O'Brien O'Keefe shows how King Alfred and his circle considered corporate reading essential to proper understanding. Coleman identifies scenes of corporate reading in the illuminated frontispieces of Cité de Dieu manuscripts emanating from the court of Philip the Good. In her analysis, the image of a scholarly, clerical crowd discussing Augustine's Civitas Dei illustrates both the imagined audience of the work and the superiority of clerical over secular knowledge, by representing the generations of scholars who had contributed to understanding the text at hand. Coleman also emphasises that images could have been intended for communal as well as individual reception. Both these studies illustrate how listening was regarded as a desirable and scholarly mode of reception, and not as a secondary mode, the preserve of the illiterate or uneducated. This is the essence of the modern bias that must be shed before approaching medieval texts. Thus, since speaking was part of 'literacy' in its broader sense, listeners participated in and must be included in a discussion of literate culture.

In surveying the vocabulary and underlying ethos of early medieval German biblical epics, Wolfgang Haubrichs engages with this challenge, as he demonstrates the imprint of presumed-illiterate court society on the written texts produced for their education and entertainment. The relationship between audience and composition is also taken up by Nigel Palmer, who uses structural features of Middle High German verse to show how, over time, writers began to adopt punctuation and layout strategies less dependent upon a learned 'performer' to interpret them aloud, and more attuned to inexpert visual decoding. This, he suggests, reflects changing assumptions about the reception of the text, progressively opening the door to private readers, without excluding the possibility of performance aloud. Tony Hunt also uses structural features to establish that the Anglo-Norman Life of St Modwenna was probably intended for individual reading, despite the appearance of orality in its verbal formulae.

This leads to a second important theme: that evidence for oral (and by analogy, written) modes of production...