New Approaches to Medieval Communication (review)

Reviews 211 death, long enough to send her grandson thefifthDuke off to Eton rather than educating him in Scotland, a final sign of her lifelong ability to move with the times. This is good story and it is well told, but by placing it in a study of life in a great noble household Marshall is able to show us not just the abiding human interest of the intergenerational gap but also the precise ways in which a great noble of seventeenth century Scotland envisaged her role, from her hospitality to her clothing, from her plans to express the grandeur ofthe Hamiltons through building a new palace to her attempts to play a role in the changing politics of her time. In every sense, then, the Duchess's 'days' were well worth recreating and the reprinting ofRosalind Marshall's account ofthem is extremely welcome. Graham Tulloch Department of English Flinders University Mostert, Marco, ed., New Approaches to Medieval Communication (Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy 1), Turnhout, Brepols, 1999; paper; pp. viii, 318; R R P EUR35.00; ISBN 2503508146. This, the first volume in a new series of studies of literacy in the Middle Ages reveals the breadth of approach that is the hallmark of the series, which has now produced two other volumes and a C D - R O M . M u c h of the research published by the series comes from the interdisciplinary groups at Utrecht's 'Pionierproject Verschriftelijking' and the Sonderforschungsbereich 231 at Munster. A characteristic of all the papers in the Mostert volume, and of the series' general approach, is that literacy is not only assessed against orality, or non-literacy, but also against all other forms of human social communication, with the result that literacy qua literacy is not overvalued nor considered in isolation from other forms of communication. All five essays in Part II of the volume benefit from this broad approach, whether they are discussing the audience of hagiographical texts in early medieval Auxerre, Utrecht and Wurzburg, or the introduction of writing into central Europe or points between these two geographical areas. As befits the introductory volume of a series, this one begins with a short introduction by one of the pioneers of studies in medieval literacy, Michael Clanchy. He reviews past achievements in thefield,summarises the special place of the series in medieval literacy research, and suggests some urgent future directions of study. The volume is divided into three parts, Clanchy's essay and 218 Reviews a much longer one by Marco Mostert forming the Introductory Part I, which is followed by Part II, comprising five essays by practitioners of the Utrecht approach on quite different subjects and geographical regions of the medieval world. Part III comprises a 'Bibliography of Works on Medieval Communication ' ofjust over 100 pages by Marco Mostert, which ranges very widely across many topics and approaches to the subject. Although now inevitably a little out of date, it is a very useful resource, especially as it is divided into sixteen different subject areas, and comes with both a subject index (pp. 297303 ) and an index of m o d e m authors and editors (pp. 304-18). All five essays in Part II and Mostert's Introduction are excellent in different ways. Mostert sets out very effectively the kinds of questions that should inform research into medieval communication, which are paralinguistic and social as well as linguistic. H e also reviews the twentieth-century development of cross-cultural research in literacy, and, valuably, looks at the various words used in several languages, including English and German, to discuss phenomena around the adoption of the written word in human societies, pointing out that the choice of terms themselves both reflects a particular conception of the phenomena under discussion and influences that discussion. In Part II there are lively essays on the following subjects: the audience of hagiographical texts, by Wolfert S. Van Egmond; the preservation context of medieval letters (and the likelihood that most such witnesses have disappeared), by Mary Garrison; the use (or lack of use) of written charters in a variety of court cases in the former Carolingian Empire north of the Alps in the ninth...