Zwischen Pragmatik und Performanz: Dimensionen mittelalterlicher Schriftkultur ed. by Christoph Dartmann, Thomas Scharff, and Christoph Friedrich Weber (review)

This volume is not a Festschrift, as the editors state emphatically in their foreword. It is instead an edited volume of essays from a conference held in 2007 dedicated to two long-running research projects, one on pragmatic literacy and the other on the relationship between literacy and symbolic communication in the Middle Ages, which coincided with the seventieth birthday of Hagen Keller, the director of both research projects. This edited collection nevertheless brings honor to Keller by collecting in one volume several truly excellent essays that explore various topics related to the research programs he initiated. Many of the essays—nine in German, four in English, two in Italian, and one in French—demonstrate the broad significance of Keller’s research by examining aspects of medieval literacy from a wide range of eras, regions, and modes of communication. The strength of these contributions makes Zwischen Pragmatik und Performanz one of the finest edited collections I have read, particularly for a volume unified by the authors’ approach rather than their object of study. Instead of attempting to summarize every essay, I will focus on several that deserve particular mention. Somewhat unusually for an edited volume, the introductory chapter is included in this group: instead of merely summarizing the upcoming chapters, Christoph Dartmann’s introduction sets the tone for this volume by clearly explicating the volume’s most significant themes and providing an excellent summary of research over the last few decades on medieval literacy and reading practices, making the introduction a valuable contribution in its own right.

Several of the essays in this volume succeed in making seemingly abstract concepts or obscure documents understandable and relevant for nonspecialists by applying approaches inspired by Keller’s work. According to Chris Wickham, whose essay treats the labyrinthine legal systems of Rome in the twelfth century, the history of Rome “has always been trapped in metanarratives,” including papal reform, revolution, modernization, and foreign intervention, that distort our understanding of life in medieval Rome. Wickham’s contribution bypasses these metanarratives by demonstrating just how messy the experience with the city’s competing legal systems was for many participants, and in so doing provides a clear and engaging exposition of issues in medieval legal history. Similar praise might be given to Franz-Josef Arlinghaus’s essay concerning Peter Abelard’s role in the history of individuality. Arlinghaus sketches out competing positions, including the suggestion of an “invention of individuality” in the late Middle Ages and the competing view that stresses the manifest self-consciousness of figures from earlier centuries. Arlinghaus investigates Abelard for the benefit of a third position that emphasizes the otherness of premodern individuality. Arlinghaus argues that the individuality of even so remarkable a figure as Abelard was not defined through self-reference, with the individual being forever different from and not fully comprehended by society (as one sees in the works of Rousseau), but rather through one’s placement in society as defined by class, occupation, and other forms of group belonging.

Other essays are particularly successful in bringing events and documents of their subfields into conversation with broader conversations of literary and historical inquiry. Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak’s essay argues that medieval epistolary practices, primarily the use of seals, were meant less to affirm validity than to recreate the author’s physical presence. When Bedos-Rezak refers to seal impressions as “products of mechanical reproductive techniques which assured the multiplication of identical images,” where “all impressions of a given matrix were assumed to be identical copies, each copy … functioning as an original generating its own accuracy,” one senses that a much more extensive argument about medieval literacy and the advent of the printing press might be underway. Giuliano Milani performs some fascinating iconographical detective work in order to confirm the thesis, previously suggested by Gherardo Ortalli, that a set of wall paintings preserved...