Affective Literacies: Writing and Multilingualism in the Late Middle Ages by Mark Amsler (review)

Amsler’s massive volume takes its title from Chapter Three, which is also the central chapter in the book. Drawing on Brian Street’s study of cross-cultural literacies, Amsler argues that literacies are “always situated and socially constructed.” His methodology is based on a conception of literacy as the current enactment of what he terms “performing bodies” within a particular social and textual space (p. 101). Literacy is therefore presented as a social process that is reflected in and through its performance by particular historical agents and can be apprehended by the modern reader via historical, textual, and literary evidence.

The central argument of the volume is that medieval literacies (defined in the plural as there can be multiple coexisting and evolving literacies at any given time and in any given context) are “fundamentally shaped by their persistent multilingualism and textual performativities and that different literate groups reworked ideas of grammar and textual authority to create new relations of power, agency, and resistance from the production and reception of written texts” (p. xxii). Literacies are therefore defined as practices that occur within particular discursive spaces. Amsler rightly points out that “literacy” is not a fully internalized and accomplished capacity that can be juxtaposed to its opposite, that is “illiteracy.” There are gradations in competence within multilingual contexts, and Amsler thus proposes the terms “practices” or “retexting” to refer to such fluid literacies (pp. xxii–xxiii). Retexting as a concept foregrounds Amsler’s main argument of the transgressive or deconstructive acts of medieval textuality, which reshape the hyperliterate network, that is, the dominant ideological authority involved in literate discourse in the Middle Ages.

The volume is divided into seven chapters along with an introduction, an afterword, an extensive bibliography, and an index (divided into index nominumand index rerum). The first half of the book is primarily theoretically oriented. Chapters One through Three define the theoretical premise of the key concept of “affective literacy” through a detailed expository of its conceptual presumptions, while the second half of the book focuses on particular subject categories and how the theoretical framework of literacy, agency, and transgressions is played out within those particular contexts.

Amsler begins the first chapter, “Theorizing Medieval Literacies,” by stating that “literacies locate power and identity,” thus affirming the socioliterary approach of his analysis (p. 1). He points out that power structures are based on accessibility and control over the written word, underlining the function of Latin as a “language ideology” in the Middle Ages (p. 6). Amsler’s argument is based on a perceived disjunction between the medieval perception of literatusand illiteratus. Access to Latin (and/or vernacular texts) entailed a potential social threat, that is the incursion of the uninitiated reader into the realm of the literati. If literacy provided the means of maintaining and upholding control over the dissemination of the creed as well as over social regulation, then lay access to literacy could undermine the inherent authority of Latin discourse, not to mention raise suspicions of heresy due to the accessibility to scriptures and scriptural interpretation. As Amsler states, “the more polyvocal a literate discourse, the more unstable and decentralized literate ideology becomes” (p. 18).

The second chapter, “Language Ideology and Marginal Latins,” presents a social analysis of power structures and the role languages play in upholding, or undermining, those structures. Amsler makes use of historical evidence (such as John Balliol’s homage to Edward I, which was spoken in French but recorded in Latin) to draw attention to the continual and fluid movement between English, Latin, and French in medieval England and the social anxiety regarding the authority of Latin and its increased communal use. The chapter progresses from a delineation of Aristotle’s theory of written symbols to analyses of the shifting ideologies of Latin, literacy, authority, and vernacularity in the late Middle Ages. Amsler raises some intriguing...