Uses of the Written Word in Medieval Towns: Medieval Urban Literacy II ed. by Marco Mostert, and Anna Adamska (review)

This substantial work on Urban Literacy across Europe consists of fifteen chapters, an Introduction, and a final section, written by editors Marco Mostert and Anna Adamska. It is divided into four parts: I, ‘Alphabets and Languages’; II, ‘Making Books, Telling Stories’; III, ‘Individuals Resort to Writing’; and IV, ‘Reading, Seeing and Hearing’. All of the authors are European, and it comes as a surprise to find all of the interesting contributions to this volume are written in perfect English. The collection underlines the importance, not only of scribes working in scriptoria, but also of the scribe in general.

The Preface provides nine maps that will be of great assistance to scholars unfamiliar with the continual change occurring in central and Eastern Europe at this time: Red Ruthania around 1400; Livonia around 1500; The Main Hanseatic Towns in Northern Europe in the Late Middle Ages; Vulnius around 1500; The Low Countries in the Late Middle Ages; The Network of Hungarian Towns in the Late Middle Ages; Croatia: Geographical and Political Division at the End of the Sixteenth Century; The Town Network of the Iberian Kingdoms of the Late Middle Ages; and The Main Towns of Transylvania in the Early Modern Period.

Surprisingly, there are few references to the many European monasteries and convents, outstanding abbots, abbesses, and clergy that were so important for the production of manuscripts and supported all levels of religious and secular education. Eltjo Buringh does describe the survival and loss of manuscripts very thoroughly, and the editors do briefly suggest that the clergy ‘participated as actively as the lay professionals of the written word in government’, describe the ‘two-way traffic between the Church and the town’ (p. 13), and argue that parish churches and religious houses carried out the daily practice of municipal literacy, determining in large part their towns’ ‘topography of literacy’ (p. 16). But throughout the rest of the book, the vital part played by the Church has been somewhat overlooked. For the spread of humanism at this time, for instance, the works of St Gregory the Great – namely some or all of his surviving Letters, his Book of Pastoral Rule (compulsory reading for all bishops), his Dialogues, his Homilies, his biography of Saint Benedict, and his brilliant Morals on the book of Job – were seen as basic reading, and were found in almost every monastery in Europe. Yet no mention is made of him.

Even so, the book provides an excellent, wide-ranging, and well expressed study of municipal writings and of the development of literacy in both Central, Northern, and Eastern Europe, and the editors have also produced a companion volume, Writings and the Administration of Medieval Towns: Medieval Urban Literacy I (Brepols, 2014). These two admirable scholars are now preparing yet another major work for the ‘Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy’ series, this time on Clergy, Noblemen and Peasants: Oral and Literate Communication in the Medieval Countryside, for which it will be well worth waiting.