- Ruling the Script in the Middle Ages: Formal Aspects of Written Communication (Books, Charters, and Inscriptions) ed. by Sébastien Barret, Dominique Stutzmann, and Georg Vogeler
The aim of this anthology is to combine two seemingly separate aspects of historiography, namely, literacy and communication studies, with so-called auxiliary sciences, such as palaeography, codicology, and diplomatics. As the title suggests, the contributions to the volume focus on material and graphical aspects of various means of communication—primarily books, charters, and inscriptions. The book is the result of multiple sessions with more than fifty international researchers held at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds between 2010 and 2014. It comprises a short preface as well as an introduction by the three editors, Sébastien Barret, Dominique Stutzmann, and Georg Vogeler, followed by twenty articles by Martin Bauch, Diego Belmonte Fernández, Isabelle Bretthauer, Claire de Cazanove, Irene Ceccherini, Emilie Cotterau-Gabillet, Els de Paermentier, Harmony Dewez, Tamiko Forunier-Fujimoto, Rahel Fronda, Maria Gurrado, Cyprien Henry, Tobias Hodel, Estelle Ingrand-Varenne, Ayda Kaplan, Claire Lamy, Jean-Baptiste Renault, Jinna Smit, Peter Stokes, and Valeria Van Camp. The majority of contributions are written in English, with the exception of three published in French (by Ceccherini, Forunier-Fujimoto, and Henry). The volume concludes with a list of shelfmarks.
The editors provide a valuable overview of the research history relevant to the anthology, beginning by discussing the origin of literacy, which does not imply merely the ability to write and read, but rather "the ability to use and implement the written word" (p. 9) as a means of communication. They then outline the development from the concept of literacy to pragmatic literacy ("pragmatische Schriftlichkeit," p. 10 et vide) to the establishment of communication studies as a distinct research field, before moving on to a discussion of the relationship between communication studies and its so-called auxiliary sciences. The editors highlight the importance of studying material aspects of scripts and communication means, pointing out that "materiality is relevant for historical and communication studies" (p. 21). Throughout the volume, the authors of the various articles demonstrate this point quite well, illustrating that the physical aspects studied through palaeography and codicology are more than merely the medium through which information was conveyed. The editors go so far in their Introduction as to suggest and encourage reassessing auxiliary sciences and lifting them to the status of fundamental sciences. [End Page 130]
The goal of the editors and contributors is to utilize a multi- and interdisciplinary approach, combining and reuniting fields, primarily communication studies and one or more of the aforementioned auxiliary sciences, "which could be deemed to be thematically or methodologically very distant from one another" (p. 21) in each article. The contributions to the volume are, moreover, rather diverse, addressing, for example, a wide range of geographical areas, languages, and different types of written documents. Some contributions focus on codicological, that is, material aspects of various means of communication and/or statistical and quantitative analysis of large data sets, often with thousands and even tens of thousands of samples. These large data sets are organized and processed with the help of various types of modern information technology and software, allowing the researchers, for example, to study writing hands, scripts, as well as changes in script, or the different purposes of manuscripts and other documents. Researchers interested in these kinds of codicological and paleographical analyses may be introduced to valuable resources, some better known than others. The databases and tools include, for example, DigiPal (a digital resource and database of paleography, manuscript studies and diplomatic, with a particular focus on resources produced in England between 1000 and 1100); Il Diplomatico (a digitized archive of documents housed at the Florence Archivio di Stato); GIWIS (the Groningen Intelligent Writer Identification System, a prototype program intended to identify the scribes...