Looking Back from the Invention of Printing: Mothers and the Teaching of Reading in the Middle Ages by Michael Clanchy (review)

Both the title and the author—writer of the famous and influential book From Memory to the Written Record—excite the would-be reader. But there is a warning in the subtitle Mothers and the Teaching of Reading in the Middle Ages. How are the title and subtitle related? The book consists of seven chapters, comprising an introduction followed by six reprints of articles published between 1983 and 2011. The title of the book in fact turns out to be the title of Chapter 2. We are not told whether the articles have been revised, but it appears not and that only the number of illustrations has been augmented (and presumably rephotographed; all forty-nine are in colour and of excellent quality). In their subject matter the former articles are closely interrelated, and this leads to considerable repetition of references to the same pieces of evidence, mainly books and pictures, which some readers may find disconcerting.

Chapter 1 is titled 'Introduction', and is subdivided into sections bearing the titles of the following six chapters. One would expect it to weld them together and make a coherent whole of them. But that is not what it does; it is rather a series of glosses on each chapter, and the book remains a collection of discussions on a group of interrelated topics, not a contribution towards a single one. It does however include two important observations. The first is this: 'Instead of viewing printing as the starting point of a new age, I want to look at it as the endpoint or culmination of a millennium. Writing was of extraordinary importance in medieval culture; otherwise printing would not have been invented' (p. 38). 'And so?', one is prompted to ask, since this observation is not an answer to the question, but only the beginning of one. And it prompts further questions. For instance, what does 'extraordinary importance' mean, in relation to the invention of printing? One might think of an argument that the expansion of literacy from the fourteenth century on put pressure on the quick and cheap production of multiple copies of the same text, and that one result was printing. But Michael Clanchy does not run this line. Indeed, he points to difficulties with it: the fact that the earliest printers avoided the increasingly-popular vernacular (p. 13), printing instead for a university or university-trained readership; and the fact that decoration and illustration of high quality could not be (and never has been since) mechanized.

The second observation occurs on p. 34: 'These new images of the teaching of reading stand alone as works of art, as well as being links in the surprising story of how Latin literacy, which for centuries had been the preserve of the male clergy, developed a feminine and mothering ethos—mainly from the thirteenth century onwards—through the use of prayer books in the home'. This glosses p. 130: 'It is remarkable that this motif ever became popular of Mary taking the initiative in the Child Jesus's schooling, as it runs counter to the patriarchal norms of medieval society'. Images of mothers engaged in the 'primary' education of their children are in fact a central motif running through Clanchy's book. But to what extent did this possibly increasing maternal activity affect the growth of literacy, whether Latin or vernacular, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries? Did it have any impact on the invention and spread of printing? We are not told in so many words.

What we are told is that mothers engaged in this activity by means of 'ABC primers', whether unbound booklets of a few leaves only, or alphabets and prayers copied into psalters or books of hours, rarely surviving because they were so heavily used that they rapidly...