The Book and the Transformation of Britain, c. 550–1050: A Study in Written and Visual Literacy and Orality by Michelle P. Brown (review)

Michelle Brown’s nimble, often playful, meditation on the roles played by books and writing in the pre-conquest Insular world began as the Sandars Lectures in Bibliography at the Cambridge University Library in 2009, and the tone in this written version retains many marks of its original oral format. The speaker’s voice is audible to the reader, and one experiences an impression of the web of glancing or elaborated cross-references, both visual and verbal, that Brown spun throughout the lecture series. One also senses an audience already at least somewhat familiar with the cast of historical and codicological characters. While the flavor of the lecture hall runs through the book, the codex also imposes its own strictures on this encounter with Brown’s work, as the reader flips back and forth to cement the cross-references or look to a footnote, and engages with the flexible relationship of the illustrations and captions to the text block. The chief concerns of Brown’s discussion raise the reader’s awareness of her book’s compound oral, written, and codicological form to good effect, particularly since the author issues frequent calls to consider the informatics of the past in relation to those of the present. In both its contents and its own published format, Brown’s study in written and visual literacy and orality is built upon a continuous redefinition and renegotiation of the relationship between all the categories embedded in the subtitle: the read, the seen, the spoken, the set-down.

Brown’s principal theme describes the possibilities of fixing language and thought in the physical form of books (and, to some extent, other vehicles such as stones, ivory supports, and scrolls), as this process occurred in early medieval Britain. She pays close attention to the archaeology of such fixed information—how it looks, where it is found, who set it down, using what materials—in order to characterize the development of books as both the engine and the mirror of transformation in medieval British society on various fronts. Brown relates the process of translation and the balance struck between Latin and the vernacular in the Insular world to the creation of religious and political communities bound together by common knowledge and a recognizable formal language of knowledge delivery, marked by visually differentiated regional or “graded” scripts, modes of decoration, and material supports. She describes the varietas of sacred Insular book programs (encompassing script, language, format, pictures, and content) as part of a project to knit Britain into a dual identity, defined in equal measure as heir to antiquity and member of an “international Christian present” (p. 63). Brown evenhandedly considers the impact of writing and book-making on the development of legal conventions and political identities, along with that of Christian cult and theological teaching. The importance of books as mobile, iconic objects—attached to particular cults, given as gifts, sworn upon, enshrined, and collected—is described alongside the importance of manuscripts’ interior contents, the stages of revision and modification many underwent, and the technologies required to compile the whole of a codex. Brown includes the powerful identity of the scribe in her treatment of the gospel book; that of the community of books represented by medieval libraries receives its own section in the third chapter, and that of the written word itself is the constant concern of every essay.

The question of who had access to medieval books and writing and how they engaged with them is a leitmotif in Brown’s ongoing consideration of what constitutes “literacy.” She advocates a reassessment of truisms in descriptions of medieval literacy, such as the compromised status of vernacular scripture, or a derogatory view of erroneous letter forms (which Brown thinks “more likely to prove rather than disprove a measure of permeation of...