The Uses of Script and Print, 1300–1700 (review)

In his classic essay, "Speech-Manuscript-Print," D.F. McKenzie encouraged his fellow early modernists to see the three primary modes of communication linked by hyphens in his title as "complementary" rather than competitive (The Library Chronicle of the University of Texas at Austin 20 [1990], 88). McKenzie was responding, first, to linear narratives of an absolute shift from orality to literacy and from script to print (in which the modes were linked by one-way arrows rather than hyphens), reminding us that oral and scribal practices not only survived the advent of printing but continued to be seen as superior for certain purposes. And against the assumption that each mode was utterly distinct from the others (separated by slashes, say, or by blank space), McKenzie argued that acts of communication usually involve more than one mode: printed sermons, for instance, invoke both the voice of the preacher and the hand of the drafter, transcriber, or commentator.

McKenzie's essay now looks like a prospectus for a revisionist history of the communications revolution in early modern Europe, in many volumes and by many hands. Over the last decade and a half, scholars have begun to recover in earnest what Margaret Aston describes — in her graceful Epilogue to this welcome addition to the project — as "the mutuality of exchange that operated in the early modern period between the spoken, handwritten, and printed . . . in multi-layered communications of eyes and ears" (289). The most sustained attention to date has been given to the circulation of lyric poetry, and most of the scholars associated with the field (including Martin Elsky, Harold Love, Arthur Marotti, Henry Woudhuysen, and Margaret Ezell) have been based in departments of English. But many of McKenzie's most striking examples come from religious and legal rather than literary texts; and his approach to the topic owes a considerable debt to social history, cultural history, historical anthropology, and the history of the book. This volume — carefully edited by Crick and Walsham, colleagues in the Department of History at the University of Exeter — restores McKenzie's original emphasis on religion and law while pushing the topic in some suggestive new directions.

Perhaps the most important new direction is backward, into the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries. As the dates in the title suggest, the editors follow scholars such as David Wallace and Seth Lerer in challenging the traditional divide between a Medieval Studies focused exclusively on scribal culture and a Renaissance Studies concerned only with the new world of print. The fruits of this approach are apparent not just in the essays by early modernists that reveal the persistence of manuscript practices, but also in the opening chapters by medievalists Felicity Riddy and David d'Avray. Riddy usefully ponders what it meant to "publish" texts before the introduction of printing, using the visions of Julian of Norwich as a rich case study; and d'Avray revisits his work on the genre of marriage sermons to argue for the existence of Amass communication" before the age of mechanical reproduction. These cross-period perspectives return in later essays by Andrew Musson (who traces the changing attitudes toward legal authority, as laws became available in handwritten copies and then in printed compendia), and Andrew Butcher (who reminds us of the crucial work performed by scribes in the regulation of "speech communities" in late medieval Hythe, anticipating Jonathan Barry's later survey of the charged and contingent interactions between script, print, and speech in Bristol between 1640 and 1714). All of these essays draw our attention to the importance of archives in both individual and corporate endeavors (as well, of course, as our own attempts to reconstruct them). Julia Crick ties these threads together in an impressively detailed account of "antiquarian transcription," whereby scholars such as Dee, Cotton, Coke, and Selden made medieval records speak to present purposes.

Even as we cross completely into the age...