Medieval Manuscripts and Paleography

  Medieval manuscripts and paleography were what this blog was originally about, but this has got a bit swamped lately with some other themes. My website Medieval Writing still seems to be used, and I get some interesting feedback from users, despite the fact that it is becoming technologically aged. Here are some of the posts that people have found interesting.

Web Sites and Medieval Manuscripts Something I thought in 2006. Wonder if it still holds good.
Medieval Manuscripts on the Move Digitisation of manuscript collections has come a long way since 2007.
Classification of Scripts Yes, I still have radical ratbag views about script classification in paleography.
Manuscripts and Information Control A whole bunch of people have been devoting their efforts to medieval marginalia since I wrote this.
Why Paleography Sucks Never do irony on the web. 
Disappearing Paleography From the days when you got blog post comments from interested participants, not just snake oil salesmen and spivs.
Writing and Remembering One of those random thought bubbles I should try to retrieve some time.
Not That Voynich Manuscript Again NEVER mention the V****** M********* in any forum on the internet.
Horrible Old Handwriting Merovingian minuscule in this case. It's not all about the pretty stuff.
Gothic Book Hands Gothic Book Hands. Pointer to section on Medieval Writing website.
Special English Characters Another pointer.
1066 and All That Dianne has bitch attack about historical periodisation, and another pointer to post Conquest Old English writing.
Of Tennis Balls and Mulberry Trees Pointer to script example of Gothic cursive from a very strange manuscript fragment.
John Paston's Books Pointer to paleography exercise on John Paston's book list in the British Library.
History of the Familiar Pointer to history of humanistic minuscule.
It's Personal Wee note on a medieval autograph.
Dirty Medieval Books Pointer to interesting work by Kathryn Rudy. For some reason a lot of people have clicked on this. Hope they were not disappointed.
Monastic Pressmarks Monastic pressmarks. Pointer to section of website on them.
Glossed Bible Pointer to a bit of interesting medieval detritus.
Little French Things Pointer to script sample of 14th century French cursive.
You Want Vinegar With Your Oak Galls? My most viewed blog post ever. If any subject arouses passion and commitment it is the correct formulation for iron gall ink.
The Writing of the Illiterate Lombards More irony, Lombardic minuscule, and more iron gall ink.
Shoes and Ships and Sealing Wax Pointer to website section on seals.
Medieval Recycling Pointer to script sample of French cursive on a document recycled into a book wrapper.
Boring Jobs and Bizarre Coincidences Hufnagelschrift.
Medieval Documents Medieval documents. Pointer to website section on dealing with them.
What Not To Do With Your Manuscripts Pointer to website section on manuscript conservation.
Manuscripts and Naked Hands The great white gloves controversy.
Medieval Digimania The ever changing status of digitised medieval manuscripts on the web.
When Did Latin Become Dead? Pointer to website sample of scramboozled 16th century English and Latin.
Ferocity of Iron Gall Ink That stuff again, and how it consumes itself.
Vale Notice of passing of Malcolm Parkes.
Ever Wonder What Paleographers Do? The Getty knows.
Working Script for (Somewhat) Ordinary Books French batarde.
Blockbuster Epic Resource for Paleographers and Historians Dictionary of Medieval Latin from English Sources. Think it's now up on the web as well.
Colophons and Marginalia and All That Colophon and gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels.
Irish Gospels Insular minuscule.
Bored with Gothic? Try This. Beneventan minuscule.
Sweet Caroline Caroline minuscule.
Protogothic and Choking Lions Protogothic.
Beasties from the Bestiary Gothic textura, with animals.
It's Gothic Jim, But Not As We Know It That totally weirdshit script from the Luttrell Psalter.
Magdalen in Blue Gothic rotunda.
Hoccleve on Chaucer Gothic bastarda
Flyleaf Friday. Or When is a Manuscript Finished? On adding prayers to books of hours.
Notarial Signs Notarial signs.
Medieval Graffiti and Medieval Marginalia Ponderings on scratchings in the margins of life.
Cutting Up Manuscripts Why you shouldn't cut up manuscripts, and why people did.

Notarial Signs

  I have a bit of a change of theme here as a result of a request. Yes, I do requests. Sometimes. A correspondent was interested in images of notarial signs, so I have pulled together all of same from the miscellaneous collection of medieval detritus that I have accumulated and put them up as a Flickr album. Potter through and enjoy.
  The signs themselves represent different ways of doing medieval legal business. In those places where ratification of legal process developed from sworn oral testimony - primitive unlettered places like Britain or the Germanic speaking areas - the insignia of authenticity rested in the use of the seal. People did not sign documents. Kings did not sign documents, King John did not sign Magna Carta, OK? Even when they became a bit more literate, the seal was established as the authenticating instrument and documents referred to witnesses, not necessarily to the document, but to having seen and heard that an oral agreement had been made.

  The seals started off with relatively simple designs, but many became very elaborate by the 14th and 15th centuries.

  Seals were owned by individuals, by offices, by institutions and corporations. There is still a whole field of study with much to be learned about seals.
  In parts of Europe which retained aspects of the Roman system of law, legal documents were drawn up and ratified by notaries, who authenticated them with their own unique pen drawn marks and endorsements. I am informed that such transactions as property deeds tended to be much longer and more specific in detail than the brief and spare charters and deeds of the seal using lands, where the document was basically to identify witnesses who could testify to the details.

  This notarial endorsement was at the bottom of a property deed on a roll that was twenty membranes long. I don't know what they filled it up with as I don't have the other nineteen membranes.
  As every notarial sign was supposed to be unique, they developed many complex elaborations; some more fascinating than beautiful, while other had an ingenious simplicity.

  The division was not necessarily along national lines, or at least what we now perceive as national lines. (OK, that's another story.) In the more southish eastish parts of France the notarial system was in use, while in the more northish westish areas seals were used on short snappy documents as in Britain. Sometimes a belt and braces approach was used, as in the following document from 16th century Brittany. Yes, that's westish. People got around in those days, despite rumours to the contrary.

  In Britain, notaries were only used by the church, to draw up documents with, or appealing to, papal authority, such as this one, so that notaries were a relatively rare species among the writing classes.

New Year's Resolution, Right

  Since trying to get my real life / cyberlife balance a bit more in synch, I can hopefully get back to a bit more medieval paleography and beaut stuff like that. I hereby promise that I will spend less time scrolling through amusing pictures of anthropomorphic rabbits and the like in digitised medieval manuscripts on Twitter, and more time on using some of these ever increasing resources to do something useful, if perhaps less entertaining.
  Making a start I have replaced one (Yes one, count it) old black and white British Library image of uncial script with a colour image downloaded from their website with the marvellous new provisions that you can play with it however you like. No bunnies or exquisite Virgins, but much more real and lifelike image of the text. I will proceed from here.
  Now I just have to think about what to do about those now grotty old Flash exercises with the crappy photographic reproduction. Do I just do them all over again with my antique version of Flash (which miraculously still actually works) or is there something easier and quicker? Suggestions gratefully received.
  Excelsior!

We Get More Medieval Every Day

  Long, long time ago I put a post on this blog about how a web page is more like a medieval manuscript than like the page of a printed book. The reverse evolution continues. Now a medievalist is telling us that Twitter, and especially live tweeting in conferences, is like the marginal annotations in a medieval manuscript, in the blog In The Middle. I love the notion that modern media are releasing us from the tyranny of the authority of the printed word and taking us back to the chaotic threads of medieval thought.
  I do wonder what some of those stern old academics of yore would have thought about it. You know, the ones whose conference papers were circulated with "Draft only. Not for publication or circulation." printed all over them. Then the book of the conference wouldn't come out for another five years and everyone would have forgotten about it.

Preservation of Books or Texts?

  I have recently resigned from a charity volunteer position which involved selling secondhand books for fundraising for a valuable cause. Never mind why. Charities do occasionally go through phases of losing their sense of direction. Suffice to say I might have a bit more time for medieval books and paleography now, with fewer big gaps between postings. And yes, I have found another good cause to devote some time to, but which might not eat up my whole life.
  The secondhand books are all donated by the public and sold at several huge bookfairs each year. The time in between was filled with sorting, pricing, processing and packing for the next blockbuster. People give the charity a helluva lot of books. Why? Because they are getting rid of them. They are downsizing, their parents have died, their kids have left home, they have bought e-readers or some other reason. Secondhand book dealers are becoming progressively more rare, don't want to buy big collections and their only alternative is to send the lot to paper recycling.

  The oversupply means that a significant proportion of the books end up in paper recycling anyway. Sometimes they are in ratty condition and frequently they are titles which appear in such numbers that they could not possibly all be sold at the bookfairs. The recycling hopper was at one time euphemistically referred to as the Dan Brown file. Sometimes there are strange old books that nobody wants to buy and you wonder if they should be preserved as historical curiosities.
  Now that so many medieval manuscript books in public collections are appearing in facsimile on the internet, interested folks are becoming aware of just how many of these survive. Of course, we know there have been massive losses as well. Fire, flood and vermin, not to mention deliberate destruction in order to replace dated texts with ones that were deemed to be more correct, all chomped up medieval libraries. Medieval monks and scholars made decisions about preservation and disposal as well.
  Every manuscript book which survives, however, is unique, not only in the decoration and presentation, but in the text. Apart from in liturgical books, the concept of the written content was still rooted in the oral tradition, with change and evolution of the text occurring all the time. This has made lifetime careers for some academics.
  With printed books, every example from a given edition is identical, and some books, whether modern bestsellers or older classics, have been printed in gazillions of copies over the years. There is a question of how much we should worry about the destruction of these identical industrial artifacts. Is it important to preserve the physical objects, or should we only worry about conserving the texts? There is a collectors' market which gets all excited and splashes money about for rare editions, but is this a reader's interest or merely an investor's ploy?
  The book will never die. There is too much pleasure in grabbing a favourite off the shelf and thumbing through it. But when I depart for the great library in the sky, somebody will sort through my eccentric collection and select what to keep and what to dump. Most unscientific. And you never know, one day Sotheby's might just sell the last ratty paperback copy of The Da Vinci Code.

Working Scripts for (Somewhat) Ordinary Books

  Standard paleography textbooks tend to categorise scripts neatly, then present the finest or most representative of each type, giving the whole process of medieval handwriting an aura of greater order and system than it really has. I quite regularly get emails from users of the site who claim that the piece of medieval writing that they are trying to untangle doesn't look like any of the examples in books, or on the website for that matter. I have started a process of putting up samples of scripts on Medieval Writing which are just a little bit ordinary, not quite as standard as the archetypes and generally a bit more real world. Many of them are from the bits of medieval detritus that are floating around the world at the moment.
  The current project is to indicate that the French term bâtarde covers a great range of styles and types, some of them exquisitely beautiful and legible and others a bit scratchy and hard to untangle. The latest example comes from a leaf from a little 15th century Flemish book of hours, with delicious little jewelled gilded initials and a bit of medievally leaf spray in the margins, but somewhat hasty and spiky calligraphy. It was probably somebody's wondrous treasure, but most likely not the Duchess of Whatsit.
  No matter how many classificatory schemes we cook up, and how many generic schools of writing have existed, handwriting is always an individual and unique expression. That's why we love even the scruffiest little scraps of parchment we can find. They represent the last traces of somebody's individuality.

When Did Latin Become Dead?

   It is commonly asserted that Latin was a dead language in the middle ages. Well, it wasn't. They simplified and changed the grammar, introduced a great deal of new vocabulary and used it for assorted daily purposes, especially in the church and the legal professions. However, by the 16th century it was getting decidedly wobbly on its feet, but English as a written language was far from standardised.
  The latest script sample on Medieval Writing is a small fragment recovered from a bookbinding, showing a segment from a legal plea roll of unknown origin, but on paleographical grounds it looks awfully like an English court hand of the early 16th century. These scripts can seem really difficult to read until you get your eye in, and suddenly they become easy. The fun thing about this one is the way in which Latin and English are scrambled together in the one sentence. It looks as if the scribe only knows the Latin for the standard legal terms and has lapsed into English whenever he got stumped for a Latin word. It suggests that Latin, if not exactly dead, was on life support at this stage.
  The only trouble is, English was not a fully literate language, in the sense that spelling, in particular, was horribly unstandardised. So while ever increasing numbers of printed books were being produced, written literacy seems to have taken a bit of a dive. The old scribes were probably going on about it the way grandmothers today go on about text messaging. Those newfangled printed books just mean that nobody knows how to write any more.

Manuscripts and Naked Hands

  It's been a long time between drinks, But hopefully I can get back on the airwaves again. Well sometimes reality interferes with your cyberlife.
  I was intrigued by the latest newsletter from e-codices, the totally fantastic and amazing manuscript website from Switzerland which not only lets you look at a vast array of medieval manuscripts in great detail, but allows others to use them through a Creative Commons licence. Truly sharing our cultural heritage. But this item was a little intriguing.
  The ultimate iconic image of a manuscript researcher has long involved a pair of white gloves. This is supposed to show how much we care for the conservation of the precious artifacts that we are handling. Valuable manuscripts and white gloves; like bread and butter, horse and cart, love and marriage (well, perhaps that last is a dated reference). Now the conservators of Switzerland are telling us that it is actually a bad thing to wear gloves while handling manuscripts, as it reduces the sensitivity of the fingers, thereby making it more likely that the manuscript might be damaged. As well, dirt and muck from manuscripts is actually transferred to the white gloves and can be spread to other items. Just regularly wash your hands, they say - just like doctors and nurses.
  This opinion is corroborated by no less an institution than the British Library, as described in a blog posting. It seems the white gloves thing is just a bit of spin. Mind you, I have experienced the difficulties of this many years ago, when attempting to photograph a medieval manuscript in a library where they insisted on white gloves, but I was unable to work the camera with them on. A compromise deal had to be worked out in which one person wore the white gloves and turned the pages and I took the pictures, promising not to touch the manuscript. Funny thing is, it was a book of hours, which had probably been handled every day with naked fingers in the course of somebody's daily devotions.
  Those people who work with the less luxurious class of manuscripts, such as legal documents, often prefer to wear white gloves because the things are so filthy that otherwise they get muck all over their hands. There is something a little bit worrying about medieval grime.
  Anyway, having broken the ice, I will see if I can get back to some work on Medieval Writing. A diligent user has found a couple of minor typos in my transcripts, so I had better start with those and then progress to something new.

What Not To Do with Your Manuscripts

  Latest additions to the site include a small expansion to the section on Handling Manuscripts, having come across some more little bits that have been mishandled.

  Take a look at these two images and try to work out what has been going on here, before going to the website to find out. Then when you have found out, do not do it to any little treasures of your own.
  I have also made a slow new beginning to the process of updating the graphics and formatting in the Script Samples section, having made a start on protogothic documents.

Authentic Fakery

  Every so often I get an email from somebody who wants to buy, or has bought, a bit of medieval memorabilia on eBay and wants to know whether they are getting good value. Note that I do not answer these queries; that is, I answer the emails but not the question. Everybody has their own idea of good value, and I am not a qualified valuer. Besides, I just might be bidding against them. One writer did once venture the opinion that all medieval manuscripts on eBay were fake. I could not imagine who would take the trouble to produce an authentic looking piece of medieval manuscript fakery for the sort of money that they generally get on eBay. There are 19th century calligraphic pieces in medieval style, but if it looks like a duck and quacks ........
  An item currently for sale has me intrigued. It is a carved and gilded book cover which is advertised as being a modern fake in 15th century style, produced by a well known forger in Siena. It seems that, so far, nobody wants to buy it. Is it because, the object having been identified as a fake, that it is difficult to identify or authenticate that it is the particular fake that it is purported to be? A quick google around art auction websites suggests that fake book covers by this particular forger can fetch several thousand English pounds. He apparently produced a lot of book covers based on some in the city archives in Siena. A known fake painting by the artist was sold to over twenty thousand pounds.
  So what is an authentic fake? Does a fake eventually generate its own authenticity? Is a fake of less value if you cannot authenticate the identity of the faker?
  Meanwhile, back at the coal face, the update to graphics and formatting of the script samples of all Gothic book hands is complete and I am about to start on the document hands. Yippee!

Rejected, Discarded, Forgotten

  Have you checked out the blog Forgotten Bookmarks? It's all about the odd things that people leave in secondhand books. If you have ever bought secondhand books, you have probably found some yourself: restaurant menus, newspaper clippings, postcards, notes and annotations. They are little stories in themselves.
  I found a very unfortunate one the other day, while sorting for the monster secondhand book fair. It was in a guide to writing fiction, the book itself inscribed from one female person to another with "Follow your dreams". The insert was a publisher's rejection letter. It seems the would-be author chucked out the book, the letter and her dreams all together. Very sad.
  Have you ever wondered what happened to failed medieval authors? Did they just quietly starve, or get themselves a desk job in the town guild or the chancery? How did you get to be an author anyway, apart from getting yourself locked away for a number of years by your country's enemies in a reasonably comfortable prison with nothing to do? For every Geoffrey Chaucer or Thomas Hoccleve, were there dozens of government scribes whose colleagues ducked out to the privy when they saw them approaching with yet another manuscript in their hands? For every William of Malmesbury or Matthew Paris, were there dozens of monks being ordered to stop scribbling and get to choir immediately? We only have winner's history, even in the literary area.
  Upgrades to the scripts in Medieval Writing have got as far as Gothic bastarda. Sounds promising, but that is only the book scripts.

Sing, Sing, Sing!

   There have been some roistering discussions on the subject of digitising books, but those of us in love with medieval manuscripts can only applaud the ever growing corpus of fully digitised manuscript material that is appearing. I mean, yes, we would love to be able to see and feel and pore over and smell the originals, but we can at least see a much greater sample these days from our own desktop. The e-Codices site from Switzerland is one of the most magnificent, and continually growing.
  Their most recent newsletter reveals a project that has taken this to another level. Musical Treasures from the Library of St Gall shows us some significant samples from a project on early church music. Notker Balbalus (840 -912) was an important composer of early church music, inventing certain musical forms. He is better known to historians as Notker the Stammerer, who wrote a life of Charlemagne. I don't know what it says about historians that he should be known forever by his affliction rather than as Notker the Magnificent Musical Composer.
  His work has been reconstructed by ploughing through various copies which are to be found on the e-Codices site, and having them recorded by the early music ensemble Ordo Virtutum. On the website you can see pages from the various manuscripts while listening to the music from those pages being sung. Fascinating for those of us untutored in early medieval musical notation who think neumes look like trails left by worms across the page. If you really like it you can buy the CD. There are links to all manner of other related materials.
  What makes this a second generation digital project is that not only is it a quite splendid multimedia presentation on the web, it was actually generated from material already displayed on the web. A few Anglophonic institutions which retain suspicious attitudes to anyone wanting to actually utilise images of their hoarded treasures would do well to take a look at this and ponder.
  And yes, I know that the limitations of early musical notation mean that we don't know if it actually sounded exactly like that, but it does bring the pages alive.

Scripts, Hands and Emails

  There is one particular type of email I get on a recurring basis. Somebody is trying to read a piece of medieval handwriting, but it doesn't look like any of the examples on Medieval Writing. The writer wants to know the name of the script so that they can read it. Alternatively, the writer knows the name of the script, but it doesn't look like the one on Medieval Writing.
  I have included a piece on Scripts and Hands to try and shed some light on this conundrum. Those of you who have been reading medieval handwriting for years know that every piece of writing does not look like its script prototype, and what to do about it. Those just starting out might need a few tips. But then it starts you thinking about the whole process of writing and why it looks like it does and ...........

Glossed Bible

And a little bit of medieval detritus that I found has turned out to be a torn fragment of a page of what was once probably a very nice glossed Bible. I have put a segment of it here so you can have a peek.

Reading and Listening

I recently received an email from someone who, as an aside to the main conversation, said he was an Oxford graduate in literature and Classics, but he had read all this literature in modern printed editions. They never discussed the manuscript tradition in those courses.

Now this is a great bugbear of mine. Any modern edition of an ancient work from the manuscript tradition is selected, corrected, disinfected, analysed, annotated and authorised. In many modern definitive editions there is no discussion of where surviving manuscript copies reside, or how many were consulted to produce the edition. Surviving manuscript copies of a work can range from one, as with Beowulf or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or several which are each significantly different, as with Piers Plowman, or hundreds with multiple variations, as with the Travels of Marco Polo. Numbers and variants that survive may be serendipitous, but may at least hint at the popularity of a work, and at how much writers and scribes were willing to alter the work in transcription. It is all part of the story of the story, if that makes sense.
There are studies of the variants of certain well known medieval works, some of which are on the web, as this modern medium is more adaptable to production of multiple variants of texts than the old linear string of little black symbols on a page. I seem to have sung this song before. When it comes to written communication, we are going medieval again.
Modern definitive editions have their place,of course. If your Latin or Middle English or Old Slovenian is a bit wonky, it at least gives you access to something you might not otherwise read. But surely literature studies should be looking at how the work has appeared in its various historic guises, at least as part of the consideration of the text. Ah well, I guess I am never destined to be a Professor of Literature!

In the recent collection by Ralph Elliot, which I mentioned a couple of posts ago, he has an article entitled "Chaucer's Voices", in which he discusses various styles of writing in Chaucer as actually representing the patterns of speech of certain types of people. This, he says, is relevant because in Chaucer's day most people knew the stories from having them read aloud to them. In the middle ages, it was reading, whether you did it with your eyes or your ears. Even legal documents often referred to "those who have read or heard" the document in question. This gives another layer of interpretation, through expression or on-the-fly editing. It was those rotten little black printed symbols that gave texts their unvarying character in the first place; handy for the church, but changing the whole nature of literature.

This Christmas, read aloud to somebody, or tell a story. Merry Christmas!

Books Real and Virtual

A recent story from BBC News has indicated that the Italian government is working with Google to digitise huge numbers of ancient books, pointing out that this means that the works will be conserved forever (??!), citing the example of thousands of rare books that were lost in the Florence floods of 1966. Digitising of whole books has been going on in the manuscript world for some time, in a somewhat lurching and uneven way, but the whole process reminds us that conservation and preservation itself has a finite, but ongoing, history.

This is really the conservation of the idea of books, rather than simply the conservation of objects which happen to be books. The antiquarians and collectors who rescued (or stole) manuscript books from monastic libraries, either those rendered redundant by the Reformation in England and other Protestant countries, or those left somewhat neglected in Catholic countries like France, were preserving beautiful and interesting old objects from a disappearing past. The regathering of these, and much other archival material, into formal government repositories, was also largely a conservation of objects. Now the libraries and archives are bursting with vast numbers of manuscript books, documents and early printings, and the conservation of these as objects, as well as the ability to make them accessible to those people who may find them interesting, is a huge logistical and financial issue.

Perhaps preservation of cultural heritage has actually advanced in its own history, and we are not so much in a collecting of objects phase, but an understanding of the ideas behind them, which requires conserving bodies to make those objects accessible to as many interested parties as possible, to allow those ideas to be explored. The idea of books has been kicking around academialand for some time, of course, and there have been whole conferences on the subject. But the attitude of galleries, museums and heritage libraries has tended to be cautious, and it can be hard to shake remnants of the mindset of jealous hoarding of objects.

There is nothing like the look and feel of the real thing , of course, but perhaps we need to be less excitable about finding new stuff, and more engaged with understanding a bit more about the stuff we have already got.

Medieval Manuscript Fragments

I was contacted recently by a scholar who had an interest in a paleography sample shown on the website Medieval Writing. While I had just put it up there in order to show how to read Gothic textura script, he had a special interest in the actual content. He was interested to find out how the text continued after the end of the sample shown, but sadly, I couldn't tell him, as all I had was an isolated leaf that I had bought.
Unfortunately, we do not know enough about the range and variety of medieval texts to be pulling books to pieces in order to sell individual pages from books as art works, but there are dealers out there who do just that. However, there are also people who sell the little leftover bits and pieces from books which have been damaged or broken up in the distant past. These fragments may contain tantalising hints about lost texts, or variants of texts, as mine evidently did. Parchment or vellum was also frequently re-used for a number of purposes, but commonly for bookbinding. Little scrappy bits of vellum with a few lines of medieval script are out there in the marketplace for those with an interest in these things.
Sticking Humpty Dumpty back together again would be a cakewalk compared to trying to reconnect these fragments back into coherent text, but occasionally there are efforts to do so. Somewhere I have even seen the suggestion that somebody should save all the photgraphs of medieval pages sold on eBay as a means of creating a digital library of fragments. I think the logistics of that would defeat most of us.
In the meantime, perhaps the most ethical thing to do is to avoid buying from anyone who is clearly selling a book off page by page. They won't do it if they are not making a bucket of money out of it. The genuine lost fragments are then a bonus, which may turn out to be of interest to somebody, even if they are frustratingly decontexted.

Kids, Fonts, Multimedia and Reading

Those who have been following my ramblings, both on the Medieval Writing website and here, know that I have a thing about trying to understand the process of literacy, and also about how modern literate communications are becoming more medieval in style than the plain linear texts that my generation learned from. These two themes came together for me recently when I attended my primary school age granddaughters' school presentation and got a copy of their school magazine.
The first notable thing was how savvy the kids were at incorporating multimedia into their live presentations. Text was incorporated into video, slide shows and live performance with lots of fancy special effects, with interesting references to much grander productions. I'm not sure what George Lucas would have made of their pinching not only the Star Wars theme music, but the receding scrolling graphics for the introduction to a blooper sequence of all the things that went wrong when they entered an interschool push car challenge. The whole production was a bit of community theatre worthy of a medieval mystery play, without the risk of the scenery catching fire.
The school magazine had lots of snippets of their original writing. Now when I was a pup, we wrote our stuff out with a pen, and the school secretary typed it out onto Gestetner sheets (Ask your grandmother about those!) and it was printed in glorious grainy black and white in a standard typewriter font. In this magazine, each kid had chosen their own font, colours, decorative headings and artwork. Each work was not just a text, but a visual exploration of design. They had made great efforts to make it appropriate, and some were quite witty. One kid had written a poem about Google, all in the Google sequence of colours for the letters. It's going back to something that is conceptually quite close to the techniques employed in a medieval manuscript. Literacy crisis - bah, humbug!
I recently obtained a copy of the second edition of Mary Carruthers The Book of Memory, a wonderful work that explores how various techniques, including page design, were used to help medieval scholars remember huge swags of text in a meaningful manner. It's a marvellous book, if a bit of a heavy read, and emphasises that reading and memory, text and image were not opposites, but part of a fuller, richer experience of literacy. I must sit down and read it thoroughly, if I can just remember where I put it down last.

Text, Image, Manuscript and Multimedia

Many years ago when the world was young, around 1995, I started attempting to produce multimedia presentations on various topics in medieval history. The received wisdom being spouted by the bright young things who had just graduated from multimedia school was that text was going to disappear from our learning process. All instructions, navigation and even content should be in the form of graphic imagery, because the upcoming generation was not going to ever need to read. It seemed we were going back to preliterate medieval style visual culture.
Strange as that seems, it never happened. The killer app of the internet is not digital video, animation or fancy graphics, but email. We are addicted to it. Advertisers bomb us with it. We can now check it and send it on our mobile phones. Web designers have gone back to advocating text links, as those little inscrutable icons are not actually intuitive after all.
The bizarre news item of the week is that a street in London is having its lamp posts and bollards wrapped in thick white padding so that people walking along the street text messaging don't injure themselves when they walk into them. The human race has become so obsessed with text that it no longer looks where it's going.
I wonder if there was panic among late medieval scribes that fancy manuscript picture books for the laity would put them out of work because book owners would all be illiterate. Then along came printing, more people learned to read, and text was king again. Nuthin' new in the world.

Manuscript and Information Control

I have just been reading a most fascinating book by the historian Eamon Duffy entitled Marking the Hours: English People and their Prayers 1240-1570 (2006, Yale University Press. It is about books of hours, but unlike most other works on the subject, which tend to de oriented towards art history, this book concentrates on the addenda and alterations which owners made to their own books, reflecting their family and social relations, as well as religious change. It shows how a set of relatively standardised texts could be personalised and individualised, creating a multiplicity of variants.
Intriguingly, I know several people who are taking a professional interest in the marginalia of various types of medieval manuscript books, as study of this aspect of manuscript text reveals a great deal about the attitudes of the readership, and how it changed over time. It is all part of the medieval attitude to text, in which the content of a book is not determined rigidly by the operator of a printing press. Comments, or glosses, written by medieval scholars became incorporated into the formally copied text of various kinds of books. Added text was not vandalistic graffiti, but a legitimate expression and a valid use for a book.
I have, on previous occasions, indicated various ways in which I think medieval manuscripts more closely resembled modern web sites rather than printed books, and this is another example. A page of manuscript text was not regarded as final, absolute or inviolable, and texts could evolve through commentary and discussion, a bit like a blog. Given the anxiety that authorities, who think they have a right to control our opinions, are expressing about the availability of information and opinions of diverse kinds on the internet, does that lead us to surmise that the great advantage of the printed work over manuscript in the late 15th and early 16th centuries may not have been so much technological improvement as more authoritarian control of text?