This book analyses later medieval writing in Latin, English, and
French as it relates to reading formations and textual
materialities. It offers a theoretical approach to literacy as
fundamentally socially-situated, subject-making, and multilingual.
New Literacy Studies, close reading, and historical sociolinguistics inform Amsler's analyses of late medieval writing and textual cultures. Amsler argues that medieval reading and writing make sense not as individual expressions with discrete texts but as multilingual, sociocultural, and intertextual practices that 'make people up' and that sustain or challenge dominant ideologies and reading formations. Rather than a single Literacy, we find socially situated literacies within manuscript matrices. Bringing new historical dimensions to literacy studies, Amsler explores the intertextualities, affective relations, and social contests in these multilingual formations. Individual chapters examine literacies as cultural practice in schooling and in elite and popular texts by Chaucer, Christine de Pizan, Dante, Margery Kempe, devotional writers, Erasmus, and the Jewish convert Hermann von Sheda, along with grammatical writing, mythography, charms, drama, and educational texts. This volume illustrates the diversity of late medieval multilingual writings,textual performances, and embodied readings.
Dr Mark Amsler is senior lecturer at the Department of English of the University of Auckland, New Zealand.
Introduction
Chapter 1. Theorizing Medieval Literacies
Chapter 2. Language Ideology and Marginal Latins
Chapter 3. Affective Literacies
Chapter 4. Reading Assimilation and Jewish Latin Textuality
Chapter 5. Ovid’s Mythography and Medieval Readers
Chapter 6. Grammar of Unruly Latin in Middle English Writing
Chapter 7. ‘Clean and Chaste Latin’: Literacy, Humanism, and the Boy Jesus
After Words
Bibliography
Index nominum
Index rerum