Stilus – modus – usus
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Book Series
Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, vol. 54
- Pages: xix + 408 p.
- Size:156 x 234 mm
- Illustrations:4 b/w, 24 col.
- Language(s):English
- Publication Year:2022
- € 110,00 EXCL. VAT RETAIL PRICE
- ISBN: 978-2-503-59842-0
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- € 110,00 EXCL. VAT RETAIL PRICE
- ISBN: 978-2-503-59843-7
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Discussing a broad range of materials, this book provides new perspectives on the ways that the alphabet was understood, on genres such as alphabet poems, riddles, and scribal signatures, and on the different ways in which scribes copied Old and Middle English texts.
Subject(s)
Review(s)
“Wendy Scase's capacious and magisterial study Visible English: Graphic Culture, Scribal Practice, and Identity, c. 700-1500, establishes itself as a new first point of reference for anyone investigating these intrinsically fascinating traces of medieval literate practice in English manuscripts, and it makes a compelling case for imagining them as crucial evidence of the formation of Anglophone literary identity (…) Particularly at this moment when our methodologies continue to seek ways of taking full advantage of our unprecedented access to medieval manuscript images, this study is sure to be an important one for years to come.” (Stephen Yeage, in Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies, 34/3, 2023, p. 270-78)
BIO
Wendy Scase is Emeritus Geoffrey Shepherd Professor of Medieval English Literature, University of Birmingham. Her previous books include The Making of the Vernon Manuscript (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013); Essays in Manuscript Geography (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007); Literature and Complaint in England, 1272 – 1553 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); and Piers Plowman and the New Anticlericalism (Cambridge University Press, 1989). Visible English is based on her research as a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellow.
Summary
Visible English recovers for the first time the experience of reading and writing the English language in the medieval period through the perspectives of littera pedagogy, the basis of medieval learning and teaching of literate skills in Latin. Littera is at the heart of the set of theories and practices that constitute the ‘graphic culture’ of the book’s title. The book shows for the first time that littera pedagogy was an ‘us and them’ discourse that functioned as a vehicle for identity formation. Using littera pedagogy as a framework for understanding the medieval English-language corpus from the point of view of the readers and writers who produced it, Visible English offers new insights on experiences of writing and reading English in communities ranging from those first in contact with Latin literacy to those where print was an alternative to manuscript. Discussing a broad range of materials from so-called ‘pen-trials’ and graffiti to key literary manuscripts, Visible English provides new perspectives on the ways that the alphabet was understood, on genres such as alphabet poems, riddles, and scribal signatures, and on the different ways in which scribes copied Old and Middle English texts. It argues that the graphic culture underpinned and transmitted by littera pedagogy provided frameworks for the development and understanding of English-language literacy practices and new ways of experiencing social belonging and difference. To be literate in English, it proposes, was to inhabit identities marked by Anglophone literate practices.
