Along the Oral-Written Continuum
Types of Texts, Relations and their Implications
Edited by Slavica Rankovic Edited by Leidulf Melve Edited by Else Mundal
Twenty essays on the continuing and renewed relevance to medieval studies of Ruth Finnegan’s concept of the orality-literacy continuum.
Ever since its introduction in the 1970s, Ruth Finnegan’s notion of the oral-written, or the oral-literate, continuum has served as one of the most effective means of dispelling the dichotomous understanding of the two principal media of communication in the Middle Ages. However, while often casually invoked, the concept has never been made a focus of study in its own right. The present volume is an attempt to place the oral-written continuum at the heart of discussion as an object of a head-on theoretical investigation, as a backdrop to distinct processes of acquisition of literacy in different European regions, and, indeed, as a tool for navigating the rugged landscape of verbal forms, exploring the complexity of oral-literary interrelationships that they manifest. The articles probe the concept with a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches, span diverse texts and genres, and involve a range of European cultural contexts, with special emphasis on Scandinavia and Northern Europe, but also reaching out to various other corners of the continent: from France, the Netherlands and England in the West, over Germany, Bohemia and Poland in the central region, to Serbia and Bosnia in the Southeast.
- Edited by Slavica Rankovic
- Edited by Leidulf Melve
- Edited by Else Mundal
Other Titles in this Series
Sins of the Tongue in the Medieval West
Sinful, Unethical, and Criminal Words in Middle Dutch (1300-1550)
Volume 36
Strategies of Writing
Studies on Text and Trust in the Middle Ages: Papers from Trust in Writing in the Middle Ages (Utrecht, 28-29 November 2002)
Volume 13
Looking Back from the Invention of Printing
Mothers and the Teaching of Reading in the Middle Ages
Volume 40
Medieval Women in Letters
Letters by Women, to Women, and about Women in Medieval Literatures
Volume 66
Homo Legens
Styles et pratiques de lecture: Analyses comparees des traditions orales et ecrites au Moyen Age / Styles and Practices of Reading: Comparative Analyses of Oral and Written Traditions in the Middle Ages
Volume 26
Writing Names in Medieval Sacred Spaces
Inscriptions in the West, from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages
Volume 56
Manuscript Communication
Visual and Textual Mechanics of Communication in Hagiographical Texts from the Southern Low Countries, 900-1200
Volume 32
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