Pragmatic Literacy and the Medieval Use of the Vernacular
The Swedish Example
By (author) Inger Larsson
Between 1150 and 1400 Sweden was transformed from a society which was predominantly reliant on oral communication into a society which increasingly deployed writing. Latin, the traditional language of government and records, was gradually replaced by vernacular Swedish. The watershed moment in this process was the drafting of national and town laws in the 1350s, an event which established Swedish as the language of the judiciary and judicial records. From this period written documentation was gradually integrated into legal procedure. Pragmatic Literacy argues that the Crown, the expanding bureaucracy, the editing of the laws in Swedish, and the laws’ demands for written documentation in everyday transactions were the main driving forces behind the development in medieval Sweden of lay literacy for practical purposes. The book demonstrates how the early use of writing by the royal administration and the writing of provincial laws in Swedish created centres of literacy from which literate ways of thinking and acting spread both geographically and socially. It further illustrates how literacy moved beyond the confines of the clerical elite, by exploring how different members of the laity adopted pragmatic literacy for private purposes. Pragmatic Literacy thus traces the history of pragmatic literacy in Sweden through the lens of the judicial and administrative archive. Inger Larsson is professor of Swedish Language at the Department of Scandinavian Languages, StockholmUniversity.
- By (author) Inger Larsson
Other Titles in this Series
Literacy in Medieval and Early Modern Vilnius
Forms of Writing and Rhetorical Spaces in the City
Volume 55
Orality and Literacy in the Middle Ages
Essays on a Conjunction and its Consequences in Honour of D. H. Green
Volume 12
Documenting the Everyday in Medieval Europe
The Social Dimensions of a Writing Revolution, 1250-1350
Volume 42
Seeing the Invisible in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages
Papers from Verbal and Pictorial Imaging: Representing and Accessing Experience of the Invisible, 400-1000 (Utrecht, 11-13 December 2003)
Volume 14
Understanding Monastic Practices of Oral Communication (Western Europe, tenth-thirteenth centuries)
Volume 21
Reading Images and Texts
Medieval Images and Texts as Forms of Communication. Papers from the Third Utrecht Symposium on Medieval Literacy, Utrecht, 7-9 December 2000
Volume 8
Stilus – modus – usus
Regeln der Konflikt- und Verhandlungsfuhrung am Papsthof des Mittelalters / Rules of Negotiation and Conflict Resolution at the Papal Court in the Middle Ages
Volume 44
The Use of Pragmatic Documents in Medieval Wallachia and Moldavia (Fourteenth to Sixteenth Centuries)
Volume 47
Accounts and Accountability in Late Medieval Europe
Records, Procedures, and Socio-Political Impact
Volume 50
Cultures of Religious Reading in the Late Middle Ages
Instructing the Soul, Feeding the Spirit, and Awakening the Passion
Volume 25
Digital Philology and Quantitative Criticism of Medieval Literature
Unconventional Approaches to Medieval Latin Literature II
Volume 49
Transforming the Medieval World
Uses of Pragmatic Literacy in the Middle Ages (A CD-ROM and Book)
Volume 6
Spoken and Written Language
Relations between Latin and the Vernacular Languages in the Earlier Middle Ages
Volume 24
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