Verbal and Visual Communication in Early English Texts
Edited by Matti Peikola Edited by Aleksi Makilahde Edited by Hanna Salmi Edited by Mari-Liisa Varila Edited by Janne Skaffari
When reading a text our understanding of its meaning is influenced by the visual form and material features of the page. The chapters in this volume investigate how visual and material features of early English books, documents, and other artefacts support – or potentially contradict – the linguistic features in communicating the message. In addition to investigating how such communication varies between different media and genres, our contributors propose novel methods for analysing these features, including new digital applications. They map the use of visual and material features – such as layout design or choice of script/typeface – against linguistic features – such as code-switching, lexical variation, or textual labels – to consider how these choices reflect the communicative purposes of the text, for example guiding readers to navigate the text in a certain way or persuading them to arrive at a certain interpretation. The chapters explore texts from the medieval and the early modern periods, including saints’ lives, medical treatises, dictionaries, personal letters, and inscriptions on objects. The thematic threads running through the volume serve to integrate book studies with discourse linguistics, the medieval with the early modern, manuscript with print, and the verbal with the visual.
When reading a text our understanding of its meaning is influenced by the visual form and material features of the page. The chapters in this volume investigate how visual and material features of early English books, documents, and other artefacts support – or potentially contradict – the linguistic features in communicating the message. In addition to investigating how such communication varies between different media and genres, our contributors propose novel methods for analysing these features, including new digital applications. They map the use of visual and material features – such as layout design or choice of script/typeface – against linguistic features – such as code-switching, lexical variation, or textual labels – to consider how these choices reflect the communicative purposes of the text, for example guiding readers to navigate the text in a certain way or persuading them to arrive at a certain interpretation. The chapters explore texts from the medieval and the early modern periods, including saints’ lives, medical treatises, dictionaries, personal letters, and inscriptions on objects. The thematic threads running through the volume serve to integrate book studies with discourse linguistics, the medieval with the early modern, manuscript with print, and the verbal with the visual.
Abbreviations Preface Part I: Discourse Linguistics Meets Book History Disciplinary Decoding: Towards Understanding the Language of Visual and Material Features MARI-LIISA VARILA, HANNA SALMI, ALEKSI MAKILAHDE, JANNE SKAFFARI, and MATTI PEIKOLA Part II: Communicating through Layout Discourse Variation, Mise-en-page, and Textual Organisation in Middle English Saints Lives COLETTE MOORE How the Page Functions: Reading Pitscotties Cronicles in Manuscript and Print FRANCESCA L. MACKAY Verbal and Visual Communication in Title Pages of Early Modern English Specialised Medical Texts MAURA RATIA and CARLA SUHR Quantifying Contrasts: A Method of Computational Analysis of Visual Features on the Early Printed Page JUKKA TYRKKO Part III: Communicating through Script and Typography Stating the Obvious in Runes YIN LIU Labours Lost: William Caxtons "Otiose" Sorts, c. 1472-1482 ANYA ADAIR Code-Switching, Script-Switching, and Typeface-Switching in Early Modern English Manuscript Letters and Printed Tracts SAMULI KAISLANIEMI Seeing is Reading: Typography in Some Early Modern Dictionaries R.W. MCCONCHIE Whose Letters Are They Anyway? Addressing the Issue of Scribal Writing in Bess of Hardwicks Early Modern English Letters I.J. MARCUS Bibliography Index
- Edited by Matti Peikola
- Edited by Aleksi Makilahde
- Edited by Hanna Salmi
- Edited by Mari-Liisa Varila
- Edited by Janne Skaffari
Other Titles in this Series
Understanding Monastic Practices of Oral Communication (Western Europe, tenth-thirteenth centuries)
Volume 21
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
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
Cultures of Religious Reading in the Late Middle Ages
Instructing the Soul, Feeding the Spirit, and Awakening the Passion
Volume 25
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
Spoken and Written Language
Relations between Latin and the Vernacular Languages in the Earlier Middle Ages
Volume 24
The Politics of Memory and Identity in Carolingian Royal Diplomas
The West Frankish Kingdom (840-987)
Volume 19
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
Epigraphic Literacy and Christian Identity
Modes of Written Discourse in the Newly Christian European North
Volume 4
Ruling the Script in the Middle Ages
Formal Aspects of Written Communication (Books, Charters, and Inscriptions)
Volume 35
Diplomatics in the Netherlands
The Use, Editing, and Study of Charters by Dutch Historians from the Middle Ages to the Present
Volume 63
Similar Books
A Collaborative Tapestry in Honour of Shirley Ann Brown / Une fresque brodée en l’honneur de Shirley Ann Brown
The Bayeux Tapestry Seen by her Colleagues and Friends / La Tapisserie de Bayeux vue par ses collègues et amis
Balthasar Caymox of Nuremberg
Early Modern German Print Publishers: Popular Prints of the Seventeenth Century
Behind the Scenes of Medieval Roofs
An Overview of the Roofing Systems of Italian Churches
Volume 90
Beyond Sovereign Courts
Agents and Practices in Early Modern Spanish and Habsburg Diplomacy
Volume 3
Circulation, Use, Impact
The Consumption of Architectural Books in the Early Modern Eastern Adriatic
Volume 1
Councils, Conflicts, Correspondence
Urban Diplomacy in Reval (Tallinn) and Lübeck (c. 1470–1570)
Volume 67
Innovation and Medieval Communities
The Circulation of Ideas and Practices in and out of the Town (1200-1500)
Volume 63
Innovationes Lovanienses: Arts, Law and Theology at the University of Louvain (1425–1797)
Studium Lovaniense: Learning across Borders, 2
Volume 18
John Dunstaple Reading Boethius
John Dunstaple’s Annotations to Boethius’s “De institutione musica” in the Manuscript Oxford, Corpus Christi College Library, MS 118
Legal Visuality
Exegesis, Ambiguity, and Dissimulation of the Donation of Constantine in the Early Modern Period
Linguistic and Cultural Dynamics in a Frontier Society
New Perspectives on Northeastern Bavaria and Western Bohemia in the Early Middle Ages
Volume 9
Medieval Debates on Foreknowledge: Future Contingents, Prophecy, and Divination
Acts of the XXVII Annual Colloquium of the SIEPM, Trento 12-15 September 2023
Volume 31
Medieval Yeghegis, Armenia
History, Archaeology, Society. Local Multiplicities and Global Connections of a Rural Centre on the Silk Road(s)
Monastic Manuscripts from the Eastern Mediterranean (Sinai, Jerusalem, Antioch)
Production, Use, and Contexts
