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.
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
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
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
Looking Back from the Invention of Printing
Mothers and the Teaching of Reading in the Middle Ages
Volume 40
Manuscript Communication
Visual and Textual Mechanics of Communication in Hagiographical Texts from the Southern Low Countries, 900-1200
Volume 32
Medieval Women in Letters
Letters by Women, to Women, and about Women in Medieval Literatures
Volume 66
Writing Names in Medieval Sacred Spaces
Inscriptions in the West, from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages
Volume 56
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
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