Visible English
Graphic Culture, Scribal Practice, and Identity, c. 700-c. 1550
By (author) Wendy Scase
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.
- By (author) Wendy Scase
Other Titles in this Series
Orality and Literacy in the Middle Ages
Essays on a Conjunction and its Consequences in Honour of D. H. Green
Volume 12
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
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
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Use of Pragmatic Documents in Medieval Wallachia and Moldavia (Fourteenth to Sixteenth Centuries)
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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
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
Spoken and Written Language
Relations between Latin and the Vernacular Languages in the Earlier Middle Ages
Volume 24
Politics of Memory and Identity in Carolingian Royal Diplomas
The West Frankish Kingdom (840-987)
Volume 19
Transforming the Medieval World
Uses of Pragmatic Literacy in the Middle Ages (A CD-ROM and Book)
Volume 6
Ruling the Script in the Middle Ages
Formal Aspects of Written Communication (Books, Charters, and Inscriptions)
Volume 35
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