New Approaches to Medieval Communication?1

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30 MARCO MOSTERTmedieval literacy and illiteracy” betrays by its very title the influence of theliteracy debate on recent art historical work on this topic. 82The investigation of the teaching of reading and writing still has to startwith Henri Pirenne’s 1929 article in the first issue of the Annales on the instructionof medieval merchants, and his 1934 article on the education of laymenin Merovingian France – if only to understand later modifications of theideas he espoused. 83Medieval memory and the differences between oral and literate ways ofremembering and forgetting became an object of research with Helga Hajdu’s1936 study of mnemotechnical literature. 84 The past as it was experienced inprimarily oral medieval societies was first explored in 1970 by MichaelClanchy in “Remembering the past and the good old law”, an article predatingmuch of the later concern with oral tradition. 85Surprisingly, the study of the relation between writing and the religion ofmedieval laymen has attracted few scholars. There has been some interest inheretics, 86 possibly because of the alleged links between Protestantism and theprinting press at the very end of the Middle Ages. Hagiographical texts, too,have been studied for what they might reveal about the oral modes of communicationof laymen. 87 Similarly, studies of the magic of writing have providedsome clues as to the uses of the written word by illiterates. 88 But much maystill be profitably explored in this domain.The study of the spoken word in the Middle Ages is still interested in thequestion of the end of Latin as a natural language. Ferdinand Lot’s question of1931 (when did one cease to speak Latin?) 89 has been often restated (for instancein Michael Richter’s review of the debate published in 1983) 90 but neversatisfactorily answered. 91 The problem of the vernaculars, the province of mod-82No. 415 (CAMILLE, 1985).83Nos. 738 (PIRENNE, 1929) and 749 (PIRENNE, 1934).84 No. 625 (HAJDU, 1936).85 No. 638 (CLANCHY, 1970), referring to No. 647 (VANSINA, 1961), in the first Englishedn. of 1965, at p. 168.86Nos. 1509 (ASTON, 1977) and 1510 (BILLER, 1986) are the first.87Nos. 1528-1552, the earliest being Nos. 1547 (VAN UYTFANGHE, 1976), 1531 (COSMOS,1977) and 1541 (KRESTEN, 1977).88Nos. 1553-1567; the earliest: Nos. 1566 (POULIN, 1977), 1556 (DÜWEL, 1988) and 1562(MÜLLER, 1988).89 No. 555 (LOT, 1931).90No. 557 (RICHTER, 1983).91 See Nos. 543-562 and, for a summary of the different views, the contribution of Wolfertvan Egmond to this volume (No. 1546).
New Approaches to Medieval Communication?31ern philologists, has recently also been addressed by historians interested in theuse of the vernacular in documents. 92Literary historians had long before the 1960s asked themselves questionsabout the relationship between oral and written verbal art. They had noticedremarks in the written texts they studied which seemed to suggest that oralversions might have preceded the written versions they were left with. Alreadybefore the Second World War appeared The Growth of Literature. It was athree-volume attempt, edited by H. Munroe Chadwick and N. Kershaw Chadwick,93 to answer the question whether under similar circumstances similarforms of literature were likely to be produced. They compared European medievalforms of heroic literature with twentieth-century heroic literature producedall over the globe. Among other things they asked how writing changed theproduction of literary works. Even before that, in 1928, the American classicistMilman Parry had discovered that in the oral composition of literary workssuch as epics formulas were used, stopgaps to fill out verses. 94 In 1960 AlbertB. Lord’s The Singer of Tales appeared, 95 in which the views of Parry werepresented anew, and ever since has been a veritable hunt for ‘oral formulas’ inmedieval epics, and a concomitant glut of articles on ‘oral formulaic theory’. 96Literary historians have also become sensitive to the information to beculled from the manuscripts in which medieval literature survives. Back in1941-1942, Henry John Chaytor realized that medieval scribes had relied on‘auditory memory’ rather than modern ‘visual memory’, and concluded that“the difference between auditory and visual memory can be made a basis foremendation”. 97 The influence of orality and on reading and on manuscriptlayout became ever more important outside palaeographical circles.Historians among medievalists started to produce surveys of the developmentof communication and literacy after the Second World War. HeinrichFichtenau’s Mensch und Schrift im Mittelalter was published in 1946. 98 Itsimmediate influence in the German speaking world seems to have been lim-92 Early examples are Nos. 588 (DE MEYER, 1974; corrected recently by No. 587(BURGERS, 1996)), 595 (MIGLIO, 1986), 599 (VRIES, 1989) and 593 (KOCH, 1990).93No. 1253 (CHADWICK and CHADWICK, 1932-1940).94M. PARRY, L’Épithète traditionnelle dans Homère (Paris, 1928). Parry’s work wasreprinted in 1971, when medievalists, too, had begun to be sensitized to the subject of medievalcommunication (The Making of Homeric Verse. The Collected Writings of Milman Parry, ed. A.PARRY (Oxford, 1971)).95 No. 1355.96See No. 1331.97 No. 948 (CHAYTOR, 1941-1942), p. 56.98 No. 191 (FICHTENAU, 1946).
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