New Approaches to Medieval Communication?1

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34 MARCO MOSTERTdevelopments in other disciplines. It had always been clear that the spokenword continued to play an important role also after the introduction of writing.The problem of the relationship between speech and writing gradually developedfrom an ‘either/or’-question into a ‘more/less’-question.One of the first questions addressed by historians was that of the literacyof groups outside the literate elites (which at first were considered to consist ofclergymen only). Were the English medieval kings literate? V.H. Galbraithasked himself in 1935. 107 Did women participate in literacy? Herbert Grundmannasked a year later. 108 Were there monks who did not know how to readand write? Alfred Wendehorst wanted to know in 1963. 109 When the obvioustruth sunk in that not all medieval clerics were scholars, the literacy of regularand secular clergy was investigated. 110 All social groups have been dealt with,including the illiterate peasants: in 1984, Aron Gurevich devoted attention tothe “peasant visions” of twelfth- and thirteenth-century oral and written cultureas he deduced them from learned Latin texts. 111Surprisingly, the use of writing in government, management and trade wasaddressed relatively late as a topic of research in its own right. Probably thishas to do with the fact that general surveys of medieval literacy tend to privilegethese uses of the written word. Diplomatics, legal and institutional historyhad always studied the use of documents. In 1971 Ruth Schmidt-Wieganddrew attention to the relationship between the spoken word and legal symbolsin ‘German’ Carolingian poetry. 112 But there are few studies until the appearanceof Michael Clanchy’s From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307 in 1979. 113 This work, which by no means deals only with governmentand administration, may be said to have been an inspiration for the Germanpreoccupation with ‘pragmatische Schriftlichkeit’. Recently, the specialists ofcharters and documents have begun to realize the importance of rephrasingtheir research questionnaire in the terms of medieval communication and literacy.In 1997, for instance, Olivier Guyotjeannin, Laurent Morelle and MichelParisse devoted an issue of the Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes to the usesof documents in the eleventh century, 114 in which recent research on orality and107No. 1092 (GALBRAITH, 1935).108No. 1108 (GRUNDMANN, 1936).109No. 1086 (WENDEHORST, 1963).110See Nos. 1058-1088.111 No. 1101 (GUREVICH, 1984).112No. 1159 (SCHMIDT-WIEGAND, 1971).113 No. 294 (CLANCHY, 1993; 1st edn. 1979).114 No. 1139 (ed. GUYOTJEANNIN, MORELLE and PARISSE, 1997).
New Approaches to Medieval Communication?35literacy has been taken into account. 115 Another very promising recent developmentis the shift in attention from juridical texts to the settlement of disputes.The Settlement of Disputes in Early Medieval Europe, edited by Wendy Daviesand Paul Fouracre in 1986, 116 stresses the function of documents among thoseof other forms of communication. Thus, the relative importance of the writtenword in medieval judicial practice can be ascertained. 117Ritual and its juxtaposition of non-verbal, oral and written forms of communicationseems the most recent addition to the study of medieval communication.As in dispute settlement, so in other ‘public’ rituals the role of thewritten word can be shown to have been less important than earlier concentrationon the extant written sources seemed to suggest. 118 Consultation, demonstrationand stage setting of emotions show, according to Gerd Althoff’s recentanalysis, to have been more important than writing in the medieval politicalgame. 119 Similarly, the participation of the aristocracy in the medieval liturgy,studied in 1995 by Horst Wenzel, shows the written word to have been onlyone form among many to represent the drama of Christianity. 120 Not only writtentexts, visual images, too, have to be replaced in the context in which theywere seen in order to be fully understood. 121We have concentrated this short review on the first publications dealingwith specific aspects of medieval communication. As a consequence, certaintitles of major importance have not been mentioned. They can, however, easilybe traced in the bibliography. The aim has merely been to show when certainquestions were first put, in order to find out when certain approaches to medievalcommunication are first expressly attested.115 E.g. in the contribution of O. GUYOTJEANNIN, “ ‘Penuria scriptorum’: Le mythe del’anarchie documentaire dans la France du Nord (X e -première moitié du XI e siècle)”, pp. 11-44,at pp. 13-14.116No. 1206 (ed. DAVIES and FOURACRE, 1986).117Cf. the contribution of Karl Heidecker to this volume (No. 1197).118See the contribution of Mariëlle Hageman to this volume (No. 487).119Nos. 476-479 (ALTHOFF, 1990, 1993, 1996 and 1997).120 No. 631 (WENZEL, 1995), pp. 95-127.121M. MOSTERT, “Qu’est-ce qu’une image? En guise de conclusion”, in: Les images dansles sociétés médiévales: Pour une histoire comparée, ed. J.-M. SANSTERRE and J.-Cl. SCHMITT(Brussels and Rome, 1999: Bulletin de l’Institut Belge de Rome 69), pp. 265-271, at p. 267.
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