New Approaches to Medieval Communication?1

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22 MARCO MOSTERTguage. No human society is known to do without one, and we can hardly imaginehow a group of humans could accomplish any but the simplest acts in itsabsence. How could one, without language, profit from the experience of others,let the others know one’s plans, or organize the tasks to be performed?Medieval societies, too, obviously attached great importance to verbal communication,and it is no coincidence that many studies of medieval communicationare devoted to the spoken and written word.Audible and visible media are extremely suitable for group use. The lightperceived by the eye and the vibrations of the air captured by the ear may be‘received’ over relatively long distances. Whereas smell, taste and touch demandthe immediate vicinity of sender and receiver, these constraints are absentin the case of sound and vision. Thus, it is possible to communicate withmore people at the same time. No doubt this possibility is one of the reasonswhy one has tried to give durability to visual and audible signs. Many of thesesigns (for instance gestures or exclamations) disappear, but they can be reencodedin visual images or written texts.The spoken word is privileged by its flexibility and ease of use, but as ameans of communication it is constrained by place and time: a discourse maybe made only at a certain time, at a certain place. Man has learnt to controltime and space by systems of coded material traces, such as writing, which callupon the eye. The relationship between writing and other forms of communicationunderwent important changes during the Middle Ages. The developmentof medieval writing has to be studied in relation to changing social institutions.Writing was (as it still is) organized in social systems of producers and consumersof written texts. These systems interacted with other social systems,and technological innovations in written culture are demanded by practical,social needs. One might even argue that writing itself is also an institution,with its own canons. 21Literacy, orality and the study of the Middle AgesOf all forms of medieval communication, the written word has benefitedmost from scholarly attention. Indeed, the study of communication is unthinkablewithout the study of reading and writing, if only because the ability toparticipate actively in written culture tends to colour and change the attitudetowards all other forms of communication. The study of written texts is as old21 On literary and other codes, see No. 265, referring to B. HERRNSTEIN SMITH,“Contingencies of value”, in: Canons, ed. R. VON HALLBERG (Chicago, 1983), pp. 5-93.
New Approaches to Medieval Communication?23as writing itself, and the study of the medieval written word predates the explicitinterest in medieval communication by many centuries. The sixteenthandseventeenth-century scholars who founded historical criticism may be saidto be the forerunners of the present-day students of medieval communication.Diplomatics, palaeography, philology and the other traditional auxiliary sciencesof medieval history continue to contribute to the better understanding ofcommunication in the Middle Ages.Nowadays, in the English speaking world the word ‘literacy’ tends to beused for the study of all and any forms of written communication. Its possiblemeanings have inflated since the subject became en vogue in the 1980s and1990s. In a study on “The extent of literacy in England in the fifteenth andsixteenth centuries” published in 1930, J.W. Adamson took the word “in thehumblest sense” merely to connote “the ability to read an English book,whether printed or in manuscript”. 22 This definition had the merit of beingrelatively clear. V.H. Galbraith, writing in 1935, also merely meant “the abilityto read and write” by it. 23Things changed in 1963 with the publication of “The consequences ofliteracy” by the anthropologist Jack Goody and the literary historian IanWatt. 24 Goody’s ideas, as well as the ideas of the classicist Eric A. Havelock,were to have a far-reaching influence in medieval studies. 25 These authorssuggested writing to be a possible motor of historical change. If they wereright, and if the human mind was reorganized by learning to read and write,then instances of this reorganization took place whenever someone becameconversant with these technical skills. If the introduction of writing enabledsocial change, then the new forms of social and political life that developedduring the Middle Ages might have been tributary to ‘literacy’.The first medievalists to use the English word ‘literacy’ in the title of apublication after the thinking of the social scientists and classicists had sunk in,were F.H. Bäuml and E. Spielmann in their 1974 study of the Niebelungenlied.26 Bäuml was also one of the first medievalists to address the problem ofliteracy in a theoretical article, which appeared in Speculum in 1980. 27 Meanwhile,the first surveys of literacy in individual medieval societies appeared: onthe bookishness of the modern Icelanders and their assumption of the transmis-22No. 292, p. 163.23No. 1092, reprint p. 78.24 No. 89.25Cf. the “Index of modern authors and editors” of the bibliography, s.v.26 No. 1393.27 No. 32.
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