Medieval manuscripts from the IX century onwards are repositories of the evolutions in the evaluation and use of the written language in Europe. In the introduction to his study Space Beween Words, Paul Saenger reports that “[in] the West, the ability to read silently is a result of the historical evolution of word separation that [began] in the seventh century;”1the manuscripts kept in the Rare Book & Manuscript Library of the Columbia University allow to follow how long it took to this separation to come along, and under what pressures it took place. Allowing to assess the progressive changes that lead to a different balance between oral and written culture, they suggest the evolution of a different conception of the notion of literacy, and a parallel evolution of controlling means to check the impact of a diffused literacy.
One of the most remarkable differences between ancient and contemporary texts is the way in which a written text used to be structured in Classical time and in the Middle Ages. Saenger reports that the adoption of vowels in Greek written alphabet provided “a complete set of signs for the unambiguous transcription of pronounced speech,” (Saenger 9) and that this exhaustive symbology allowed to record spoken acts as fluxes of letters whose discrete elements where not represented by spaces between words, punctuation, or any other textual clue, but only by the very presence of vowels; this scriptura continua was meant to be read out lout, and the performance relied on the reader's good knowledge of the text at hand. The logic that underlaid this seemingly impractical writing system uncovers what Saenger identifies as the concrete “advantage[s]” (Saenger 11) for the ancients, linked to rooted linguistic behaviors: the obviousness of a limited access to reading decoding abilities and the reliance on oral diffusion of contents; the existence of a limited number of contents that could be meaningful for the large public; an unchallenged elitist conception of culture. These elements were part of an approach to literacy that excluded the possibility of silent and individual reading, and the approach itself was strongly influenced by the media available to diffuse content: ancient texts were mostly recorded on fragile papyrus, either used in scrolls or codices, and papyrus did not prove practical enough to encourage or justify a different organization of writing and reading practices.
The manuscripts of the Middle Ages bear witness of a tension between these deep-seated habits and the changes that took place in the modes, instruments, and practices of literacy. Manuscripts form France, Italy, Germany, and England, ranging from the IX to the XV century were realized on leaves of parchment, treated animal skin that was more practical and easier to handle and organize than papyrus. Until XIII century, the realization of manuscripts was prerogative of the monasteries, where the scribes would copy religious texts as the Bible, theological and exegetical documents, Psalters and missals. Even though the writing continued to be strongly influenced by the traditional patterns of the scriptura continua, some clues for deciphering started to appear: one of the documents of the Columbia Library, an ancient codex form the late IX century, presents some red 'annotations' that seem to gloss the text in order to facilitate its reading; moreover, two scraps of a X century Bible show that grouping grammatical units was spreading as a practice of writing. Nonetheless, the extreme slowness of these changes reflected a still strongly limited access to the written text, that continued to be an instrument available only to the high spheres of society, interested in a controlled production and impartation of sense, meaning, and culture.
After the XIII century, manuscripts began to be produced also outside monasteries; some of the exemplars of the Library show that the new public was composed by wealthy people, in large part the nobility, and some representatives of the in-the-making merchant class. In this period the hornbooks, used to teach reading to children, began to appear, and also small personalized learning books, containing the alphabet and some well known prayers. From this time on, silent reading evidently gained more and more ground, and with it the writing strategies changed, word separation being progressively employed also outside Ireland, where the scribes had adopted it in the early Middle Ages (Manguel, Saenger). With the diffusion of literacy, many examples of individual note books can be found, and their content is telling in respect to which strata of society literacy reached: commonplace books or recipe books are two of the example that point at the merchant class as the new sector of society form whom literacy represented a tool and a weapon.
The document written under the command, but not by the hand of Philip Augustus in 1207, is telling of the ancient widespread conception of the writing tool as a subordinate instrument, and of the status of the people who could master this tool as mere laborers serving a cause on which they could not nor were supposed to participate. However, this trend began to change with the diffusion of schooling and of a more intimate perusal of the written text, that contributed to the development of written awareness among an increasing number of people. It would be interesting to assess how the notion of authenticity, that will be pivotal after the invention of printing, started to develop during these first stages of written awareness, and in which sense it influenced the value of literacy. I would also like to see how the issue of authenticity, linked to that of authorial rights, proved to be a powerful mean to restrain the revolutionary access to and diffusion of the written word once this was freed by extra-monasteries production, printing, and widespread literacy.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Manguel, Alberto. A History of Reading. New York: Viking, 1996.
Saenger, Paul. Spaces Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading. Standford: Standford University Press, 1997.
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