[Sca-librarians] [tmr-l@wmich.edu:Crick/Walsham (eds), Uses of Script and Print (Erler)]

Wed Feb 2 21:49:23 CST 2005

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From: The Medieval Review <tmr-l at wmich.edu>
Subject: TMR 05.01.36 Crick/Walsham (eds), Uses of Script and Print (Erler)

Crick, Julia and Alexandra Walsham, eds. The Uses of Script and 
Print,
1300-1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. 298. 
$70.00 (hb).
ISBN: 0-521-81063-9.

   Reviewed by Mary Erler
        Fordham University

Two earlier books cast their long shadows over this new volume. Michael 
Clanchy's
From Memory to Written Record, England 1066 to 1307, its second 
edition published a decade ago, is still immensely powerful, right down 
to the minutiae of its specific illustrations of various reading 
practices--still the ones revived and re-cited to prove this or that 
point, as we see often in this volume. The introduction to The Uses 
of Script and Print, while summarizing previous work on the 
transition between these modes, has its own position, as we might 
expect: that writing and printing have overlapping, as well as 
separate, histories--and indeed that position, which emphasizes the 
parallels rather than the disjunctions between the two worlds, 
represents the new orthodoxy.

In adopting this perspective the volume necessarily challenges its 
other great predecessor, Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press 
as an Agent of Change (1980), whose view, although nuanced and 
complex, emphasized the radical differences between a manuscript 
culture and a print one. Eisenstein's work now receives a more mixed 
response, though many elements are still cited deferentially and even 
the thesis is still invoked at various points in this volume.

The introduction's central point is that manuscript use continues vital 
long after the arrival of print. This is not a new observation: what is 
new is the analysis of why manuscripts endured and for whom they filled 
a need. This portion of the introduction is fascinating and important 
to discussion of the script/print divide. The introduction is not quite 
so successful in presenting a considered overview of the situation. For 
instance the editors note the way print "served to nourish and 
reinvigorate unwritten tradition," i.e. orality (17), but they later 
say "wisdom transmitted by word of mouth was increasingly dismissed as 
untrustworthy and vulgar" (21)--and these contrasting points of view 
are not adequately distinguished in terms of period, nor differentiated 
in terms of their authors. Likewise, although the point is early made 
that the print medium was not necessarily well-regarded (20), with 
examples from sixteenth-century Italy and the English Civil War, a page 
later we are told that "over time?printing did come to carry a kind of 
imprimatur," with an example from early nineteenth-century poet John 
Clare--a conclusion that seems somewhat facile and inadequately 
supported.

Like the introduction, Margaret Aston's epilogue offers an overview of 
the volume's themes, though her finale gives a richer and more personal 
response which finds particular stimulus in the subjects of talk, of 
sermons, and of community reading. Aston's summing-up of script and 
print's relation as demonstrating "a lasting permeability?throughout 
the period" seems right, but raises the question how far the period 
extends. Perhaps such interpenetration of script and print might obtain 
as late as the nineteenth century. Her phrase describing the 
situation--interaction rather than impact--will be recalled in pursuing 
further work.

The volume is extremely interested in the relation of forms of 
communication, manuscript and print, to forms of religion, traditional 
and reformed. Half of the twelve essays examine this large topic, both 
before and after the reformation. Before considering these essays, 
however, we might look at the book's first contribution, appropriately 
placed because so widely relevant to all the volume's concerns. This is 
Felicity Riddy's answer to the question "How was publication done 
before printing?" She summarizes what we know--not always enough for 
firm conclusions--and offers a stimulating re-thinking, suggesting we 
define publication in its Middle English sense as "making known" rather 
than "issuing for sale." Requiring a discursive instead of a spatial 
publicness, such publication stresses the importance of talk; indeed it 
defines publication as being talked about. Similarly fruitful is 
Riddy's thinking on the responsibilities of the book's patron. Though 
some medieval dedications seem to imply that this important figure had 
the burden of disseminating the text, Riddy instead sees the book as an 
element in gift-exchange, the author presenting the work in return for 
expected rewards and favors. This reading seems especially plausible in 
light of the frequency with which inscriptions identify personal gift 
books as presented in exchange for prayers. The book, in other words, 
was often a counter in various sorts of transfer.

All the essays having to do with religion, with one exception, focus on 
the print half of the script/print continuum. This exception is David 
d'Avray's reiteration of the argument found in his 2001 book, 
Medieval Marriage Sermons, that substantive scribal changes to 
sermon texts argue against commercial scribes and for friars copying 
for themselves, and that the loss rate for medieval manuscripts, 
particularly sermons, was huge. James Clark's intriguing contribution 
traces the aborted beginnings of English Benedictine printing, and asks 
what might have happened if the Dissolution had not intervened in 1539. 
Though in the treatment of printing at St. Albans there are some 
discrepancies with the account given by STC, the essay is successful in 
drawing attention to this overlooked yet significant element in English 
printing history. Indeed, given another decade of life, monastic 
printing might have made its contribution to religious history as well. 
The 1536 confutation of John Frith printed at St. Albans, for instance, 
hints at such an outcome.

The rest of the essays treating religion and print are firmly 
post-Reformation. Alexandra Walsham provides a survey of dissenting 
books from the Lollards though the seventeenth century (the brevity of 
the Catholic list vs. the Protestant one is notable). The second half 
of her essay questions the classic linkage of Protestantism and print 
(a caveat found elsewhere in the book), suggesting that print was seen 
as useful in times of persecution or in the absence of a preacher, but 
was judged second-best to the oral delivery of the word.

If this essay stresses the importance of the oral over the printed 
word, Thomas Freeman's contribution, on the scribal culture of the 
Marian martyrs, emphasizes the importance of writing over print to 
controversialists on the other side of the fence, for instance in 
waging internecine doctrinal disputes or correcting texts before 
printing. Eisenstein's ideas about the stability of print, challenged 
elsewhere, are influential here and in the following essay, Ann 
Hughes', where Eisenstein's thesis on the power of print to forge 
"impersonal communities linked by ideology" is invoked to illustrate 
the intermingling of speech, manuscript and print around the 
seventeenth-century Presbyterian text Gangraena. Scott 
Mandelbrote examines the relative weight given to manuscript and to 
print sources in establishing post-Reformation printed editions of the 
bible, concluding, surprisingly, that manuscript sources were not 
always preferred and in fact that "reverence for traditions embodied in 
print" to a large extent displaced the authority of manuscript. 
Mandelbrote's lucid essay shows how first one, then the other form of 
writing was dominant, concluding that, "almost paradoxically, 
manuscripts and their histories retained an ability to challenge and 
undermine, as well as to uphold, [scriptural] traditions that were 
supported by print" (153).

Among the remaining essays, those whose focus is not religious, perhaps 
the most widely useful is Anthony Musson's contribution on law and 
text. It asks about the effect of the movement from oral to written law 
in the late Middle Ages, and in doing so, gives a brief clear history 
of the evolution of legal practice and the development of legal texts. 
The interaction between oral and written forms of law is explored and 
the question of who had access to law is entertained. At every point 
Musson is synthesizing the work of numerous others to offer his 
magisterial overview, a piece of work that, with its frequent 
definition of terms, is bound to be illuminating to nonspecialists.

Equally memorable, though for its originality rather than its synthetic 
power, is Christopher Marsh's call for acknowledgement of ballads as 
song, and his demonstration of the evocative force of tunes, containing 
"a hidden code of meanings and associations" (176). A contribution that 
challenges, just slightly, Michael Clanchy's classifications is Andrew 
Butcher's thoughtful and delicate exploration of the work of town 
clerks as historians. Using anthropology and linguistics, Butcher sees 
these histories or administrative writings, usually viewed as part of 
the development of "practical literacy," as instead expressing the 
community to itself. Not personal, yet incorporating individuals, these 
town chronicles were the product of "fellow speakers engaged with one 
another and with a local speech community, even a speech/text 
community"--a term that describes, as well, Felicity Riddy's account of 
the readers and talkers around Julian of Norwich.

Jonathan Barry's analysis of forms of communication--script, print, 
speech--in Bristol from 1640 to 1714 is so firmly and intentionally 
subordinated to a presentation of the local context that produced these 
forms that what emerges is simply an essay on the city's history. Julia 
Crick's essay, a byproduct of her forthcoming edition of Anglo-Saxon 
charters, looks at the practice of seventeenth-century editors of these 
records, and hence at their attitudes toward the past revealed in their 
use of sources, but the evidence is tortuously involved and in the end, 
serves only to illustrate the relative interchangeability of manuscript 
and print sources.

The Uses of Script and Print, 1300-1700 grew out of a conference 
held at the University of Exeter in April 2000. Unlike many collections 
of conference proceedings, this collection's success rate, through its 
individual essays, is high, and the introduction's framing of the 
issues in current scholarship, as well as its presentation of those 
issues in historical context, is valuable. Christopher Marsh calls the 
process "that grand, never-ending transition from a culture centered on 
orality and aurality?towards one centered more on literacy?"(172). This 
book constitutes a lively and judicious marker of where we are now in 
reflecting on the differences between writing and print, and at the 
same time does much to make that reflection both more full and more 
subtle.

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