Michael Clanchy. Looking Back from the Invention of Printing: Mothers and the Teaching of Reading in the Middle Ages. Turnhout: Brepols, 2018, 211 pp.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 467-469
Author(s):  
Jane Beal
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Research University ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Professor Emeritus ◽  
Medieval History ◽  
Medieval Manuscripts ◽  
Teaching Of Reading ◽  
Looking Back

Michael Clanchy (Professor Emeritus of Medieval History at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London and Fellow of the British Academy), who is well-known for his seminal study From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066–1307 (1979; rev. 1993; Oxford, rev. 2013), has produced a new book with an original introduction that brings together six of his studies, all previously published separately in edited collections between 1983 and 2011. The book concerns a significant theme: the development of literacy in later medieval England and Europe. The chapters explore the evidence from medieval manuscripts and material culture, especially visual art, to provide support for the idea that mothers taught their children the basics of reading before taking them to school. Clanchy writes:

Punctuation

2020 ◽  
pp. 3-8
Author(s):  
Frank T. Coulson
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Medieval Manuscripts ◽  
History Of ◽  
New System ◽  
The Middle Ages

This chapter provides a brief survey of the history of punctuation of Latin texts, and functions as a guide to the use of punctuation marks in Latin manuscripts of the Middle Ages. Punctuation in medieval manuscripts is quite variable, some scripts, such as Beneventan, having their own unique punctuation systems. During the Carolingian period, a new system of punctuation (known as positurae) began to be developed; it was later supplemented by the work of Humanist scholars.

The so-called Statutes of John Pecham and Robert Winchelsey for the Province of Canterbury

1961 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. R. Cheney
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
Medieval Manuscripts

Among the legislators of the medieval English Church John Pecham, archbishop of Canterbury, 1279–92, is remembered chiefly on account of canons published in two councils early in his pontificate, at Reading in July-August 1279 and at Lambeth in October 1281. His successor, Robert Winchelsey (1294–1313), less celebrated for his laws, none-the-less is assigned by Lyndwood, the fifteenth-century canonist, nine chapters of the Provinciale. The ‘Winchelsey’ documents and some others described in medieval manuscripts as ‘Statuta’ or ‘Constitutiones’ or ‘Decreta’ of one or other of the two archbishops cannot be immediately or surely connected with any known provincial council. They include texts on questions of almost daily occurrence to medieval archdeacons and parochial clergy: about the calculation of tithe, the duties of stipendiary priests, the obligations of the laity for church repairs. Lyndwood glossed many of them. Modern students of history and canon law commonly cite them. It is, therefore, of some importance to establish the degree of credit which may be allowed to the ascriptions. This study will consider the evidence of the manuscripts and will aim at sorting the genuine statutes from the spurious and the dubious. Some of each kind will be found. The enquiry may not only help to determine the nature of these particular documents, but also may reflect light on other doubtful legislation and illustrate the ways in which laws were framed and customs established in the English Church in the later Middle Ages.

Poet of the Medieval Modern

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
History Of ◽  
Catholic History ◽  
In Parenthesis ◽  
Stone Sculpture

The early Middle Ages provided twentieth-century poets with the material to reimagine and rework local, religious, and national identities in their writing. Poet of the Medieval Modern focuses on a key figure within this tradition, the Anglo-Welsh poet and artist David Jones (1895–1974), and represents the first extended study of the influence of early medieval culture and history from England on Jones and his novel-length late modernist poem The Anathemata (1952). The Anathemata, the second major poetic project after In Parenthesis (1937), fuses Jones’s visual and verbal arts to write a Catholic history of Britain as told through the history of man-as-artist. Drawing on unpublished archival material including manuscripts, sketches, correspondence, and, most significantly, the marginalia from David Jones’s Library, Poet of the Medieval Modern reads with Jones in order to trouble the distinction we make between poetry and scholarship. Placing this underappreciated figure firmly at the centre of new developments in modernist and medieval studies, Poet of the Medieval Modern brings the two fields into dialogue and argues that Jones uses the textual and material culture of the early Middle Ages—including Old English prose and poetry, Anglo-Latin hagiography, early medieval stone sculpture, manuscripts, and historiography—to re-envision British Catholic identity in the twentieth-century long poem. In The Anathemata Jones returned to the English record to seek out those moments where the histories of the Welsh had been elided or erased. At a time when the Middle Ages are increasingly weaponized in far-right and nationalist political discourse, the book offers a timely discussion of how the early medieval past has been resourced to both shore up and challenge English hegemonies across modern British culture.

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