FRENCH 474 A: Reading and Writing: Manuscripts in the Middle Ages

Course description: The course examines the rising importance of the written word and of cultures of reading for many critical aspects of medieval life. Education, religious practice, leisure, story-telling, history, information and political awareness evolved from the early twelfth to the late fifteenth century, at the same time of the rise of the middle class and towns, breakdown of Catholic consensus, new political configurations, new kinds of knowledge and curiosity about the world. New habits of writing and reading gave rise to new kinds of readers, new modes of authorship, and new socio-cultural rituals in monastic scriptoria, university towns, stationers’ shops, and private libraries with the emergence of a literate middle class in the later Middle Ages. We will discuss the history of written literary works, particularly in medieval France and Italy, which embraces and comprehends developments as varied as the history and transmission of the heritage of Antiquity, the creation and codification of literary traditions and genres, the invention of new forms of pedagogy the establishment of performance practices for a corpus of liturgical chant, and the regulation of personal piety or, in the case of the tournament book, the rules of chivalric competition. In a visit to the Special Collections we will explore how manuscripts were produced, presented, exchanged and read to highlight the role of the author, the scribe, the compiler, the stationer, and the readers in this process. We will also consider a self-conscious culture of the word in which books served as symbols of authority, access and authenticity, as well as expressions of the human experience. Finally, we will consider how digital projects and open access critical editions enrich and advance scholarship by sharing knowledge in an open, timely and accessible way on medieval texts and their complicated manuscript history. At a time when the book is undergoing a process of profound transformation, new textual practices in the digital world are more consistent with medieval reading experiences than current printed editions by linking texts, images, and tunes into fluid, communal, and unfolding processes. Medieval manuscripts give us cause to consider the ways in which the book as a medium itself served to shape the content and experience of reading literary texts. No prerequisites, taught in English.