In Visible English, Wendy Scase views “graphic” features of medieval English texts--from runic inscriptions to fifteenth-century religious poetry--as technologies of identity formation. The contemporary pedagogy of Latin grammar (littera), Scase argues, is fundamental to understanding the decisions that English writers made about their vernacular products, and how such decisions constructed “boundaries between belonging and difference” (351). For example, continued use of <þ> over <th> (see chapter one) might participate in the formation of, and signal belonging to, a particular “community of practice” (15): those who also employ <þ> (and perhaps, do so to signal something about their Englishness). It is the pedagogy of littera, and the discourses of inclusion and exclusion that frame it, which “made graphic variation socially meaningful” (12) for medieval scribes.
The result of Scase’s research is a study of enormous range and scope. The diversity of sources makes this book relevant reading for scholars working across the medieval period and builds a picture of continuity (and change) in English writing practice that supports Scase’s resistance to “prevailing assumptions” (353) of growing English literacy after the Norman Conquest. Reading and writing in English, Scase argues, continued to be the occupation of experts: “English literacy was in practice as well as pedagogy a specialized subset of Latin literacy” (352). However, the investigation does not extend a diachronic approach. Chapters are arranged thematically, and so among the detailed case studies there are also gaps. Readers should not approach the book expecting to find a history of literacy training, although they will find a more comprehensive overview than any recently offered. Rather, Scase traces the influence and effect of Latin littera on a wide selection of materials, bringing them together as instantiations of a shared mode of learning.
Chapter one (29-00), “Graphs, Alphabets, and Scripts,” focuses on letters and alphabets as they appear on pre-Conquest monuments (in runic and Roman scripts), in the margins of texts, and in more formal primers. When scribes included English graphs (especially <þ>, <ð>, <ȝ>, <æ>, <ƿ>) among their letter forms, they engaged Latin lessons in the relation between the shape of letters (figurae), their names (nomina), and sounds (potestates) to navigate choices over placement and use. Such negotiations, both explicit and implicit, build communities of practice around the letters that “we use” (48) and their relation to sanctioned Latin practice and Biblical exempla. The chapter, like the whole, is replete with examples, each treated individually. (The book has a separate four-page manuscript index, with over 250 entries.) This approach makes it is easy for readers to find analysis of specific objects, but also means that chapters are dense and long, offering incremental adjustments and nuances that can confuse or misdirect. Scase recognizes the risks that comprehensiveness holds, and each chapter is divided into sections framed by a discursive introduction and conclusion to guide expectations and orient readers within the larger argument. Nevertheless, this reader sometimes found it hard to see the forest for the trees. The richness and extent of the material will certainly reward return visits.
Further chapters address other types of material evidence. Chapter two (101-155), “Graphic Models,” focuses on the use of pedagogical copying, a practice which Scase associates with repeated letterforms and verses in margins, names and ownership inscriptions, the copying of model sentences and phrases, and more formal writing exercises in educational texts. These short, often fragmentary, pieces, in which a student (formal or informal) learns the form, shape, and style of English handwriting by copying, constitute a mode of “literacy socialization” (121). Here, learners are inducted into particular identity groups--“communities of practice” (14)--through the reproduction of specific forms, ductus, or even types of text. Pattern books formalize some of these identity markers into marketable and transposable forms.
The third chapter (157-216), casts puzzles, riddles, codes, and logic games as forms of “Graphic Play,” which were used to cultivate literate ingroups. Such games were commonly used in Latin pedagogy, but the “particular challenges” (216) that accompanied transferal into English presented opportunities to establish hierarchies of knowledge and indexes of learning and attainment. For example, acrostic poems that conceal names, like one in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B.11.18 dedicated to St Katherine and built around the letters “KATIRIN,” challenged writers and readers to engage their knowledge of “how figurae and potestates relate, and how to assemble syllables and words” (192) to make sense of the poem and its encoded referents. In settings where the hidden name was more personal, it might only be understood by members of particular social groups, allowing for the production of “select literate identities” (201).
Chapter four (217-81), “Graphic Display,” analyses writing displayed in public and private spaces, which Scase approaches in terms of “graphic landscapes” (223). Scase takes her examples from pre-Conquest monumental inscription, late medieval Church graffiti, and words on display in gentry households. In such contexts, the practices adapted into English writing from literacy pedagogy were “amplified and modified by public display” (281). For example, elaborate murals on the wall of the Chapel of the Guild of the Holy Cross in Stratford-upon-Avon include a copy of the poem “Erthe upon erthe” (see 260-74), which riddles on the multivalency of the word “earth.” This poem is part of a tradition of variation, reworking, and word play that Scase associates with the “skills and knowledge” (263) of littera, but in semi-public display contexts like this one the work of identity formation becomes a collective experience.
The final chapter, on “Reprographics” (283-349), argues that the tools of literacy pedagogy outlined in this book “gave scribes of medieval English ways of developing and thinking about modes of copying and the special challenges of transmitting texts in the English language” (285): namely, its variable alphabets and orthography, range of verse forms, and irregular grammar. The chapter focuses on the practices of individual scribes, such as Orm, as well as variation across multiple witnesses of the Prick of Conscience and Nicholas Love’s Mirror. In particular, Scase offers an alternative consideration of the data collected by the Middle English Dialect Project, explaining variations in the copy text as primarily the consequence of negotiation between literacy training--and the working communities of practice that developed around it--and the text presented by the exemplar, rather than an indication of local morphology. “The clusters (of shared orthography) might represent the creation of a written language in community, and a community’s creation of its identity by means of written language, rather than being examples of a pre-existing written language in a given area” (355).
Scase raises critical questions about identity formation in English writing culture. The choices made by copyists and scribes can indicate “social belonging” (11), however, the identity categories involved might be transitory, temporary, or shifting. Who is part of the ingroup at any given time? And what does the group’s practice signal to or about its members? Beyond their source in the “‘us and them’ discourse” (12) of Latin grammar pedagogy, Scase makes little attempt to pin these variable identity categories down. As a result, identity is a slippery concept throughout the book: ever present, but never really defined, and used to cover a wide spectrum of experience. The term “graphic” is used with similar broad valence. Readers may expect a primary focus on layout, handwriting, and matters of format and form (all of which Scase touches upon), but orthography is often the main question at stake. The elision between the graphic and the orthographic can lead to misdirection. For instance, Scase’s intervention into discussions of (so-called) dialectal variation is a key aspect of the book’s conclusion, but the language of graphics gives no suggestion that it is part of the study from the outset.
The book is richly documented, and Scase makes interesting use of scholarship from historical linguistics and sociology to inform her thinking on medieval written culture. Brepols’s house style allows for footnotes, rather than endnotes, which Scase uses to good effect: I echo other reviewers in celebrating the utility of full refences and ample explanation of authorial decisions. But for a book with an extensive bibliography (364-94), there are some surprising omissions. Considerable ink has been spilled in recent decades, on questions of scribal identity and identification. Even if Scase did not want to enter into these questions herself--a decision I do not fault her for--her interest in questions of identity and communal identification suggest this work as relevant context for the study. For example, the term “community of practice” has a history in manuscript and book historical studies. High medieval monastic letter writers (Micol Long, “High Medieval Monasteries as Communities of Practice: Approaching Monastic Learning through Letters,” Journal of Religious History 41.1 (2017), 42-59), printers working in London between 1506 and 1570 (Hanna Rutkowska, “Typographical and graphomorphic features of five editions of the Kalendar of Shepherdes as elements of the early printers’ community of practice,” in Communities of Practice in the History of English, edited by Joanna Kopczyk and Andreas H. Jucker [Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2013], 123-49; Scase does cite Justyna Rogos and Jukka Tyrkkö in the same volume [17, n. 53 and 54]), fifteenth-century letter writers in the circle of the Stonor family (J. Camilo Conde-Silvestre, “Spelling Focusing and Proto-Standardisation in a Fifteenth-Century English Community of Practice,” Studia Neophilologica 91.1 [2019], 11-30), and London clerks working in the office of the Privy Seal (Sebastian Sobecki, “Communities of Practice: Thomas Hoccleve, London Clerks, and Literary Production,” Journal of the Early Book Society 24 [2021], 51-106) have all been characterized as “communities of practice” based on their shared graphic and orthographic usage. Other critical interventions in paleography and manuscript studies are similarly under-cited, leading, at best, to a sense of disassociation from the scholarly conversations that the book participates in.
As indicated above, this book makes several significant interventions, one more of which I want to highlight here. Historically, many of the material texts that Scase analyses have been classified as marginal to the traditions of English literature and writing more broadly. Texts like signatures and ownership marks, “pen trials,” graffito, and wall paintings have occupied the periphery of manuscript studies. They are often fragmentary, ephemeral, non-codiform, and/or later additions to the materials in which they survive. More recently, many of these genres have received reconsideration. However, Scase provides a framework that connects these disparate “micro-texts” (74) together: both to each other, as part of the dynamic “graphic landscape” (223) that could be derived from literacy training, and also to the wider--traditionally more highly prized--network of English literary, historical, and theological writing. By focusing on the Latin literacy training that prompted them, Scase shows that the many signatures of Dorothy Helbarton might be thought of as parallel with, rather than subordinate to, the copy of the Brut that they frame (San Marino, Huntington Library MS 136, see 131-33). Although Scase’s model, in her own words, “runs...counter to prevalent understandings of the extent to which literacy permeated medieval society” (353), her reframing of such materials provides a different lens on the vibrancy of the medieval English writing practice.