As an established field of linguistics, historical pragmatics aims to understand how people in the past used human language for expression, communication, and sociality. The default assumption in linguistics is that language is primarily speech. Literacy studies challenge that assumption. Likewise historical pragmatics. While general pragmatics has access to contemporary spontaneous speech, historical pragmatics has a problem in that researchers must rely on written materials. Historical pragmatics often uses the focus on conversation to explore not only usage at a particular time but the development of usage patterns over time and how particular language uses become conventional, standard, “frozen,” or abandoned. The masthead of the Journal of Historical Pragmatics states that the journal’s main emphasis is on “conversational principles, politeness strategies, or speech acts,” including terms of address (T/V), politeness, discourse markers, and other representations of speech in texts. Historical pragmatics mostly recapitulates these analytic questions and then adds the development over time of pragmatic features and communicative functions. Therefore, and rightly, corpora of recorded speech and written language are the primary databases for historical pragmatics. Given pragmatics’ general orientation to spoken language, linguists tend to gravitate to collections which include court transcripts, letters, dramatic and narrative texts (dialogue), sermons (monologue), and similar texts for approximations of how people used language and interacted in the past. The use of drama and narrative reflects historical pragmatics’ appreciation for fictional representations of speech as possible indicators of social practice or pragmatic consciousness.
Graphic Practices and Literacies in the History of English changes the focus of historical pragmatics in an important way. The twelve essays and afterword address written texts as visible language: letters, punctuation, page layout, and especially various nonverbal “graphic devices” such as tables, diagrams, and figures. The volume appears in the respected Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy series. It emerges from the University of Turku’s Early Modern Graphic Literacies research project, funded by the Academy of Finland (2021-2025). The Turku researchers and their collaborators ask new questions about the mise en page, literate practice, and written pragmatics in late medieval manuscripts and early printed books. Texts, not just written words, communicate. Taking their cue from earlier work by Malcolm Parkes, Jeremy Smith, Daniel Wakelin, Wendy Scase, and Tim Machan, the editors in their introductory overview define “graphic devices” as punctuation, diagrams, tables, drawn figures, charts, lists, braces (brackets), and page layout (color, size, style, space). These writing devices constitute writers’ and readers’ “graphic practices” for making meaning with texts in “literacy events.” As part of “graphic literacy,” graphic devices may be combined with verbal elements (multimodal writing) or may be used on their own to organize and convey information visually.
Rather than literature or theology, the text types discussed are not elite genres but more “everyday” modes of medieval writing: churchwarden account lists, medical recipes and diagrams, the widely translated John of Burgundy Plague Tract (1365), world chronologies, household devotional images, Playford’s The English Dancing Master (1651), English grammar books, and personal letters. These texts and genres and the graphic devices and practices they encode are situated initially by Colette Moore’s clear-eyed, theory-savvy discussion of how standardization and conventionalizing do not develop uniformly but vary according to information load-bearing features over time. Along the way, she offers a concise, elegant account of the development of the ampersand (&) from Latin script et. Jeremy Smith’s bookending short but capacious afterword helpfully reiterates the volume’s overriding question: “how meaning can be expressed not only through lexis and grammar but also...through features that have traditionally been seen as non-linguistic” (308-309).
Moore and Smith’s overriding questions give us a pathway for discussing the individual essays and their interrelations in terms of text types, pragmatic discourse, and graphic devices. The variety of genres and devices discussed in this important collection thickens our understanding of what medieval readers and writers were capable of or expected in a transitional literacy environment. The graphic devices most commonly discussed are tables, diagrams, punctuation, and page layout. Depending on the genre or historical context, tabula can be a list, index (alphabetical, keyword, topical), simple or complex diagram, or grid (“a Pater noster in a table ypeynted”).
Financial accounts aren’t usually read for their stylistics, but Kjetil Thengs gives a lively analysis of lists in “regular,” “mixed,” and “prose-style” formats in churchwarden account records. His point is not all acceptable medieval account records looked like conventional columnar tables. Local styles emerge. Drawing from the Corpus of Middle English Local Documents, Thengs finds some account records used mixed column layout with prose sections to report items and sums, while others used prose entirely. It is intriguing that people did not seem to be confused by the variability. Scribes also introduced new pragmatic markers in financial recordkeeping. Repurposing numerals, scribes sometimes used a 2-shaped symbol or an inverted 2 to highlight the following numerals in the records. In context, an initial 2 orinverted 2 is a pragmatic marker, not a number. “Every visual feature,” Thengs argues, “that enhances communication between the text and its reader might be considered a pragmatic marker” (60).
Thengs’ analysis of numerate characters’ multifunctionality connects with the three essays analysing written medical discourse. Reading handwritten medical recipe books (fifteenth to seventeenth centuries) in the Malaga Corpus of Early English Scientific Prose, Javier Calle-Martin and Jesús Romero-Barranco show, for example, how scribes came to use the medieval period (punctus, dot) to serve several semiotic functions, macrotextual as well as microtextual. Medical recipes listed ingredients and directions for mixing and application. Over time, scribes short on ideas or characters came to use the available punctus to mark “the beginning of a new section or sense unit” (125) more than individual sentences. In the recipe texts the punctus became a discourse marker. Comparing over one-hundred copies and translations of the John of Burgundy Plague Tract (c. 1365-post 1550), describing the causes, prevention, and treatment for the plague, Alpo Honkapohja finds successive manuscript versions increasingly used metatextual markup (table of contents, rubrication, decorated capitals, letter size, underlining, marginal headings, internal lists, etc.) to highlight information for readers. The “most significant development over time,” (91) he argues, was the shift from medieval rubrication to blank space on the page to mark metatextual divisions. These metatextual changes to the original text fundamentally altered the book’s page layout and therefore the way medical information was marked and disseminated. In their wide-ranging analysis of medical writing (1500-1700), Mari-Liisa Varila, Carla Suhr, and Jukka Tyrkkö show how use of graphic devices varied in different subgenres: textbooks, illness or treatment texts, midwifery, plague, recipes, health guides, and surgical treatises. Unsurprisingly, diagrams were used especially in textbooks and surgical treatises. It matters that doctors know the locations of organs, vessels, and bones when conducting exams or surgery. On the other hand, plague texts and texts devoted to specific diseases used few graphic devices (unlike in the John of Burgundy Plague Tract), although the authors don’t offer any explanation as to why that was so (243).
Two essays take up graphic devices and representations of time in historical texts. Wendy Scase explores the Latin and English versions of Higden’s Polychronicon, a world history account compiled from earlier chronicles (1385-1387). The text contains two prominent tables (lists as finding aids) of historical information and their location in the book. Noting that the Latin table was easily transferable to the English translation, Scase asks why Trevisa the translator added a second table in English. As an answer, she focuses on the English table’s (tabula specialis) indexing functions and its imagined readership. The special table, although dependent on the Latin tabula communis which listed events alphabetically and by book and chapter number, arranges events and historical figures under more conceptual key words (“bellum”) keyed to what Scase imagines to be English readers’ interests and local knowledge. In the English translation, both the common and special tables are organized alphabetically, but differently for different audiences (159, 167). The tables in question are just one kind of discourse marker in the text. Other important semiotic features of page layout in the Polychronicon manuscripts include headwords in the common table (list) marked with enlarged red majuscules (161); entries in the special table (list) are connected to English history or geography, deeds, and “marvels and wonders” with alternating red and blue paraphs. Different discourse markers for different audiences’ visual processing. Scase’s essay is the volume’s most complex analysis, if not the most wide-ranging or large corpus derived, but her close reading of graphic devices in the Polychronicon manuscripts teases out device and practice with different concretely imagined audiences, which is about all we can get without more direct readership evidence.
Liira, Peikola, and Kaartinen survey English printed chronologies, Creation to Last Judgment, published prior to 1650, and the range of graphic devices used in those texts. They argue that unlike linear representations of time, “chronological tables as index-like paratextual elements...allow the reader to navigate the prose discussion preceding them” (217). Readers process the verbal narrative and tables of various design together on the page to synchronize or “harmonise” different historical lines. The authors imagine that in Walter Ralegh’s The History of the World (1614) the appendix containing a 26-page table of events was designed to make the book’s wealth of information more accessible to “the vulgar,” (219) those less conversant with historical materials than more educated readers. By transposing the historical narrative into column/row tables, with marginal notes, lists, and diagrams, Ralegh’s table connects disparate historical events, figures, and sequences for the reading eyes in multitemporal ways which the linear narrative account can’t do.
The remaining essays in the volume cover other familiar genres: printed English grammars, dance manuals, personal letters, and a devotional page in a late fourteenth-century household compilation. Skaffari and Tyrkkö (whose name is all over the volume as co-editor and coauthor) compare seventeenth-century printed grammars of Latin and English. The grammars, they argue, typically use tables, lists, tree diagrams, and brackets (braces) to organize grammatical and semantic information, primarily to visually explain nouns, verbs, and pronouns (303). Unlike medieval manuscript grammars, early printed grammars (I think of Comenius’s Latin pedagogical texts) used more illustrations to teach vocabulary and more script/font variations to highlight grammatical categories. Effectively, the page becomes the principal place of language learning. Readers will recognize that the early modern grammars’ page layouts and graphic devices have become standard for representing linguistic evidence to the present day. More could have been done to discern how the English grammar books’ layouts and graphic devices compare with those used in the many seventeenth-century grammars of indigenous languages in the Americas.
Two essays discuss what the authors describe as innovative tables on the page. Salmi analyses the development of tables in succeeding editions of Playford’s influential The English Dancing Master. Framing the text as “technical writing,” she argues that Playford created a new kind of table by directly linking on the page his verbal description of dance steps with the tunes’ musical notation and small illustrations of the dancers’ initial positions. Oddly, the format was abandoned by the end of the seventeenth century. Salmi speculates that was because the tabular linking of musical notation and verbal description was no longer compatible with newer conventions of printed page layout (273-275).
Timofeeva’s classy discussion of the Pater Noster table in the famous Vernon MS (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Eng. Poet. a. 1, f. 231v, c. 1390) becomes a two-pronged analysis of the innovative visual tabular format on the page and the development of late Middle English lexical forms. She explores the visual organization of the “table ypeynted,” with its rows, columns, rondels, and Latin and English phrases and then uses those insights to discern late Middle English neologisms and binomials and how some of those binomial phrases (e.g., “loue & charite” with obligatory lexemes and order) were becoming accepted idioms. Timofeeva reads the Pater Noster table on the page as similar to the chessboard and explores how that image was part of allegories of virtues and vices. Taking flight, she examines the language of the virtues and vices in the table and compares the Middle English collocations (e.g., “wrathe & angur”) with usage in the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse and Early English Books Online. Some phrases reflect emerging English forms, others suggest unique innovations, and still others are “frozen” pairs with irreversible word order, that is, functional English binomials and not just glosses on the table’s Latin vocabulary. Timofeeva’s essay is the one most directly involved with the history of English language.
Tieken-Boon Van Ostade compares the grammarian Robert Lowth’s (d. 1787) handwritten correspondence to his wife and his “rival” William Warburton (d. 1779). The Warburton exchanges were later printed as a separate volume. Tieken-Boon Van Ostade’s essay takes a different approach to personal letters than does most historical pragmatics analysis. Rather than using personal letters to uncover approximations to speech or conversation, Tieken-Boon Van Ostade focuses on letters’ writtenness and the writers’ uses of graphic devices, specifically, punctuation on the page: ampersand, abbreviation stop (’), superscription, and hyphen. After an unnecessarily lengthy but still pragmatically helpful reconstruction of the acrimonious dispute between Lowth and Warburton that sparked their correspondence, Tieken-Boon Van Ostade reads their letters against letter writing handbooks of the time. Working between prescription and practice, she discusses the degree to which the three graphic devices she focuses on constitute “graphic informality,” personal style, innovation in spelling and page design, or simply pragmatic utterance. Like Thengs on account records, she teases out personal styles and discourse stances from the correspondence archive, showing for example that while contemporary letter writing handbooks regarded abbreviated personal titles (Dr) and contractions (wou’d) as impolite, Lowth often used such forms consciously in draft letters and in those addressed to his favoured recipients (not Warburton). Tieken-Boon Van Ostade’s analysis of abbreviations raises some pragmatic questions about the implications of editors “expanding manuscript abbreviations” in later printed editions.
Most of the essays confirm the importance of corpora and corpora interpretation for any diachronic, historicized research on language or literate development, whether with small archives (Lowth/Warburton) or large digitized databases (Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse, Corpus of Middle English Local Documents, Early English Books Online, Early Modern English Medical Texts, The Malaga Corpus of Early English Scientific Prose, etc.). Collectively, the essays also raise important questions about some givens of medieval and to an extent early modern literacy studies. Images, diagrams, and tables were important elements of sophisticated textuality, not just accommodations for the “illiterate.” Manuscript punctuation served a variety of pragmatic functions. Tables and diagrams suggest that texts on important topics (medicine, plague, financial accounts, history, moral theology) were not imagined simply to be read aloud. The authors’ attention to graphic devices opens onto a broader multifunctional account of the semiotics of medieval literacy. The authors use effective close reading and holistic textual and metatextual reading and analysis. Most carefully explain their methods and corpora, which might put off some readers, but it’s important to understand how an analysis emerges from the database. The methodology narratives also suggest ways others can use historical pragmatics frameworks to explore other medieval texts. Collectively, the authors articulate an interdisciplinary book history in relation to the page and the audience. If pragmatics is concerned with how discourse establishes stance and aspect and generates, organizes, and disseminates information, we need to keep in mind that information is never raw. It is designed, shaped, spoken for in verbal and nonverbal ways. With clarity and readable complexity, Graphic Practices and Literacies in the History of English makes an important contribution to medieval literacy studies and the semiotics of literacy by showing us multiple ways in which late medieval and early modern texts from across the social spectrum conceived and organized ideas of time, the body, linguistic form, artistic movement, and spiritual understanding through visual design and graphic devices entangled with verbal discourse.