Reading Images and Texts: Medieval Images and Texts as Forms of Communication: Papers from the Third Utrecht Symposium on Medieval Literacy

by Mariëlle Hageman (Editor), Marco Mostert (Editor)

How did people know what they knew, and learn what they learned? As Derek Pearsall's introduction makes clear this is the primary focus of this collection of essays published in celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the foundation of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York. The learning materials included range from grammar books to mystery plays, and from court records to monastic chronicles, as well as liturgical and devotional texts. But the essays are not only concerned with texts alone, but with the broader and often fluid social environments in which learning took place. Many of the papers therefore question the validity of some distinctions habitually used in the discussion of medieval culture, such as the opposition between orality and literacy, between Latin and the vernacular or between secular and religious.

546 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2003

About the author

Hageman's PhD thesis was "The Emperor's Clothes: Rituals of the Carolingian and Ottonian Rulers in Word and Image", later published in a revised form as De Kleren van de Keizer.