Abstract
Anchored to a discussion of urban literacy with the new volumes edited by Marco Mostert and Anna Adamska, this essay will review the recent historiography of medieval urban studies. In general, the state of the field has seen historians using a multi-pronged approach to their sources but the cultural trend that has affected medieval studies has also influenced urban history. One can cite for example the lovely essay by Kathryn Reyerson, “Urban Sensations: The Medieval City Imagined,” in the recent Cultural History of the Senses in the Middle Ages, which focuses on the sounds, smells, sights, feels, or “sensory experience” of medieval urban dwellers. 1 Closer to modern day concerns, the 2013 collection of essays edited by Cédric Quertier and his colleagues highlights the various strategies of integration used by recently arrived immigrants and how immigration became organic to the urban fabric during the Middle Ages. 2 In addition to cultural interpretation, environmental analysis has also proven to be a stimulating approach. As Roberta J. Magnusson argues, sources are available to construct a multidisciplinary approach to the environmental history of medieval cities, and to debunk the old myth that filth and unsanitary conditions prevailed. 3 She lists the scores of scholars who have recently oriented their research toward medieval ecology, human footprint, sanitation, and climatic forces, and the rapport between medieval city dwellers and their environment. This environmental approach segues conveniently to the study of public health, a topic broached by not only one of the books under review but also articles like “Healthscaping a medieval city: Lucca’s Curia viarum and the future of public health history,” where G. Geltner also demonstrates that the late Middle Ages indeed was concerned with hygiene and public health. 4
Carole Rawcliffe’s Urban Bodies aims above all at debunking the Monty Pythonesque impression of medieval towns as cesspools and of medieval people as functioning lepers, of the so-called golden age of bacteria (pp. 8, 66). Each of her six chapters opens with a less than savory quote (the introduction starts with “Of hygiene in the whole of this period there is little that can be said” [p. 1]) and proceeds to expose the erroneousness of the citation. She concludes that the battle against debility and disease was a matter of pressing concern to the people whose struggles are documented here; and although their beliefs and strategies can often seem alien to our own, they are no less deserving of study and respect. (p. 359)
The book is rich in its multidisciplinary range, the span of research astounding; it is beautifully written and documented, and will quickly become the benchmark of future studies. Her appendix of “National and Urban Epidemics, 1257-1530” represents an enormous effort at centralizing data (like the rest of her book) and I certainly wish that such data could be produced for the rest of Europe (maybe using crowdsourcing?). Rawcliffe cites scores of documents, principally from the cities and towns of England, that reveal familiar concerns. Medievalists have all read something about medieval sanitary regulations or testamentary donations for new hospitals in Italy, Germany, or Hungary. Her methodology allows medieval historians to make sense of, organize, and reference medieval efforts at public health in England but most of all she sets the stage for studies of the rest of Europe.
One of the basic premises of Rawcliffe’s study is the association in the medieval mind of the urban body politic with the physical body, of the symbolic and the real, the sacred and the profane. Thus, the “intimate connection between spiritual and physical health” (p. 8) meant that moral and corporal pollution needed to be simultaneously expelled from the urban body to reestablish lost balance. This explains why often, in times of crisis, lepers, Jews, or prostitutes were banished from cities just as rubbish was carted away to cesspits. All were different means to the same end: sanitation. Emphasizing efforts that followed the fourteenth-century epidemics, Rawcliffe details the various means employed by medieval secular authorities to cleanse their towns. The list is long and exhaustive: health and sanitary regulations that controlled trash disposal and polluting trades (butchers, furriers, dyers, smelting, and so on), cleansing and paving of streets, dredging rivers, the installation and maintenance of water pipes and sewers, the provisioning of quality food and water, medical care and hospitals, and the maintenance of almshouses and various institutions of support. The many regulations that controlled waste removal and polluting activities (which England preferred to the quarantines and limitations on travel chosen by the rest of Europe) all point to a concerted effort at maintaining hygiene and quality of life. Medieval epidemiology blamed miasma or bad air for diseases; thus, royalty and urban elites decreed legislation that controlled its emanation, based on their understanding of the relationship between cause and effect. We may smile at the futility of their efforts but we cannot ignore medieval attempts at controlling diseases. They may not have known bacteria but they still could reason. This book resonates even more in the aftermath of the Ebola epidemic that shows the limitations of our modern medical technology. Rawcliffe’s work is groundbreaking and will inform medieval environmental and medical studies for years to come.
In many instances, Carole Rawcliffe refers to the level of urban literacy required by medieval urban administrators and medical practitioners. The collection edited by Marco Mostert and Anna Adamska puts the focus on this urban literacy, which is often taken for granted. Their project was born from the encounter between scholars of central and western Europe, giving both volumes an international character. The authors widely define a European continent that ranges from Scandinavia to the Low Countries and Spain in the West to Hungary and Poland in the East. In general, the articles emphasize central over western Europe. While the wide range of local studies is an asset—it allows specialists the opportunity to compare data—it is unfortunate that few articles tackle the entire historiography of their topics. Each article remains attached to the framework of its own country’s historiography and rarely reaches outside.
This insular approach reduces the scope of what could have been an extremely valuable collection. The historiography of literacy within Romanized western Europe should inform the discussion of non-Romanized areas and vice versa. Still, central and western European scholars will be able to reach their own conclusions. While the volumes attempt to shatter the traditional geographical boundaries of “western” Europe, they also enlarge the traditional medieval periodicization with many articles reaching into the sixteenth century. The argument is made early on that the history of urban literacy leads to a reconsideration of the traditional medieval chronology.
The two volumes are divided between a study of the pragmatic use of writing and the secular professionals that supported literacy within an urban institutional framework in the first volume, and a discussion of writing and literacy within a broader urban environment in the second: who wrote and read? How were they trained? The first volume, focused on urban administration, addresses the varieties of administrative literacy; archives as places of power, memory, and secrets; and the literate urban elite from notaries to schoolboys and their teachers. The second volume, focused on the written word, offers a variety of approaches with sections dedicated to multi-ethnic and multilingual alphabets and languages; the production of books; and individual writings such as testaments, memorial practices, and diaries. It ends with a discussion of writing, communication, and ritual. This setting takes literacy out of the traditional diplomatic, religious, and institutional template to emphasize a cultural approach. It asks what the study of medieval literacy can tell us about the way medieval urban dwellers thought. Each volume opens with a set of maps and ends with a detailed index.
The scholars involved in the various workshops that gave us both of these volumes attempted (with difficulty) to define urban literacy. They concluded that it requires the use of writing as a natural, trusted medium for the memorialization of urban matters combined with an exponential growth in literacy rates and in the social standing of literate individuals. The working definition offered by Sarah Rees Jones works best: By civic literacy I mean the capacity of urban governments to generate both records and archives as part of their processes of self-government, and also the uses of that writing in creating a sense of identity and purpose within a civic community. (I, p. 220)
If the first volume rarely addresses non-urban producers of literacy, the many clerical and monastic institutions, almshouses, guilds and confraternities, and individual authors and professionals who also generated written records, the second volume does. It would take too much space to address each specific article (thirty-four in total) in detail; rather, I will focus on the wider methodological and historical implications of the questions raised by the contributors, highlighting how specific research can enrich the historiography of medieval towns. Interested readers will find abundant information on the techniques, institutions, and persons that promoted and used written literacy. Both volumes are rich and I congratulate the editors for putting together such an innovative collection.
The sixteen articles in the first volume emphasize institutional or civic literacy, examining the dialectic between municipal production, use, and preservation of written documents, and communal self-governance. Medieval communes first engendered the production of records and their preservation. Authors define these activities as “pragmatic,” “practical,” “institutional,” or “civic” literacy. Such a definition leads automatically to a working methodology that associates literacy with the exercise of power. Towns created chanceries, hired notaries, used seals that identified them jurisdictionally, issued laws, and kept financial records to consolidate their powers. They selected what to preserve and archive, and in the process they deselected, eliminated, and sometimes falsified what they deemed unnecessary (or dangerous; see the second section of volume 1, “Urban Archives: Places of Power, Memory, and Secrets”). Thus, we could almost identify something akin to positive and negative literacy. Towns used the trusted medium that was writing to construct their sovereignty, never hesitating to alter that same medium if necessity arose. In sum, literacy defined and served authority.
In many instances, important documents were isolated and protected just as, I would argue, sacred images were. Archived and hidden most of the time, both words and images were displayed publicly only for ceremonial and symbolic purposes. If images found their sanctuary in churches and cathedrals, documents were stored away in archives. Again a relation of power underscored the preservation and visibility of urban documentation. Communal authorities controlled who had access to documentation just as religious authorities controlled who had access to the sacred. As such they also controlled and regulated urban memory. Still, Christoph Friedrich Weber argues that “true secrets mainly stayed in the realm of orality and therefore were not archived” (I, p. 248). Thus, we face a conundrum. Even though literacy was advertised as a trusted medium, orality remained the more trusted form of communication for confidential information!
The issue of memory and communication is better addressed in the second volume, especially in its discussion of urban ritual. In this case, orality and visual messages competed with, or added to, the word. The editors clarify that “the term urban ritual usually refers to recurrent collective activities in which sacral and secular ‘civic’ elements were closely associated with each other.” (II, p. 14. I am confounded that the work of Richard C. Trexler on Florence is never mentioned since the definition provided is basically his!) Here we can see that even if the word was part of ritual, not all ritual was scripted. Audiences understood the meaning of sound, gesture, and the positioning of things and people, and gave meaning to what they saw or heard, without reading about it. A fitting example would be Carole Rawcliffe’s discussion of a reprimanded butcher ordered to parade around London with “maggot ridden meat attached to his person” and a placard stating, “For puttying to sale of mesell and stynkyn bacon” (Rawcliffe, p. 235). People did not need to know how to read to get the meaning. Furthermore, if the institutional tone of the first volume seems to separate secular from religious literacy, the second volume demonstrates how interrelated they were. Civic ritual often took religious forms, processions for example. Literacy led to something akin to urban piety where civic entities sacralized their past, or built their identity using words often written “in the style” of clerics, if not by a clerical staff.
The discussion of testaments similarly bridges both forms of literacy (secular and religious) as it demonstrates what the editors label the “naturalization” of writing into households, that is, the translation of pragmatic literacy into individual practice (see more specifically the third section of volume 2, “Individuals Resorting to Writing: Memoria and Business”). As the editors explain, testaments reveal a “tension between spoken and written law, between Latin and vernacular languages, and finally between a formulaic text and the individuality of the author” (II, p. 9). This unresolved tension can illuminate thought processes by revealing what was taken from each mode.
Historians also need to address the diverse forms of urban literacy. Many of the articles in the present volumes assume that writing was done on parchment, vellum, or paper, at least in western Europe. But, as some of the articles dealing with the European “margins” prove, urban writing took many forms, with inscriptions on stones, metal, wood, or marble, to name a few (for more details, see the first section of volume 1, “Varieties of Administrative Urban Literacy,” and the fourth section of volume 2, “Reading, Seeing, Hearing, The Place of Writing in the System of Urban Communication”). Thus, western methodology would benefit from checking non-traditional avenues. A comparison between traditional medieval textual evidence and non-traditional means may bring us to new paradigms. Was there a rivalry between paper/parchment/textual literacy attached to the elite and a more archaic folk medium attached to alternative supports like stone or wood engraving/marking, or graffiti?
This duality between lower and higher literacy may also appear in a discussion of the topography of urban literacy. If we look at the presence and usage of written words within urban space, we often assume that first, they marked power and authority, and second, they were observable in locales with high visibility, that is, town centers, town halls, castles, and market places. These were spaces attached to the urban patriciate, high-value real estate and occupations. Thus, the topography of literacy followed the boundaries of wealth. Still, as I have demonstrated for Avignon, this space was malleable and changeable, with inscriptions, declarations, and ritual sometimes displaced to marginal spaces. 5 Thus, an analysis of the topography of literacy leads (again) to an analysis of the topography of power.
As urban governments navigated between transparency and secrecy, they dealt with the management of documents. And here, as is pointed out by many of the volume’s contributors, lies a new field for urban historians: how did the Middle Ages keep, preserve, and organize its records? Can historians get at what was discarded through what was conserved? Towns preserved their own “books of remembrance,” civil, criminal, and sometimes ecclesiastical court cases, legal records attached to the towns’ administration, statutes and other texts that regulated building, trade, industrial production, security, and environmental preservation, accounting and tax registers, employment registers, official letters, privileges and charters, deeds, property transactions, pious donations, wills, and codicils. This massive output should not delude us into believing that we know it all. Maybe getting at what is missing through inferences from what we have will tell us as much about a society as digging in archives.
Incidentally, as Hannes Obermair highlights in his discussion of Bolzano in southern Tyrol, there is a direct correlation between a city’s population density and its documentary output (I, p. 56). Thus, urban literacy should also be linked to demography. In a similar effort at standardizing methodology, Agnieszka Bartoszewicz calls for a geographical perspective on literacy (I, p. 180). Based on her Polish example, literacy rates grew with proximity to a main center of literacy production. Similarly, the second volume demonstrates that the efforts to rationalize public recordkeeping seeped into the private world, and individual literacy grew exponentially with institutional literacy (see the third part of volume 2 on Memoria and Business). Institutional production also drove the production of books. A highly technical discussion of book production leads Eltjo Buringh to conclude that the production of books moved to cities during the central Middle Ages, and he estimates that Paris produced some 1,500 books a year during the thirteenth century. Thus, a somewhat centralized country like France, with a robust institutional literacy, produced a total of five hundred ten thousand manuscripts for the entire thirteenth century with Paris manufacturing one hundred fifty thousand of them (see II, p. 173).
Both volumes lay emphasis on languages used by both urban chanceries and private citizens, focusing on the mixed usage of intellectual idioms such as Latin and the innumerable vernaculars and alphabets in use at the time (see, for example, the first section of volume 1, “Varieties of Administrative Urban Literacy,” and the first section of volume 2, “Alphabets and Languages: Multi-Ethnic and Multilingual Urban Literacies”). One characteristic stands out from many of the readings: the simultaneous use of many languages, marking the Middle Ages as truly multilingual. Many authors implicitly or explicitly discuss the interaction between orality and literacy without taking linguistic multiplicity into consideration. Some languages represented power and authority; others did not. It also seems that if population density relates directly to literacy rates, so should linguistic plurality. The more people, the more languages? So maybe contextualizing literacy within communication systems (and power relations) would facilitate our understanding of medieval individuals’ literacy.
Another characteristic attached to the growth in record production is the correlative growth of the literate professions. This growth drove increases in schooling to satisfy demand. Section 3 of the first volume, “Litterati in Town: Notaries, Schoolmasters, and Schoolboys,” focuses on urban personnel: the various scribes, clerks, notaries, and keepers of archives. Still the question remains as to who precisely used the written word. Did the growth of legal literacy (and maybe the legal Romanization of Europe after the twelfth century) influence the reliance on writing? Most European towns had guilds and confraternities, for example, that relied on written statutes. Does the existence of such statutes mean that every member could read them? Or are we still dealing with a double model of orality/literacy where a few literate individuals read out loud to the illiterate majority? The day-to-day records of confraternities, for example, may point to this hybrid model.
With such a wide sample of data, it would have been helpful for the editors to itemize the various factors that led to the development and codification of urban laws. Jeroen Benders points to synchronicity in the codification of Dutch municipal laws in the early fourteenth century. Was the movement Europe-wide? Or did certain basic requirements need to be in place before the development of urban laws, such as political centralization, freedom from lordship, and a certain threshold of public income? Scholars of central Europe seem to attach urban development to literacy, but was there a rural literacy boom? The volumes’ editors raise the question at the conclusion of the second volume. It seems that we have connected writing to cities because of their complex social and industrial organization. But medieval Europe was far more rural than urban. Have we failed to look for rural literacy? As the editors suggest, new criteria to define literacy and illiteracy can expand our knowledge of “literacy,” in whatever form it existed.
David S. Bachrach’s edited translation of several medieval chronicles of the German city of Worms allows us to put into practice the various methodologies set forth in the previously discussed volumes, and enables scholars and students alike to practice history. The four chronicles, the Vita Burchardi, Vita Sancti Eckenberti, Chronicon Wormatiense, and Annales Wormatienses, epitomize many of the conclusions presented in the Mostert and Adamska volumes. Here we see the construction of civic identity and memory, and the dependence on the written word for justifying rights and authority, at work in one of the main cities of the Rhineland. These lives will interest scholars of urban medieval Europe but they also inform us about literacy. In the first decades of the eleventh century, Bishop Burchard I persuaded his sister Mathilda to head the convent of Nonnenmünster. The author of the chronicle describes a woman gifted in the arts of “women’s work” (that is, textiles and women’s clothing) who also knew how to read the Psalter. Once Burchard convinced his sister to accept her new office, “he immediately ordered her to read canon law, the Computus, the lives of the fathers, the Dialogue, and other books that pertained to this life” (p. 45). This is evidence enough that a high level of literacy and numeracy was not solely reserved to men. Burchard also insisted that “each of the young men [at Worms’ cathedral school] should engage in oral or written study every day according to the degree of their ability” (p. 50). Similarly, the life of Eckenbert shows a distinct respect for education and literacy. His tutor, a certain Stephen, argued that “knowledge of literature would not be in any way harmful for one intending to have a military career and would be very useful to one planning to leave the secular world” (p. 62). It seems that this Stephen also educated the sons of the nobility with “examples both of honesty and of court administration” (p. 62). Thus, literacy was wholly integrated into the learning apparatus of a thriving medieval town at both the ecclesiastical and secular levels. All in all the volumes under review have largely attempted demystifying the image of a dark, ignorant, filthy, and illiterate Middle Ages. Interestingly enough, they all used the city as their paradigm.