A Companion to the History of the Book (85 page)

If “self-culture” and, somewhat later, “self-expression” became bywords of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literate culture, early schoolbooks – for example, trecento Florentine grammars (Gehl 1993), Renaissance handwriting manuals (Goldberg 1990), Anglo-American alphabet books (Crain 2000), and nineteenth-century rhetorics (Carr et al. 2005) – manifest a quite different ideology of literacy. Such texts reveal methods of training as well as a given culture’s aspirations for reading and writing pedagogy. For Erasmus and other Renaissance pedagogues, the “human is made human through the letter” (Goldberg 1990: 175). The notion that alphabetic learning generally distinguishes the human extends through the Enlightenment, lending itself to colonial and imperial programs as well as to a still influential teleological model of literacy. Walter Mignolo’s study of the “darker side of the Renaissance” finds in Spanish grammars a dual emphasis on “the unification of Castile and the expansion of the Spanish Empire”: in Elio Antonio de Nebrija’s important 1492 grammar “the letter was defined as the instrument to tame the voice,” a theory with wide-ranging consequences for the methods of Spanish colonization (Mignolo 1995: 41, 43). Mignolo describes the resulting differences between Mexica (i.e., Aztec) and Spanish modes of communication in the sixteenth century, which

had not only different material ways of encoding and transmitting knowledge but also . . . different concepts of the activities of reading and writing. Mexicas put the accent on the act of observing and telling out loud the stories of what they were looking at (movements of the sky or the black and the red ink). Spaniards stressed reading the word rather than reading the world, and made the letter the anchor of knowledge and understanding. Contemplating and recounting what was on the painting
(amoxtli)
were not enough, from the point of view of the Spaniard’s concept of reading, writing, and the book, to ensure correct and reliable knowledge. (Mignolo 1995: 105–6)

Over time, in common with many colonized groups, Amerindians adapted European writing systems and genres “in order to sustain their own cultural traditions” (Mignolo 1995: 204). Still, literacy is so often implicated as a set of disciplining and culturally destructive technologies, one might wonder why the subaltern ever submits to it except under duress. The Nigerian anthropologist John Ogbu suggests one answer: “If we don’t know what you know, when we get up, our things will be gone” (quoted in Keller-Cohen 1994: 359).

The Poetics of Literacy

The French anthropologist and surrealist Michel Leiris described in his memoir his sensuous attachment to alphabetic letters: “If I think that when I say
alphabet
I am eating language, the illusion takes place by way of the book, this book whose materiality remains a ballast when I join together the primary elements of writing, which themselves lead me to the tongue, of which they are the algebraic summary or the broken reflection” (Leiris 1991: 32). The nostalgia-steeped, highly polished memories of a French intellectual; the diary of a working-class reader; a seventeenth-century Mas-sachusett Indian’s graffiti in the margins of his Bible – these are the kinds of sources that uncover the experience of and the significance of (for lack of a better word) literacy These documents are far from transparent: scholars must appreciate that they are crafted not only by individuals but by generic conventions as well as by cultural, social, and historical contingencies. Even marginalia is a genre, with formal constraints.

Literacy has often been treated as a marker and a maker of cultural, social, and national histories; it has also been seen as part and parcel of modern constructions of personality, subjectivity, and interiority. As an object of study, then, literacy is a rich site for exploring the hinge between and the interpénétration of the public and the private, the social and the personal, the large and national or global, on the one hand, and the small and local, on the other. But the oppositions embedded in “literacy,” rooted in its nineteenth-century origins – the ways in which it evokes the somewhat evacuated categories of “illiteracy” or “orality” – pose an ongoing challenge to the historian.

References and Further Reading

Altick, Richard (1998)
The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800– 1900,
2nd edn. Columbus: Ohio State University Press (originally published 1957).

Augst, Thomas (2003)
The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-century America.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Baldwin, T. W. (1944)
William
Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Baumann, Gerd (ed.) (1986)
The Written Word: Literacy in Transition.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Boyarín, Jonathan (ed.) (1993)
The Ethnography of Reading.
Berkeley: University of California Press.

Carr, Jean Ferguson, Carr, Stephen L., and Schultz, Lucille M. (2005)
Archives of Instruction: Nineteenth-century Rhetorics, Readers, and Composition Books in the United States.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Cavallo, Guglielmo and Chartier, Roger (eds.) (1999)
A History of Reading in the West,
trans. Lydia Cochrane. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Cipolla, Carlo M. (1969)
Literacy and Development in the West.
Harmondsworth: Pelican.

Clanchy, M. T. (1993)
From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307.
Oxford: Blackwell.

Cook-Gumperz, Jenny (ed.) (1986)
The Social Construction of Literacy.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cornelius, Janet Duitsman (1991)
“When I Can Read my Title Clear”: Literacy, Slavery, and Religion in the Antebellum South.
Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.

Cram, Patricia (2000)
The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Cressy, David (1980)
Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cushman, Ellen, Kintgen, Eugene R., Kroll, Barry M., and Rose, Mike (eds.) (2001)
Literacy: A Critical Sourcebook.
New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s.

Editorial (1883) “First Fruits of Butler’s Inaugural.”
Journal of Education,
17 (4): 54.

Ferguson, Margaret W. (2003)
Dido’s Daughters: Literacy, Gender and Empire in Early Modern England and France.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Furet, François and Ozouf, Jacques (1982)
Reading and Writing: Literacy in France from Calvin to Jules Ferry.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gehl, Paul (1993)
A Moral Art: Grammar, Society and Culture in Trecento Florence.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Goldberg, Jonathan (1990)
Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Goody, Jack and Watt, Ian (1968) “The Consequences of Literacy.” In Jack Goody (ed.),
Literacy in Traditional Societies,
pp. 27–68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Graff, Harvey (1987)
The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Culture and Society.
Bloomington: University of Indiana Press.

Guillory, John (1993)
Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hall, David D. (1996) “The Uses of Literacy in New England, 1600–1850.” In
Cultures of Print: Essays in the History of the Book,
pp. 36–78. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Harris, William V. (1989)
Ancient Literacy.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Harrop, Sylvia (1983) “Literacy and Educational Attitudes as Factors in the Industrialization of North-East Cheshire, 1760-1830.” In W. B. Stephens (ed.),
Studies in the History of Literacy: England and North America.
Educational Administration and History Monograph, no. 13, pp. 37–53. Leeds: Museum of the History of Education.

Hoggart, Richard (1957)
The Uses of Literacy.
London: Chatto and Windus.

Justice, Steven (1994)
Writing and Rebellion : England in 1381.
Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kaestle, Carl F. (1991)
Literacy in the United States: Readers and Reading since 1880.
New Haven: Yale University Press.

Keller-Cohen, Deborah (ed.) (1994)
Literacy: Interdisciplinary Conversations.
Cresskill: Hampton.

Leiris, Michel (1991)
Rules of the Game I: Scratches,
trans. Lydia Davis. New York: Paragon.

McHenry, Elizabeth (2003)
Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies.
Durham: Duke University Press.

Mignolo, Walter D. (1995)
The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Monaghan, E. Jennifer (2005)
Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

National Center for Education Statistics (available at
http:
//aces.
ed.gov/naal/defining/defining.asp
; accessed May 14, 2005).

Nelson Salvino, Dana (1989) “The Word in Black and White: Ideologies of Race and Literacy in Antebellum America.” In Cathy Davidson (ed.),
Reading in America: hiterature and Social History,
pp. 140–56. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Ong, Walter (1982)
Orality and Literacy: The Tech-nologizing of the Word.
London: Methuen.

Pattison, Robert (1982)
On Literacy.
New York: Oxford University Press.

Price, Leah (2004) “Reading: The State of the Discipline.”
Book History,
7: 303–20.

Richardson, Alan (1994)
Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice 1780– 1832.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rose, Jonathan (2001)
The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes.
New Haven: Yale University Press.

Siegert, Bernhard (1999)
Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System,
trans. Kevin Repp. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Spufford, Margaret (1981)
Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth-century England.
Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Stone, Lawrence (1969) “Literacy and Education in England 1640-1900.”
Past and Present,
42: 69-139-

Street, Brian (1984)
Literacy in Theory and Practice.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Thompson, E. P. (1963)
The Making of the English Working Class.
London: Victor Gollancz.

Vincent, David (1989)
Literacy and Popular Culture: England 1750–1914-
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

— (2000)
Rise of Mass Literacy: Readers and Writing in Modern Europe.
Cambridge: Polity.

Warner, Michael (1990)
The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-century America.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Williams, Raymond (1985)
Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society,
rev. edn. New York: Oxford University Press.

Wyss, Hilary (2000)
Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity and Native Community in Early America.
Boston: University of Massachusetts Press.

35

Some Non-textual Uses of Books

Rowan Watson

Anecdotes about the uses of books as physical objects abound. The literary historian knows that Samuel Johnson nearly brained the bookseller Thomas Osborne with a hefty tome during work on the catalogue of the Harleian collection (1743–5). Musicians know that John Cage’s artwork,
Wild Edible Papers
(1990), made on the same principles as he composed his music, was his response to seeing the poor of Santiago, Chile, boiling books and newsprint to make the pulp edible. Anthropologists may be aware that a sage in Sub-Saharan Africa of the 1950s used a printed school book as part of equipment for divination. Students of Tibet learn that books were paraded unopened and used to line the tomb of a grand lama. What can stories such as these, and representations of books, tell us about the aura that surrounds books at any time? What are the messages of books when they appear in the visual iconography of any period?

Egypt, Greece, and Rome

Instances where books were paraded as marks of conspicuous consumption rather than objects transmitting texts go back very far. The Book of the Dead was a collection of charms and spells needed for protection in the afterlife: left in an Egyptian tomb, its physical characteristics were no less effective than the quality and quantity of tomb furnishings to mark the status of the departed. Produced according to established formulae after c.1500 bc, ready-made versions were made speculatively, with empty spaces for the insertion of names. When one encounters a late version, of the Ptolemaic period (200
BC
), written in hieratic script rather than the more imposing hieroglyphs, it seems that we are seeing a work at the bottom end of the market, the upper reaches of which were dominated by works signifying social distinction.

Scrolls were abundant in classical Greece in the fifth century bc, but possession of them had no implications about status. Philosophers and scholars were represented with the beards of sages; scrolls denoted a trade or profession. Socrates famously mistrusted the written word as a basis for education. In Roman statuary, the holding of a scroll might represent literary interests, though portraits of retired soldiers with such scrolls may signify no more than integration into civilian life. Representations of poets before the late antique period usually show inspiration as coming from a Muse rather than a book. But by the first century, Seneca (d.65) could complain that owners accumulated scrolls with decorated knobs and colored labels for display rather than use (Kenyon 1951). A lady of the second century from Fayûm in Egypt was buried with an illustrated roll of the second book of the Iliad beneath her head, perhaps to relay to the afterworld an element of what gave her distinction in this. In the third century, a scroll with a scriptural text was carefully built into a wall in a Greco-Roman house in Egypt, perhaps an early example of a book as a talisman to protect the house at a time of persecution: the learned John Chrysostom (347–407) felt that the presence of the Scriptures in a house would save it from harm. There may have been a parallel with Jewish custom, which dictated the hanging of texts on the doorpost (the
Mezuza)
to allow those passing through to say a prayer.

The Ritual Function of Christian Bibles and Service Books

As objects of awe, the book joined the cross and crucifix as a major element in the iconography of the Roman empire’s new state religion after the conversion of the emperor Constantine. The image of the codex was used to represent the word of God, the source of salvation for the individual and for society as a whole, for which the Church was uniquely responsible. Early Christian art privileged images of Christ as ruler holding a book. In the Greek regions, images of Christ Pantocrator clasping a codex dominated the east end of churches. The Evangelists identified themselves with books, held open or closed, and saints were similarly shown to indicate that sanctity derived from study of the Scriptures. It is worth noticing the
traditio clavis et legis
iconography where a Christ in Majesty hands a key to St. Peter and a book to St. Paul: Paul never met Christ, so there needed to be a visible sign of Christ handing him the law to underline his authority.

Initially, individuals rather than churchmen may have led the way in making copies of the Gospels into objects of display. In 384, St. Jerome complained that women used scriptural texts written in gold on purple vellum and decorated with jewels. In less-civilized surroundings, St. Boniface, an English missionary working in what is now Germany, asked Abbess Eadburh in 735 for a copy of the Epistles in gold letters to impress the “carnal men” he was trying to convert. Orthodox Christianity developed the image of the codex on its own. A miniature of c.880 from Byzantium shows a church council of the fourth century presided over by Emperor Theodosius who sits next to a Gospel book mounted on a throne: proceedings took place under the aegis of the Word.

Bibles and service books were given bindings that used gold, gems, and ivories to enhance their significance among believers. The earliest surviving examples date from the fifth century, and many incorporated late antique carved ivories, a visible sign of their attachment to the earliest – and purest – years of the religion. Their texts had a functional use in the liturgy, but their format had quite another function as ceremonial objects, carried in processions and displayed on altars and lecterns. In Rome, books were ceremonially carried to the altar by deacon and acolytes before the Pope entered to say mass. They were also used in rituals with secular participants. When the remains of St. Adalbert were brought to Gnesen, the archbishop and Emperor Otto III waited for the train with crosses and books to lead the saint into the city. When the same emperor visited the abbey of Farfa near Rome in c.1000, he was greeted by abbot and monks holding crosses and the Gospels: he was sprinkled with holy water, incensed, and given the Gospels to kiss. The kissing of missals, a kind of service book that emerged in the eleventh to twelfth centuries, became standard practice for priests celebrating mass.

The making of Gospel and service books was regarded as an act of piety, encouraged by the rulers and aristocracy of Carolingian and Ottonian Europe. Images in surviving works give prominence to the holy book as the source of authority. However much the theory of sacralized kingship might be expounded in the images, the control of the sacred word rested firmly with the Church: temporal power was represented by sword, orb, and crown, not by the book. Secular rulers could do no more than offer books to the Church. Thus Dietricht Count of Holland and his wife were shown handing a book to the abbey of Egmont in c.940/970, a visual reminder of their subservient position and their support for the Church’s mission. The saints too were guardians of the word and recipients of books: Abbess Hitda of Meschede had herself shown presenting her Gospel book to St. Walburga in c.1000 (Mayr-Harting 1991). Images such as these can be found throughout the Middle Ages. Only at the Reformation was it possible for a ruler to show himself enthroned, distributing the Word of God to both clergy and laity - as appeared in Henry VIII’s Great Bible in English of 1539.

Divination

Methods of divination in republican and imperial Rome – those using chicken’s entrails are most fondly remembered today – included the random selection of passages in revered works, particularly Homer and Virgil. Hadrian, before becoming emperor in 117, is said to have opened at random a book of the Aeneid and chanced on a passage predicting his elevation. The first centuries of Christianity saw Bibles, liturgical books, and saints’ lives used in this way (the practice was known as
Sortes)
for elections and other matters. St. Augustine (354–430) denounced the practice, as did a number of Church councils, from that at Vannes in 465 to Aenham in England in 1109. However, writers such as Sulpicius Severus (c.360–c.425) and Gregory of Tours (c.539–c.594) described the practice in relation to episcopal elections, while Theodore, made Archbishop of Canterbury in 668, referred to it in the process of installing canons (Leclercq 1951).

The practice evidently survived. The French writer Rabelais (c.1494–1553) has Pantagruel order copies of Homer and Virgil to be brought before him: opened three times, the texts were to reveal whether Panurge’s marriage would be successful (a disquisition follows about famous instances of such divination in the past). There are incidental references to such practices at a less-educated level of society. From the late Middle Ages, we learn of the custom of using a Bible or Psalter and a key: the latter was stuffed with slips of paper bearing the names of suspects. When the book fell, the last name to be stuffed into the key was taken to be that of the guilty party. Instances of this are recorded in England as late as 1551 and 1641 (Thomas 1971). In Islamic communities outside Europe, copies of the Qur an and, for example, works of the fourteenth-century Sufi poet Hafiz were used to cast fortunes. The
Fal-Nãmah
was specially made as a book for divination: surviving examples from India, Iran, and Turkish lands date from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Lewis 1965: 760).

Talismanic Use of Books and Texts

Books and written texts joined rings and amulets as devices to ward off evil. There are early references to the habit of wearing the Gospels around the neck, in the form of small books
(párvula evangelia
was the phrase used by St. Jerome). Small books that could be worn in this way are known to have existed at this time. Perhaps they were not unlike a tenth-century Gospel of St. John, measuring only 70 X 55 mm, which was found in 1712 in the tenth-century shrine of the veil of the Virgin Mary, said to have been given to the cathedral of Chartres by Charlemagne himself. Other works were equally effective. An enthusiast in Durham was reported by John of Salisbury to have worn a book with the life of St. Cuthbert around his neck.

The special powers of St. John’s Gospel were respected for long after the Middle Ages. Shortly after 1600, copies were being sold in Nottingham as preservatives against witchcraft for the extortionate price of ten shillings. Perhaps we should see the girdle books worn as jewelry by noble ladies in Tudor times as an up-market version of this practice. The texts here were suitable for Protestant devotions: the writer John Lyly in 1580 remarked that this custom had made Englishwomen as “cunning in the scriptures as Italian women were in the works of Ariosto and Petrarch.” The special powers of the Bible as an object were probably widely respected: Thomas Pennant in his
Tour of Wales
(1778) reported the use of one in an elaborate ceremony to cure the sick at the church of St. Tecla in Llandegla.

The wearing of sacred or magical texts on small pieces of paper or parchment as a defense against harm has a long history, and can be found all over the world. In Europe, Alcuin (d.804), advisor to Charlemagne, called such slips
pittaciole.
If the texts were biblical they could do little damage in the eyes of Church authorities. The interrogation of a spy in 1472 before a royal judge in Tours shows what an individual might carry: he had a series of pieces of parchment
(brevets, rouleaux),
some designed to be carried round the neck. There were texts to cure toothache, others to obtain the love of a woman; a few had been bought in a tavern, but others had been copied out for him from a book by a friar in Poitiers – the presumed spy admitted that he could not read the writing (Day 2002). A vagrant in Elizabethan England, William Wake, seems to have traded in such scraps of writing. The opening words of St. John’s Gospel were especially popular. Mementoes of this kind survived into the age of printing: Joseph Hall, Bishop of Exeter from 1627 and of Norwich from 1642, denounced the habit of wearing small roundels printed with the text of St. John’s Gospel to ensure freedom from danger. Soldiers from the Auvergne undertaking an attack on Geneva in 1602 were discovered with charms on paper on which the first words of St. John’s Gospel were written.

“Associational Copies”: The Book as Relic

Relics – parts of a saint’s body or objects used during their lifetime – were venerated by Christians from the fourth century. There was a lively trade in such things, since the presence of a famous relic could bring material as well as spiritual benefits to any church. Books used by saints were regarded as having special powers. When St. Patrick’s tomb was opened in 553, some 60 years after his death according to the Annals of Ulster, his Gospel book was removed as a relic and bestowed on St. Columba. Books associated with saints Canice, Cronan, Decían, and Enda of Aran were similarly prized. Perhaps the best documented book of this kind is the Stonyhurst Gospel, written in Northumbria in the late seventh century in imitation of Italian books of the fifth to sixth centuries and removed from the tomb of St. Cuthbert (d.687) in 1104 (Brown 1969). John of Salisbury reported that Cuthbert had healed the sick by the laying-on of the book; St. Augustine had reported a similar practice to cure headaches. Other venerated books had similar powers: a deluxe copy of St. Dionysius’ works brought to St. Denis near Paris by legates of the Byzantine emperor in 827 performed nineteen miraculous cures the night it arrived. A copy of the
Cantigas de Santa Maria
(hymns to the Virgin) made for Alfonso X of Castile (1252–84) was placed on his chest to cure a threatening illness.

In Ireland, such works were frequently given metalwork cases to act as shrines. These shrines were used for activities as various as administering oaths, leading armies into battle, and the protection of tax gatherers. When the Normans defeated Domnall Ua Lochlainn in 1182, they took as spoil the Gospel of St. Martin, depriving the Irish of their special protection. The most celebrated book shrine is that of the Psalter of St. Colomba (521–97), known as the Cathach of Colmcille, made between 1062 and 1098 to the order of Cathbar O’Donnell. A sixteenth-century source records its function as a military trophy: carried to the right, three times around an army, it ensured victory. The power of manuscripts such as these had a long life: in 1627, the custodian of the Book of Durrow, then associated with St. Columba, was said to put water on the book and use it to cure sick cattle (Bede, d.735, had reported a similar practice with scrapings from Irish books to cure snake bites in his
Ecclesiastical History).
By the nineteenth century, books of this kind were sometimes the property of gentry families in Ireland, who hired them out for the taking of oaths (Lucas 1986).