... and statues was to be replaced by learning to read the English Bible. Literacy, however, isn't easy, even now. Taking up the issues of iconoclasm and literacy from the perspective of recent research in cognitive neuroscience, this essay explores the reformers' misunderstandings about how people could...

..., as these essays posit alternative, dispersive, and layered models for the book. By showing that cutting and pasting can rightly be recognized as acts of reading and writing, as specific intellectual gestures, these essays upset much of what has hitherto been known or assumed about literacy, composition...

... excellence and recalls the fact that monastic literacy, particularly nuns’ literacy, has received considerable critical attention in recent years.9 The bookish Brigit- tines have come in for special consideration, and Mary Erler’s essay included here focuses on textual cultures and reading practices...

... audiences the authority that attends literacy by inviting them to participate in a public print sphere that did not depend on its readership’s lexical prowess.3 However, since these prints chart neither the records of the great nor the remnants of the excluded, they have fallen through...

... in the larger operations of literacy, and we explore several interconnected methods for teasing out the implications of these accounts. The reviewing enterprise and the topic of readership Like so many digital collections that support complex cultural analysis, the WWiR collection of reviews is a proxy. What we...

... Latin grammar. Katherine Zieman, for example, proposes a category of “liturgical literacy,” which designates a mode of interacting with Latin liturgical text that also incorporates musi- cal ability, swift decoding of script, and good memorization, without giving priority to any one...

... and translations 2. Reference 3. Biography 4. Appropriations 5. Rhetoric, literacy, and learning 6. Dreams and visions 7. Biblical imagination 8. Church, reform, and devotion 9. Gender and works of women 10. Witchcraft 11. Medicine...

... and writing in the experience of a specific individual or group. The number of times that Margery finds herself being accused of having too detailed a knowledge of the Bible suggests that the extent of her personal literacy is not a barrier so much as the challenges of documentation she faces in recording her...

... modern literature, and the place of literature in early modern diplomacy; diplomacy, race, and eth- nicity; diplomacy and discourses of secrecy; diplomatic literacy; the dispatch as genre; the ambassador as displaced person; queer diplomacy; diplomacy and the rise of the nation state; diplomacy...

... generically very different texts, but many of their influences and audiences were shared. Scholars are well aware that the last quarter of the fourteenth century saw an astonishing rise in vernacular literary production and that this in part stemmed from developments in literacy and bureaucracy over...

... outlined above, this response does not appear to me in any sense a gullible one. Rather it suggests a high degree of literacy in reading a material text of this kind. Moving from the location to the text known to be the queen’s, the material trace is individualized as the product of a reading experience...

... as an embodiment of the unbounded ambi- tion of Baconian science and a remnant of the culture of medieval magic, as an idealization of a superior European technology and a materialization of European letters and literacy, as the enchanted “book” of the theater and the corporeal incarnation of the sorcery...

... curative care and literacy in late medieval Britain simultaneously increased experiences of medicine’s obscurity and of textual incomprehension. Medieval men and women confronted a set of therapeutic models and explanatory terms that often failed — failed, that is, to be understandable to readers...

... 158.00. Grote, James. Medieval Literacy: A Compendium of Medieval Knowledge with the Guidance of C. S. Lewis. Louisville, Ky.: Fons Vitae, 2011. xix, 365 pp.; illus. throughout. Paper $34.95. Härtel, Helmar, et al. Katalog der mittelalterlichen Helmstedter Handschrif- ten, Teil 1: Cod. Guelf. 1...

... particularly to the emergence of dis- tinctions about kinds of readers. Centrally concerned with the vocabulary of assessment and evaluation, and its implications for changing ideas about readership and authorship, their findings reveal anxieties about reading in an age of increasing literacy, where...

... colonizing power which has enslaved him: insofar as they do represent a fetishized literacy itself, he is right. Reifying unlettered Ariel’s and Caliban’s actual physical labor, Prospero’s books, according to Kearney, reveal the “magic” of New World productivity to be based on slavery. Ester...

... cultural forms. Because of their lim- ited access to literacy, many of these forms were oral and performative: the elaborate cycle drama of late medieval England is a preeminent example, but there are plenteous records of processions, plays, and ceremonies, as well as protests and revolts...

... for him to join “in día” as “India.” One may wish to dismiss this linguistic error as being insignificant because Guaman Poma’s literacy in Spanish was simply not as good as his literacy in Quechua. But the irony is that Chris- topher Columbus made an equally egregious mistake when he called...

... of pure orality or pure literacy, it is difficult to imagine a post-­Gutenberg text that consists of only speech, script, or print.1 And the hybrid book, neither solely printed nor handwritten nor illustrated, provides the modern reader with an unexpected feast: copious manuscript notes...

... on, understanding, and living scripture.17 As D. H. Green has shown, “Even if [women read- ers were] uneducated and unable to read [a text] in the literal sense,” this kind of visual or aural reading entails a form of devotional literacy, for “[i]n devotional and mystical literature, especially popular...