Visible English: Graphic Culture, Scribal Practice, and Identity, c. 700-c.1550

In this provocative, learned, and remarkably wide-ranging study, Wendy Scase offers a revisionist history of the role of English writing. In Scase's argument, the visible presence of written English helped form identities of those literate in the vernacular. The key to this identity formation is not merely dialectal markers, lexis, or degree of Latinity—all aspects that have long been recognized as doing such work in medieval England. For Scase, it is the very appearance of English, on the written page or inscribed upon objects, that does a lot of hitherto unrecognized work in identity formation. And although Latin provided the model for the transmission of literacy, Scase argues that the visible features of English writing were just as constitutive of identities, which she understands as the social process of differentiating us from them (pp. 14–15). She divides her evidence up into five distinct thematic chapters, each of which looks at a unique aspect of written English's ability to help form what she calls "communities of practice" (first defined on pp. 15–21, but then employed passim).Chapter one, "Graphs, Alphabets, and Scripts," examines how the differences between the Latin alphabet and the alphabet of Old or Middle English manifested on the pages of manuscripts. Here, Scase analyzes numerous examples of scribes working out how to slot the runic letters –þ, –ȝ, –ð, and –Ƿ into alphabetized tables. There was no uniform way of doing this, but each time a scribe tried a new method, they were registering English as a literary practice distinct from the dominant Latin culture. In this chapter, Scase also identifies a new genre of writing that she terms the Anglice littere tradition, encompassing a range of texts that explicitly reflect on the English alphabet but do so in the learned terms of traditional grammar. Chapter two, "Graphic Models," looks at how models for writing inculcated ideas of belonging to a literate community. To this end, Scase examines what we can reconstruct about the pedagogy of writing, particularly how neophyte writers were trained to imitate models of script. By its very nature this process ushers members into a community of writers and thus aids in identity formation. But Scase also locates reflexes of writing pedagogy in the margins of manuscripts—in the parts of manuscripts, that is, that are typically ignored by textual scholars, cataloguers, and codicologists. The numerous pen trials, ex libris, epistolary formulas, and diplomatic formulas that litter the margins of manuscripts—all based on models—attest to people in the Middle Ages entering the community of writers via imitation. Chapter three, "Graphic Play," considers the multiple forms of games (e.g., riddles, acrostics, alphabet poems, cryptic scribal colophons) that underwrote medieval textual practices, arguing that "pedagogic genres and practices that harnessed play for literacy education became mediators of belonging and difference" (p. 159). These literate practices demanded that those playing exhibit a "metalinguistic awareness" (p. 159) signaling group membership. Chapter four, "Graphic Display," looks at the multiple places, outside of books, in which English was inscribed and suggests that in epigraphical encounters "the capacity of literacy pedagogy to draw boundaries between belonging and difference was extended and amplified" (p. 218). In this chapter, Scase examines inscriptions on stone, graffiti in parish churches, and words inscribed on domestic objects.Finally, the book concludes with Chapter five, "Reprographics," asking how those who had been ushered into the community of English literacy understood the act of reproducing texts. Squarely in this chapter's revisionist sights is the methodology underlying The Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English and affiliated approaches to dialectology. The key to Scase's alternative model of scribal practice is training in Latin literacy, which required precise spelling to accurately preserve quantitative meter. Many communities of practice, influenced by this training, practiced a similar fastidiousness about spelling when copying Middle English. Looking at examples from multiple manuscripts of The South English Legendary and The Prick of Conscience, Scase proposes that commonalities in spelling across multiple copies arose from "learned sets of spellings as a novel means of speeding up copying," instead of arising from a given scribe's dialect (p. 308).I found this study to be remarkably rich, and in a review of this length I cannot pretend to flag up for readers the multiple provocations they may find in it. But I found myself most engaged with chapter five, particularly the critique of The Linguistic Atlas's methodology. In lieu of scribal dialect, Scase believes that scribes, working in communities, developed community-specific practices that dictated, among other things, their preferred spellings. Certainly, Middle English dialectology is a bit of a muddle at the moment. However, I am hesitant to accept Scase's argument wholesale, because we know from locally produced documents that spellings varied from region to region and are specifically identifiable with those regions, and we know that such spelling patterns were applied, over and over, to manuscripts copied in those regions. Nothing in Scase's chapter would upend this core fact. Moreover, Scase does not tell us how communities of copyists would have settled on a particular set of spellings, and I cannot imagine that such markedly variant spellings of such, she, or them were up to negotiation and compromise amongst those who made their living by cranking out large volumes of text.At the same time, I think Scase has done our field a remarkable service here by simply reminding us that scribal practice is as complex as any human practice, and thus the typologies underlying The Linguistic Atlas are likely too simple and too neat. Dialectology, as it applies to scribal practices, is clearly an area in need of much refinement. Scase's book promises to be a goad to this long-overdue discussion. And while Visible English's bibliography is remarkably comprehensive, I noted only a few oversights: The argument would have benefited from consulting Katharine Breen's Imagining an English Reading Public, 1150–1400, with which it has much in common. And while Scase does engage with Daniel Wakelin's Scribal Correction and Literary Craft, more of her claims in chapter five could have usefully been grounded in Wakelin's work.Of this book's many virtues, I would highlight a few. First, Scase's archive is tremendously rich, ranging across epigraphy, manuscripts, and pedagogical history, while encompassing nearly a millennium of English writing. Few scholars are equipped to cover so much ground, and we are in Scase's debt for the labor that must have gone into pulling together so much material. This book also models interdisciplinarity by grounding its material evidence in Literacy Studies. This is not a route many Anglophone manuscript scholars have taken, but Scase has shown that there is much to be done at this intersection. But I was most struck by this book's studied dedication to finding meaning in various often overlooked corners of medieval England. The discussion of graffiti in parish churches, for example, illuminated for me the need for epigraphers and book historians to collaborate. I was also struck by Scase's keen eye for locating meaning in the margins of manuscripts. Scholars have long passed over the ephemeral notes that proliferate in the margins of manuscripts, but in chapter two, Scase hones in on what she calls "micro-texts," showing them as "traces of reading and writing practice" (p. 351). This is a term that deserves to be considered, debated, and utilized in future studies of English writing.