Affective Literacies: Writing and Multilingualism in the Late Middle Ages (Late Medieval and Early Modern Studies)

New Literacy Studies, close reading, and historical sociolinguistics inform Amsler's analyses of late medieval writing and textual cultures. Amsler argues that medieval reading and writing make sense not as individual expressions with discrete texts but as multilingual, sociocultural, and intertextual practices that 'make people up' and that sustain or challenge dominant ideologies and reading formations. Rather than a single Literacy, we find socially situated literacies within manuscript matrices. Bringing new historical dimensions to literacy studies, Amsler explores the intertextualities, affective relations, and social contests in these multilingual formations. Individual chapters examine literacies as cultural practice in schooling and in elite and popular texts by Chaucer, Christine de Pizan, Dante, Margery Kempe, devotional writers, Erasmus, and the Jewish convert Hermann von Sheda, along with grammatical writing, mythography, charms, drama, and educational texts. This volume illustrates the diversity of late medieval multilingual writings, textual performances, and embodied readings Theorizing Medieval Literacies -- Languages Ideology And Marginal Latins -- Affective Literacies -- Reading Assimilation And Jewish Latin Textuality -- Ovid's Mythography And Medieval Readers -- Grammar Of Unruly Latin In Middle English Writing -- 'clean And Chaste Latin' : Literacy, Humanism, And The Boy Jesus. Mark Amsler. Includes Bibliographical References And Indexes.