Disruptive practice: Multimodality, innovation and standardisation from the medieval to the digital text (original) (raw)
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Old Light on New Media: Medieval Practices in the Digital Age
This essay offers an insight into the way digital editions of medieval texts can be employed to replicate the medieval reading experience. Awareness of the characteristic features of medieval textuality, exemplified through select late medieval texts, can help in developing increasingly flexible editorial models, which are more consistent with medieval reading practices than current editions. Editions, transformed from single textual occurrences into fluid, communal, and unfolding processes, can uncover a complex notion of medieval hypertextuality by linking texts, images, and tunes. They can then even trace the reception of a given text. As readers are empowered to “zoom” in and out specific textual components, of manuscript witnesses, of families and printed editions, digital editions can present individual witnesses alongside editorial apparatuses and thus bridge the gap between the Old and the New Philology.
Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures, 2013
This essay offers an insight into the way digital editions of medieval texts can be employed to replicate the medieval reading experience. Awareness of the characteristic features of medieval textuality, exemplified through select late medieval texts, can help in developing increasingly flexible editorial models, which are more consistent with medieval reading practices than current editions. Editions, transformed from single textual occurrences into fluid, communal, and unfolding processes, can uncover a complex notion of medieval hypertextuality by linking texts, images, and tunes. They can then even trace the reception of a given text. As readers are empowered to zoom in and out specific textual components, of manuscript witnesses, of families and printed editions, digital editions can present individual witnesses alongside editorial apparatuses and thus bridge the gap between the Old and the New Philology.
The modernity of Middle-English manuscripts - a multimodal investigation
Elephant & Castle, 2017
This study investigates the interrelation between different semiotic resources in a corpus of sixty Middle English manuscripts dating from 1350 to 1500. The analysis focuses on two main forms of interaction between text and image, namely visual positioning and functionality, and their role in the transmission of meaning. In terms of visual positioning, three main macropatterns have been identified: separateness, inclusion, and integration. As regards functionality, the following patterns emerge: manifest functionality, co-functionality, and apparent unrelation. This study confirms that modern multimodal approaches to text analysis may be fruitfully employed to investigate Middle English manuscripts and their complex iconographic apparatus. Indeed, manuscripts do not represent merely an aesthetic juxtaposition of verses and pictures but a complex and interactive system based on the strategic and creative combination of different multimodal resources.
With this study I intend to develop the application of modern theories of multimodal communication to a corpus of medieval manuscripts written in Middle English. Multimodal analysis can be effectively applied especially to narrative texts featuring a pictorial cycle illuminating the related events, but it is applicable to others genres as well. This work will illustrate the peculiar communicative dynamics existing between two communicative modes (image and word) and their structural visual arrangements. Through the application of this kind of analysis, the manuscript medium appears again as a whole, a system of semiotic resources linked by multiple relations, showing modern communicative dynamics.
Leeds IMC 2016: “Stylus as a Paint Brush – Writing and Artistic Creation (sixth to ninth centuries)”
LEEDS INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS 2016 “Stylus as a Paint Brush – Writing and Artistic Creation (sixth to ninth centuries)” Two sessions convened by Vincent Debiais and Francesca Dell’Acqua By involving scholars from various disciplines, these two sessions will explore: 1) the ability of late antique and medieval authors to create images throughout their written words, blurring the borders between visual and literary arts; 2) investigate how the written and oral dissemination of textual imagery interacted with the conception, production, and perception of visual arts in the same period. Using their stylus as a painting brush, late antique and medieval authors composed texts in which the arrangement of words and the display of rhetorical devices transformed words in literary images/icons, making them part of a wider visual culture. Works of art described or evoked might have existed in their “physical” dimension, but, most of the time, textual imagery remained “literary works of art” in a poetic space of creation, a fiction of shapes and colors, depicted or shaped under the readers’ eyes. Not willing to rely on the common assumption that inspiration, creation, and innovation are no more separate than the realms of literature and visual arts, and expanding the common assumption of “texts influencing visual arts,” the two sessions will reconsider the elaboration of textual and physical images/icons through the written circulation of texts among the literate, and the oral circulation of liturgical or poetic texts among a wider audience. In fact, what usually escapes the attention of scholars is how the oral transmission of texts eventually influenced visual culture, specific “mental visions” of art patrons and artisans, and the imagery produced by the latter. Therefore the relation between text and image – one of the oldest issues in art history – needs to be broken into a more complex sequence of: literary and theological tradition – current circumstances (theological debate, political situation, current mentality) – production of texts – written transmission of texts – verbal transmission of texts – reception of texts – consequent shaping of religious and lay mentality and mental imagery – shaping of visual imagery. Through case-studies, these sessions will consider the “visual” dimension of late antique and early medieval texts, and will help understand how the circulation of ideas and mental images among writers and artists shaped the representation of certain subjects in lay and religious art. Connecting textual and visual works of art, this workshop offers an opportunity to take a broad look at the notion of “creation”. Keywords: Iconic mentality; visual rhetoric; mental images; textual images; liturgical texts; narrative texts; poetry; late antique to Carolingian/middle Byzantine period Deadline Please, send a 100-word abstract by the 20th of September 2015 to: vincent.debiais@univ-poitiers.fr and F.DellAcqua@bham.ac.uk
Introduction: Reading practices and participation in digital and medieval media
2018
Reading practices and participation in digital and medieval media 'Where is the moralizynge?' So asked a friend of the early fifteenthcentury clerk and writer Thomas Hoccleve when shown a copy of Hoccleve's newly translated poem 'Jereslaus' Wife'. Hoccleve describes this exchange in his long poem Dialogue, in which he explains that he had 'endid' the tale a 'wike or two' before his friend visited. Taking up the work, the friend read the poem eagerly, but objected to its ending. After storming home for his copy of Hoccleve's source, the friend returned, book in hand, to regale Hoccleve with the moral. In response, Hoccleve adds it following the end of his poem. 1 The interaction Hoccleve describes represents one of the underreported ways in which medieval readers could participate in the development of texts. Hoccleve clearly views his work in translating and composing the tale as finished and complete before his friend confronts him with an alternative view of the work that prompts Hoccleve to add the interlude and the moralizing. He then identifies the moral as an addition for which his friendly reader holds responsibility. His friend's participation alters both the text itself, through the provision of an explicit moral, and Hoccleve's own nascent role as author. This alteration enacted through participation responds to the reader's casual assumption that he possesses authority sufficient to counter Hoccleve's own authority. Neither he nor Hoccleve view the writer as the sole determinant of the work. Instead, his friend asserts authority as a reader to contribute to Hoccleve's work, and the friend's suggestions lead to its modification. This relationship Hoccleve depicts between a writer who accepts and responds to the authority of a reader occurs at a critical moment in the history of medieval English literature. From the late fourteenth to the early sixteenth centuries, expanding literacy among the upwardly mobile mercantile and professional classes
“Pictures are material signs of the invisible:” Medieval Visual Theory and Modern Graphic Narratives
2015
Press, 2003), a study that analyzes the power of visual images to affect the reading experience and the reader. They argue, "The luminous nature of the reading experience in a manuscript culture situates the reader as a spectator constructed by the luminous quality of the page… This aspect of the reading experience in late medieval manuscript culture is analogous to the modern cinematic experience" (2). The connection between graphic novel narrative techniques and the cinema has been widely noted, but there is little to no Hoche