Our historical understanding of the Reformation in northern Europe has tended to privilege the idea of disruption and innovation over continuity - yet even the most powerful reformation movements drew on and exchanged ideas with earlier cultural and religious practices. This volume attempts to right the balance, bringing together a roster of experts to trace the continuities between the medieval and early modern period in the Nordic realm, while enabling us to see the Reformation and its changes in a new light.

Compared with most of Continental Europe North of the Alps, the introduction of writing in East Central Europe (Bohemia, Poland and Hungary) took place with a considerable delay. Much is known about East Central European uses of writing, although only a fragment of this knowledge is known outside the region. Gathered by historians, palaeographers and codicologists, diplomatists, art historians, literary historians and others, this knowledge has hardly ever been studied in the light of recent discussions on medieval literacy and communication. Work done in the Czech, Polish and Hungarian traditions of scholarship has never been subjected to a comparative analysis. Furthermore, the question of the relation between writing and other forms of communication in the region remains largely unexplored. The volume serves a double purpose. For the first time, a collection of contributions on medieval literacy in East Central Europe is put before the forum of international scholarship. It is also hoped to further discussions of modes of communication, literate behaviour and mentalities among scholars working in the region.

Limiting itself to the vital centuries when the late Roman West reshaped itself into a first "Europe," the conference explored the dominant conception of human nature in that era: that human existence was both body (in the visible world of material things) and soul (in the invisible world of spirit). This was a legacy of pre-Christian elements handed down from Greek philosophy and Hebrew Scriptures. Assimilating it to indigenous cultures in the Roman West, many alien to the ancient Mediterranean world, precipitated sea-changes in the understanding of human psychology. Ensuing frictions sparked extraordinary expressions of creativity in words and visual images. It also created dangerously subversive disequilibriums in the collective mentality within elites and between them and majority cultures. The papers in this volume investigate numerous configurations of a new culture taking shape in that volatile environment. They contribute to continuing debates about the cognitive co-ordination of words and pictorial images, and to cross-disciplinary dialogues in such disparate fields as art history, religious literature, mysticism, and cultural anthropology.

Trust is the basis of all social relations. A society in which trust - be it in one's fellow men or in political order - is not assured, will not, in the end, endure. In the Middle Ages - as, indeed, in any other period in human history - trust presupposes the concordance between word and deed, for instance, that future human action may be predicted. In this way trust creates the security necessary in the life of individuals. Rather than an emotion, trust is an attitude based on experience. It is not created spontaneously, but requires a process of observation and socialization. This implies that the preconditions for trust are culturally determined and subject to change. Trust is expressed through communication. The following questions are addressed in the contributions to this volume: Are some contents more trustworthy than others? Does writing as a medium engender trust irrespective of the contents of the written text? Was trust in writing dependent on trust in an authority? Was it perhaps exclusively dependent on that authority? Are there suggestions that the written form of the text was meant to confer trust on its contents? Did rituals take place (before or during the writing down of the text, or during its handing over to its recipient) that were meant to enhance the text's trustworthiness? Can changes be observed in the strategies of engendering trust? Was trust food for reflection in written texts? What was considered to constitute a breach of trust?

In recent years the relations between images and texts have benefitted from an increase in scholarly attention. In medieval studies, art historians, historians, codicologists, philologists and others have applied their methods to the study of illuminated manuscripts and other works of art. These studies have shifted from a concern about the contents of the messages contained in the artefacts (e.g. in iconography) to an interest in the ways in which they were communicated to their intended audiences. The perception of texts and images, their reception by contemporaries and by later generations have become topics in their own right. The analysis of individual manuscripts and works of art remains the basis for any consideration of their transmission and uses. Yet the time has come for an evaluation of the results of recent work on medieval communication. The interactions between non-verbal and verbal forms of communication, more in particular the relations between visual symbols other than writing and the recording of speech in writing, are important for the evaluation of both images and texts. According to some, medieval images may be 'read'. According to others, the perception of images is fundamentally different from that of texts. Do images have a morphology (colours, lines, planes), a syntax and semantics of their own? In other words: do both texts and images have a 'grammar'? Is it useful to speak of 'visual literacy'? Can texts be considered as images? How are texts and images perceived? Do they communicate different kinds of messages? Can an image's message be put into words? In which social contexts does medieval man prefer the visual to the textual? What about the interplay of texts and images (e.g. in rituals and ceremonies)? Do we observe an evolution in the perception of images due to the development of a literate mentality? These are some of the questions discussed in the contributions to this volume.