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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.
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