This seminal work of scholarship, which traces the development of literacy in medieval England, is now fully updated in a third edition.

This seminal work of scholarship, which traces the development of literacy in medieval England, is now fully updated in a third edition. This book serves as an introduction to medieval books and documents for graduate students throughout the world Features a completely re-written first chapter, ‘Memories and Myths of the Norman Conquest', and a new postscript by the author reflecting on the reception to the original publication and discussing recent scholarship on medieval literacy Includes a revised guide to further reading and a revision of the plates which illustrate medieval manuscripts in detail

England 1066 - 1307

From Memory to Written Record

How the way we hold knowledge about the past—in books, in file folders, in databases—affects the kind of stories we tell about the past.

How the way we hold knowledge about the past—in books, in file folders, in databases—affects the kind of stories we tell about the past. The way we record knowledge, and the web of technical, formal, and social practices that surrounds it, inevitably affects the knowledge that we record. The ways we hold knowledge about the past—in handwritten manuscripts, in printed books, in file folders, in databases—shape the kind of stories we tell about that past. In this lively and erudite look at the relation of our information infrastructures to our information, Geoffrey Bowker examines how, over the past two hundred years, information technology has converged with the nature and production of scientific knowledge. His story weaves a path between the social and political work of creating an explicit, indexical memory for science—the making of infrastructures—and the variety of ways we continually reconfigure, lose, and regain the past. At a time when memory is so cheap and its recording is so protean, Bowker reminds us of the centrality of what and how we choose to forget. In Memory Practices in the Sciences he looks at three "memory epochs" of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries and their particular reconstructions and reconfigurations of scientific knowledge. The nineteenth century's central science, geology, mapped both the social and the natural world into a single time package (despite apparent discontinuities), as, in a different way, did mid-twentieth-century cybernetics. Both, Bowker argues, packaged time in ways indexed by their information technologies to permit traffic between the social and natural worlds. Today's sciences of biodiversity, meanwhile, "database the world" in a way that excludes certain spaces, entities, and times. We use the tools of the present to look at the past, says Bowker; we project onto nature our modes of organizing our own affairs.

Memory Practices in the Sciences

With its combination of exciting narrative and clear analysis, this book will capture students interest in a range of courses on medieval and Western history.

Exploring the successful Norman invasion of England in 1066, this concise and readable book focuses especially on the often dramatic and enduring changes wrought by William the Conqueror and his followers. From the perspective of a modern social historian, Hugh M. Thomas considers the conquest's wide-ranging impact by taking a fresh look at such traditional themes as the influence of battles and great men on history and assessing how far the shift in ruling dynasty and noble elites affected broader aspects of English history. The author sets the stage by describing English society before the Norman Conquest and recounting the dramatic story of the conquest, including the climactic Battle of Hastings. He then traces the influence of the invasion itself and the Normans' political, military, institutional, and legal transformations. Inevitably following on the heels of institutional reform came economic, social, religious, and cultural changes. The results, Thomas convincingly shows, are both complex and surprising. In some areas where one might expect profound influence, such as government institutions, there was little change. In other respects, such as the indirect transformation of the English language, the conquest had profound and lasting effects. With its combination of exciting narrative and clear analysis, this book will capture students interest in a range of courses on medieval and Western history.

England After William the Conqueror

The Norman Conquest

From the early Sumerian clay tablet through to the emergence of the electronic text, this Companion provides a continuous and coherent account of the history of the book.

From the early Sumerian clay tablet through to the emergence of the electronic text, this Companion provides a continuous and coherent account of the history of the book. Makes use of illustrative examples and case studies of well-known texts Written by a group of expert contributors Covers topical debates, such as the nature of censorship and the future of the book

A Companion to the History of the Book

In Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science, Richard Yeo interprets a relatively unexplored set of primary archival sources: the notes and notebooks of some of the leading figures of the Scientific Revolution.

In Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science, Richard Yeo interprets a relatively unexplored set of primary archival sources: the notes and notebooks of some of the leading figures of the Scientific Revolution. Notebooks were important to several key members of the Royal Society of London, including Robert Boyle, John Evelyn, Robert Hooke, John Locke, and others, who drew on Renaissance humanist techniques of excerpting from texts to build storehouses of proverbs, maxims, quotations, and other material in personal notebooks, or commonplace books. Yeo shows that these men appreciated the value of their own notes both as powerful tools for personal recollection, and, following Francis Bacon, as a system of precise record keeping from which they could retrieve large quantities of detailed information for collaboration. The virtuosi of the seventeenth century were also able to reach beyond Bacon and the humanists, drawing inspiration from the ancient Hippocratic medical tradition and its emphasis on the gradual accumulation of information over time. By reflecting on the interaction of memory, notebooks, and other records, Yeo argues, the English virtuosi shaped an ethos of long-term empirical scientific inquiry.

Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science

... From Memory to Written Record , 185 . 12. From Memory to Written Record , 189. Clanchy notes that knowledge of Latin extended from the central government to the manors and villages , where stewards , bailiffs , beadles , and reeves&nbsp;...

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book for 1999 Karma Lochrie demonstrates that women were associated not with the body but rather with the flesh, that disruptive aspect of body and soul which Augustine claimed was fissured with the Fall of Man. It is within this framework that she reads The Book of Margery Kempe, demonstrating the ways in which Kempe exploited the gendered ideologies of flesh and text through her controversial practices of writing, her inappropriate-seeming laughter, and the most notorious aspect of her mysticism, her "hysterical" weeping expressions of religious desire. Lochrie challenges prevailing scholarly assumptions of Kempe's illiteracy, her role in the writing of her book, her misunderstanding of mystical concepts, and the failure of her book to influence a reading community. In her work and her life, Kempe consistently crossed the barriers of those cultural taboos designed to exclude and silence her. Instead of viewing Kempe as marginal to the great mystical and literary traditions of the late Middle Ages, this study takes her seriously as a woman responding to the cultural constraints and exclusions of her time. Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh will be of interest to students and scholars of medieval studies, intellectual history, and feminist theory.

Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh

... From Memory to Written Record , England 1066-1307 ( London : Edward Arnold , 1979 ; 2nd edn , Oxford : Blackwell , 1993 , with many important additions - this is the edition used here ) , and Richard Firth Green , A Crisis of Truth&nbsp;...

In Cultures of Forgery, leading literary studies and cultural studies scholars examine the double meaning of the word "forge"-to create or to form, on the one hand, and to make falsely, on the other.

Making Nations, Making Selves

Cultures of Forgery

... from memory to written record, then, but also the ability to work in Anglo-Norman or Latin, the languages of written records at the time. As countless studies of literacy demonstrate, the ability to read and write cannot be removed from&nbsp;...

How the theoretical tools of literacy help us understand programming in its historical, social and conceptual contexts. The message from educators, the tech community, and even politicians is clear: everyone should learn to code. To emphasize the universality and importance of computer programming, promoters of coding for everyone often invoke the concept of “literacy,” drawing parallels between reading and writing code and reading and writing text. In this book, Annette Vee examines the coding-as-literacy analogy and argues that it can be an apt rhetorical frame. The theoretical tools of literacy help us understand programming beyond a technical level, and in its historical, social, and conceptual contexts. Viewing programming from the perspective of literacy and literacy from the perspective of programming, she argues, shifts our understandings of both. Computer programming becomes part of an array of communication skills important in everyday life, and literacy, augmented by programming, becomes more capacious. Vee examines the ways that programming is linked with literacy in coding literacy campaigns, considering the ideologies that accompany this coupling, and she looks at how both writing and programming encode and distribute information. She explores historical parallels between writing and programming, using the evolution of mass textual literacy to shed light on the trajectory of code from military and government infrastructure to large-scale businesses to personal use. Writing and coding were institutionalized, domesticated, and then established as a basis for literacy. Just as societies demonstrated a “literate mentality” regardless of the literate status of individuals, Vee argues, a “computational mentality” is now emerging even though coding is still a specialized skill.

How Computer Programming Is Changing Writing

Coding Literacy

... From Memory to Written Record , pp . 314–17 . 52. Brigitte Miriam Bedos - Rezak , &#39; Medieval identity : a sign and a concept &#39; , The American Historical Review , 105 ( December 2000 ) , p . 1503 . 53. Clanchy , From Memory to Written Record&nbsp;...

Personal identification is very much a live political issue in Britain and this book looks at why this is the case, and why, paradoxically, the theft of identity has become ever more common as the means of identification have multiplied. Identifying the English looks not only at how criminals have been identified - branding, fingerprinting, DNA - but also at the identification of the individual with seals and signatures, of the citizen by means of passports and ID cards, and of the corpse. Beginning his history in the medieval period, Edward Higgs reveals how it was not the Industrial Revolution that brought the most radical changes in identification techniques, as many have assumed, but rather the changing nature of the State and commerce, and their relationship with citizens and customers. In the twentieth century the very different historical techniques have converged on the holding of information on databases, and increasingly on biometrics, and the multiplication of these external databases outside the control of individuals has continued to undermine personal identity security.

A History of Personal Identification 1500 to the Present

Identifying the English

The Idea of Anglo Saxon England, 1066-1901 presents the first systematic review of the ways in which Anglo-Saxon studies have evolved from their beginnings to the twentieth century Tells the story of how the idea of Anglo-Saxon England ...

The Idea of Anglo Saxon England, 1066-1901 presents the first systematic review of the ways in which Anglo-Saxon studies have evolved from their beginnings to the twentieth century Tells the story of how the idea of Anglo-Saxon England evolved from the Anglo-Saxons themselves to the Victorians, serving as a myth of origins for the English people, their language, and some of their most cherished institutions Combines original research with established scholarship to reveal how current conceptions of English identity might be very different if it were not for the discovery – and invention – of the Anglo-Saxon past Reveals how documents dating from the Anglo-Saxon era have greatly influenced modern attitudes toward nationhood, race, religious practice, and constitutional liberties Includes more than fifty images of manuscripts, early printed books, paintings, sculptures, and major historians of the era

Remembering, Forgetting, Deciphering, and Renewing the Past

The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066-1901

In this volume, the author argues that literacy is a complex combination of various skills, not just the ability to read and write: the technology of writing, the encoding and decoding of text symbols, the interpretation of meaning, the ...

In this volume, the author argues that literacy is a complex combination of various skills, not just the ability to read and write: the technology of writing, the encoding and decoding of text symbols, the interpretation of meaning, the retrieval and display systems which organize how meaning is stored and memory. The book explores the relationship between literacy, orality and memory in classical antiquity, not only from the point of view of antiquity, but also from that of modern cognitive psychology. It examines the contemporary as well as the ancient debate about how the writing tools we possess interact and affect the product, why they should do so and how the tasks required of memory change and develop with literacy's increasing output and evoking technologies.

Cognitive Studies of Memory and Literacy in Classical Antiquity

Wax Tablets of the Mind

Rosalind Thomas. Here Clanchy&#39;s From Memory to Written Record ( 1979 ) is particu- larly enlightening - and it has now been joined by some other studies of the Middle Ages.5 Clanchy traces the gradual change in medieval England from a&nbsp;...

Explores the role of written and oral communication in Greece.

Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece

... From Memory to Written Record , p . 298 . 93. See Margaret McGlynn , &quot; Memory , Orality and Life Records : Proofs of Age in Tudor England , &quot; Sixteenth Century Journal 40 ( 2009 ) : 679-97 . 94. Clanchy , From Memory to Written Record&nbsp;...

England has traditionally been understood as a latecomer to the use of forensic medicine in death investigation, lagging nearly two-hundred years behind other European authorities. Using the coroner's inquest as a lens, this book hopes to offer a fresh perspective on the process of death investigation in medieval England. The central premise of this book is that medical practitioners did participate in death investigation – although not in every inquest, or even most, and not necessarily in those investigations where we today would deem their advice most pertinent. The medieval relationship with death and disease, in particular, shaped coroners' and their jurors' understanding of the inquest's medical needs and led them to conclusions that can only be understood in context of the medieval world's holistic approach to health and medicine. Moreover, while the English resisted Southern Europe's penchant for autopsies, at times their findings reveal a solid understanding of internal medicine. By studying cause of death in the coroners' reports, this study sheds new light on subjects such as abortion by assault, bubonic plague, cruentation, epilepsy, insanity, senescence, and unnatural death.

Forensic Medicine and Death Investigation in Medieval England

... From Memory to Written Record.16 In this book Clanchy argues that England not only went through an extraordinary ... From Memory to Written Record (Chichester, West Sussex: Blackwell, 2013), Introduction. Clanchy, From Memory to&nbsp;...

This volume analyses the constructions and realities of childhood in Poland, c. 1050-1300 CE, by examining a range of texts and considering the ways in which children fit within textual frameworks and genres. These texts include two major chronicles, monastic sources, and hagiography related to five major saints. The textual sources are put into conversation with findings from archaeology. The author argues that certain common themes, such as assumed care for children, the need for education, and the puer senex trope do feature through most texts of any genre, and the book also explores how Poland was similar to and different from the situation in western Europe. See inside the book.

Constructions and Realities in a European Context

Childhood in Medieval Poland (1050-1300)

... From Memory to Written Record : England 1066-1307 , first published in 1979 , and now in its third edition.102 ... From Memory to Written Record : England 1066–1307 ( London , 1979 , rev . edi- tions 1993 and 2013 ) . Appendix&nbsp;...

This is the first major study of the interplay between Latin and Germanic vernaculars in early medieval records. Building on previous work on the uses of the written word in the early Middle Ages, which has dispelled the myth that this was an age of ‘orality’, the contributions in this volume bring to the fore the crucial question of language choice in the documentary cultures of early medieval societies. Specifically, they examine the interactions between Latin and Germanic vernaculars in the Anglo-Saxon and eastern Frankish worlds and in neighbouring areas. The chapters are underpinned by an important comparative dimension on account of the two regions’ shared linguistic heritage and numerous cross-Channel links. Contributors are: Stefan Esders, Albert Fenton, Robert Gallagher, Wolfgang Haubrichs, Charles Insley, Kathryn A. Lowe, Rosamond McKitterick, Rory Naismith, Janet L. Nelson, Edward Roberts, Annina Seiler, Marco Stoffella, Francesca Tinti, Kate Wiles, Bernhard Zeller. See inside the book.