Minor Knowledge and Microhistory

Manuscript Culture in the Nineteenth Century

Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon, David Olafsson, Sigurdur Gylfi Magnusson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138812079
• eBook ISBN: 9781317607816
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

This book studies everyday writing practices among ordinary people in a poor rural society in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Using the abundance of handwritten material produced, disseminated and consumed some centuries after the advent of print as its research material, the book's focus is on its day-to-day usage and on "minor knowledge, " i.e., text matter originating and rooted primarily in the everyday life of the peasantry.

The focus is on the history of education and communication in a global perspective. Rather than engaging in comparing different countries or regions, the authors seek to view and study early modern and modern manuscript culture as a transnational (or transregional) practice, giving agency to its ordinary participants and attention to hitherto overlooked source material. Through a microhistorical lens, the authors examine the strength of this aspect of popular culture and try to show it in a wider perspective, as well as asking questions about the importance of this development for the continuity of the literary tradition. The book is an attempt to explain "the nature of the literary culture" in general – how new ideas were transported from one person to another, from community to community, and between regions; essentially, the role of minor knowledge in the development of modern men.

Part I
Theory and Historiography

1
Historiography of Texts

From Literacy to Literacy Practices within the Anglo-Saxon School of Thought

A. The Focus

“This is a book about manuscripts; about the men and women who wrote, read, bought, sold, presented, and received them. It is also a book about paper, pen and ink, and a book about those for whom writing by hand was a necessary and profitable part of their lives.”¹ These words, taken from Henry Woudhuysen’s study of the production and circulation of manuscripts in England during the during the (English) Renaissance, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558–1640, might very well stand as a motto for this book as well, indicative of its subject matter. While it may be maintained that there is a huge gulf between the literary culture of the nobility and court poets of seventeenth-century England, on one hand, and literacy practices among ordinary people in nineteenth-century Iceland, on the other, the theories of Woudhuysen and other similar scholars apply to the peasantry anywhere in the world. Woudhuysen and his followers carry out a comprehensive analysis of the production, transmission, and use of handwritten materials and highlight the importance of analyzing the cultural, social, and economic elements of manuscript culture.

By the same token, the following opening words of Peter Beal’s book In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and their Makers in Seventeenth Century, published in 1998, may also serve as a dictum for this book: “[M]y concern is to establish the importance of scribes in the early modern period: to recognize them as figures at the centre of civilized life, as men to be reckoned with, and as key agents in the process of written communication and literary transmission—as men every bit as vitally productive as printers and publishers, rather than the anonymous, shadowy, marginal figures who have traditionally been ignored.”²

Beal and Woudhuysen are but two of a considerable and growing number of scholars in the fields of literature, social, and cultural history and bibliography who, in the last quarter of a century or so, have been reevaluating the connection and interaction between handwritten and printed texts in the centuries after Johan Gutenberg’s influential printing innovation. With their research and publications, they have revised what has been understood as a clear divide between the two media and the linear progress of a printing revolution, where a new and advanced technique pushed an old and obsolete one swiftly aside.

One of the things these studies suggest is that the process of the print revolution, usually described in the shape of modernization theory, may have been neither as swift, as linear nor as predestined as is usually thought. When Peter Beal writes about the time and the circumstances in the seventeenth century that “tipped the balance in favour of print rather than manuscript as the dominant mode of literacy communication,”³ he opens up the way to a very interesting view of the development of written media in the early modern and modern period. The case of Iceland, from the invention of movable-type print up to the late nineteenth century, offers an opportunity to challenge and deconstruct the modernization process of print taking over the role of handwriting, as if by the law of nature. While Icelandic society was introduced to the new technology fairly early—when the first printing press was imported by the last Catholic bishop at Hólar in 1530, shortly before the Reformation—print did not become the main medium for the written word until 350 years later. In Peter Beal’s terms, the balance was in favour of manuscripts as a dominant mode of literary communication for almost a half a millennium after Gutenberg’s invention.

In his popular textbook on Icelandic manuscripts, Handritaspjall from 1958, Jón Helgason, professor of Old Norse studies at the University of Copenhagen, portrayed his notion of the history of the book in Iceland:

Enter the sixteenth century and copying by hand became an obsolete book-making method in neighboring countries. They were printed and could then be disseminated much more easily than before. But in this matter, as in many others, the Middle Ages continued to loom over Iceland. It is true that printing was introduced to the country, but it was monopolized by the Church … But the stories that people wanted to read and hear read and the ballads they yearned to chant and hear chanted were not printed. People copied them in the medieval manner with infinite patience. The scale of production was greater than before, for paper had become common and it was cheaper than vellum, so more people could own books than before. This manner of text production continued through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and well into the nineteenth. Even after printed books became available, there still existed true medieval men who continued to reproduce books with their pen.⁴

As a general description, this portrait is both captivating and conceivable, and it, to some degree, is employed in this study. Jón Helgason, however, emphasizes two points that we argue against in this book. First, he depicts Icelandic scribal practices of the early modern and modern era as archaic remnants of medieval practices, and second, it suggests that Iceland was in this way exceptional in Europe and in the world.⁵ We maintain that the substantial sphere occupied by scribal culture in early modern and modern Iceland was neither exceptional in a European context nor an anachronistic remnant of a medieval practice. It was an essential element of contemporary culture, up to the turn of the twentieth century.

The aim of this chapter and the next is to propose a historiographical, global context for the case of Icelandic manuscript culture in the long nineteenth century. In addition to what we may call “a surge of early modern and modern manuscript studies,” notably within the discipline of literary history and cultural history, we address related fields such as literacy studies (both historical and contemporary), bibliography, and philology.

B. Historical Literacy Studies

The sociocultural historiography of literacy has taken many shifts and forms since its inception as a serious form of scholarship half a century ago. It was primarily within, or in relation to, the influential French Annales school of historical studies that the topic of literacy rose to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s. When American social historian Harvey J. Graff, in a paper published in 1986, reflected on the state of the historical study of literacy in the second half of the twentieth century, he divided it into three generations.⁶ To the first generation he assigns the works of Carlo Cipolla, Lawrence Stone, and Roger S. Schofield, who first argued that the subject was an important historical factor and undertook systematic examinations of the quantitative sources available to produce comprehensive outlines of the course of literacy over time.⁷

The first wide-reaching account on the subject was a small but influential book: Literacy and Development in the West, published by Italian historian Carlo Cipolla in 1969. Cipolla’s approach was to link the development of literary matters to wider trends in Western historiography. Cipolla presents vast amount of quantitative data about levels of literacy across Europe and North America. He addresses the coming of mass literacy in the West as a crucial but neglected process of historical change, a transition from a traditional, custom-bound society to the technical civilization of the printed word. With its wide geographical scope and innovative employment of sources, this book constituted a starting point for the new scholarship of the history of literacy.

The second generation was also represented to some degree in the reader Literacy and Social Development in the West and included scholars such as François Furet and Jacques Ozouf, David Cressy, Egil Johansson, and Graff himself.⁸ Among its characteristics were an emphasis on more wide-ranging collection and more detailed exploration of quantitative records, usually but not always from signatory or census sources; more concern for different levels of literacy; and in-depth inspections of the relations between literacy and more general economic, social, and political developments, and institutions like the church and the school system.⁹ Perhaps a summation of the work of this generation, as well as a bridge to the third, was Rab A. Houston’s Literacy in Early Modern Europe, published in 1988.¹⁰ In a thematic manner, it aims to portray the whole of Europe, conveying common features as well as different characteristics. In the book Houston presents “a set of arguments about the place of literacy and education in social structures and social change in Europe between the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution.”¹¹ Its central theme is that “while education expanded and literacy improved enormously during these three centuries, the impact was tempered by the attitudes and social structures that obtained in the different societies of early modern Europe.”¹²

“The ‘third generation’ now awaits us,” Graff wrote in 1986, prophesying the agendas and emphases of the next phase of historical literacy studies.¹³ One of the tasks ahead was to put aside “destructive dichotomies,” such as those between literate and illiterate, print and oral, and the like, “none of which are interpretively rich or complex enough to advance our understanding.”¹⁴ In Graff’s view, recent literacy studies in other disciplines suggested intriguing ideas for more interdisciplinary approaches, especially the social-psychological works of Scribner and Cole and the ethnographies of anthropologist and linguist Shirley Brice Heath, approaches that soon became known as “New literacy studies.”¹⁵ Graff presented several considerations for the third generation. One important step would be a critical examination of the conceptualization of literacy itself, partly under influence from anthropology and psychology, partly to avoid generalizations and sweeping explanations, because literacy only has meaning within specific contexts. Another important notion was the link between literacy and “the creation of meaning,” that is, the interaction between reader and text and the responses to writing and print.

Through his two books published in 1987, Graff himself has become the most influential scholar of this third generation of historical literary studies in the 1980s and 1990s. One was The Labyrinths of Literacy, an assemblage of essays previously published in scholarly journals between 1975 and 1986, which provides a highly informative image of the coming of age of a historical field of study.¹⁶ The second, The Legacies of Literacy, is a wide-ranging account of the development of literacy in the West, from its origins in ancient Greek and Rome through the Middle Ages and the early modern and modern eras and finally probing into the future.¹⁷ Throughout his work Graff stretches the complexities of what is behind the apparently simple concept of literacy and promotes a critical view over any simplistic, sweeping, and deterministic conceptions of it:

Until recently scholarly and popular conceptions of the value of the skills of reading or writing have almost universally followed normative assumptions and expectations of vague but powerful concomitants and effects presumed to accompany changes in the diffusion of literacy. For the last two centuries, they have been intertwined with post-Enlightenment “liberal” social theories and contemporary expectations of the role of literacy and schooling in socioeconomic development, social order and individual progress.¹⁸

Graff termed this general understanding “the literacy myth,” and he argues that it can no longer serve as a model of explanation.¹⁹ Some of the most influential works of the preceding two decades within the realm of historiography of texts had, according to Graff, all been underpinned by the notion of change, progress, and modernization. Most scholarship about literacy was governed by evolutionary premises, where literacy, development, growth, and progress are inseparably linked.²⁰ Graff, however, rejects the hypothesis that phenomena such as literacy and print culture were somehow inherently related to an equally self-evident modernization process.

The noticeable influences of what can only be termed postmodernist views on Graff’s scholarship are clearly projected in a new introduction to the 1995 edition of The Labyrinth of Literacy, in which Graff lists nine common conclusions from recent studies in the field, of which the second i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Toward a New Model of Fragmented History
• PART I Theory and Historiography
• PART II The Structure of Culture and Education
• PART III Barefoot Historians and their Everyday Life
• Bibliography
• Index