History of Reading News. Vol.XXI No.1 (1997:Fall)
by NANCY ANN VIGHETTI

Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France, by Joyce Coleman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. 250. Illustrations, biblio. $59.95.

Simply put, Coleman's thesis is that listening to literary works was a viable activity long past the various dates posited for its demise by the propounders of the "Great Divide" of oral/literacy theory. To Coleman, "aurality" (or the "reading of books aloud to one or more people," p. xi), was a common event and signaled that medieval people enjoyed the shared experience of hearing an author or other person read a work prepared to be heard, or as she calls it, "prelectated." The arrival of the Renaissance heralded not the extinction of aurality, but its transformation. By the end of her argument, she has demolished the orality/literacy dichotomy of earlier researchers and outlined a model from which all researchers in reading and the history of reading will benefit.

To delineate her model of reading, Coleman has created new terms. The term "modality" acts as an umbrella for var-ious "formats" or "pragmatic events." Her paradigm includes four formats: (1) "oral-written-formulaic," composed of common motifs and standard formulas used in performance, mainly by bards; (2) "memorial," or texts that are presented orally from memory instead of from the printed page; (3) "prelection," or a public reading of a text, whether it has or has not been written in order to be read aloud; and, finally, (4) "private," or works that are read aloud or silently to oneself (p. 35). In addition, there is a further option for a text to be a "dividual text" ("dividual" being defined as one who reads privately).

During the construction of this new paradigm, Coleman provides a firm basis for her work by her position that "we should work outward from given texts and literary environments to develop a culture-specific descriptive system" that arises from the documents, the era, and the place rather than being imposed from on high (p. xii). When, for instance, Coleman delves into the work of Chaucer, the most important of the authors she explores, she employs her flexible paradigm in a manner that leaves no doubt in the reader's mind as to how inadequate the old schema of orality/literacy is. Chaucer begins each of his narratives with "a paradigmatic piece of reading that illustrates the specific benefits the audience can derive from the poem to follow" (p. 177). Traditionally, critics have claimed that later poets imitated his fictive orality. To Coleman, it is unreasonable to assume that for a period of over 150 years before and after Chaucer this approach derived "from the somehow universal desire to give private readers the thrill of pretending to be hearers" rather than actually hearing the texts read aloud (p. 179).

Coleman's "ethnography of reading" cohabits comfortably with Hymes' "ethnography of speaking" (1962) and Basso's ethnography of writing" (1974). Although she does not stress it, the three ethnographies are so closely intertwined that all who are interested in forms of communication, as well as the history of reading, now have a grasp of the intricacies involved in comprehending ourselves and our forerunners in the use of communication. In this superb work, Coleman cites what she calls the "mixed-mode" of reading--a concept that works as well for the Ancient World and the modern world as for the medieval period. For example, orality, the stage that supposedly preceded literacy, still exists in television and radio. Similarly, her "aurality" exists in libraries where children gather to hear "prelected" texts, in books read for the blind, or in authors' readings of their works on cassettes.

The book includes a glossary of terms, an extensive bibliography, a good index and illustrations. If there is a revised edition, one hopes the publisher will take more care with the printing of the illustrations, or perhaps print them in color so that their symbolic aspects will be easier for non-medievalists to comprehend.

The few faults in this excellent work cannot be laid at the author's doorstep. Coleman was asked to cut her manuscript to a more manageable length--an understandable request. But she has been ill-served by her editor who did not catch many infelicitous or jarring phrases. Moreover, the publisher uses the APA style of documentation, citing most references in parentheses in the text. The work is so chopped with these that it is difficult to read. Had Cambridge University Press used numbered notes throughout, readers could more easily come to terms with Coleman's valid "modalities" in reading.

REFERENCES

Basso, K. (1974). The ethnography of writing. In R. Bauman and J. Sherzer (Eds.), Explorations in the ethnography of speaking (pp. 425-432). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hymes, D. H. (1962). The ethnography of speaking. In T. Gladwyn and W. Sturtevant (Eds.), Anthropology and human behavior (pp. 13-53). Washington, DC: Anthropological Society of Washington.

NANCY ANN VIGHETTI is an adjunct instructor in the Department of Educational Services at Brooklyn College of CUNY, where she teaches developmental reading. She is currently working on an M.A. in English and Comparative Literature and has recently taught a course in Children's Literature.