Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France
For a long time scholars have generally shared the belief that late medieval authors - particularly in England and especially Chaucer - wrote for private readers. This book challenges that view and current orthodoxies in orality-literacy theory. It assembles and analyses in depth, for the first time, an overwhelming mass of evidence that in both Britain and France from the mid-fourteenth to the late-fifteenth century, literate, elite audiences continued to prefer public reading (aloud in...
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This book demonstrates that received views on orality and literacy underestimate the importance of public reading in the late Middle Ages.
List of illustrationsPreface1On beyond Ong: the bases of a revised theory of orality and literacy12Taxonomies and terminology: the pursuit of disambiguity343A review of the secondary literature524The social context of medieval aurality: introductory generalizations from the data765Aural history1096An "ethnography of reading" in Chaucer1487An "ethnography of reading" in non-Chaucerian English literature179Conclusion221Notes223Glossary228Bibliography231Index245
