Spoken Word and Social Practice: Orality in Europe (1400-1700) addresses historians and literary scholars. It aims to recapture oral culture in a variety of literary and non-literary sources, tracking the echo of women’s voices, on trial, or bantering and gossiping in literary works, and recapturing those of princes and magistrates, townsmen, villagers, mariners, bandits, and songsmiths. Almost all medieval and early modern writing was marked by the oral. Spoken words and turns of phrase are bedded in writings, and the mental habits of a speaking world shaped texts. Writing also shaped speech; the oral and the written zones had a porous, busy boundary. Cross-border traffic is central to this study, as is the power, range, utility, and suppleness of speech.

Contributors are Matthias Bähr, Richard Blakemore, Michael Braddick, Rosanna Cantavella, Thomas V. Cohen, Gillian Colclough, Jan Dumolyn, Susana Gala Pellicer, Jelle Haemers, Marcus Harmes, Elizabeth Horodowich, Carolina Losada, Virginia Reinburg, Anne Regent-Susini, Joseph T. Snow, Sonia Suman, Lesley K. Twomey and Liv Helene Willumsen.

Thomas V. Cohen (Ph.D., 1974, Harvard University), is Professor of History and Humanities at York University in Toronto. He writes microhistories about the cultural and political anthropology of early modern Rome, championing close cultural reading of social documents and the narrative light touch.

Lesley Karen Twomey (Ph.D., 1995, Hull University) is Reader in the Department of Arts at Northumbria University. She has published monographs on material culture in religious writing and a study of doctrine in Hispanic poetry and many articles on Isabel de Villena, a fifteenth-century Franciscan woman writer.

Informations pratiques :
Thomas Cohen et Lesley Twomey (éd.), Spoken Word and Social Practice. Orality in Europe (1400-1700), Leyde, Brill, 2015 (Medieval and Renaissance Authors and Texts, 14). Approx. 448 pp. ISBN: 9789004288683. Prix : 162,00 euros.

Source : Brill