"The foundations for the present volume were laid at the international symposium Linguistics Meets Book History: Seeking New Approaches, organized by the Pragmatics on the Page research team in Turku, Finland, 24-25 October, 2014"--Page ix. Includes bibliographical references (pages 251-276) and index.
Contents:
Whose letters are they anyway? Addressing the issue of scribal writing in Bess of Hardwick's Early Modern English letters / I.J. Marcus. Discourse variation, Mise-en-page, and textual organization in Middle English saints' lives / Colette Moore -- How the page functions : reading Pitscottie's Cronicles in manuscript and print / Francesca L. Mackay -- Verbal and visual communication in the title pages of Early Modern English specialized medical texts / Maura Ratia and Carla Suhr -- Quantifying contrasts : a method of computational analysis of visual features on the early printed page / Jukka Tyrkkö -- Stating the obvious in runes / Yin Liu -- Labours lost : William Caxton's "Otiose" sorts, c. 1472-1482 / Anya Adair -- Code-switching, script-switching, and typeface-switching in Early Modern English manuscript letters and printed tracts / Samuli Kaislaniemi -- Seeing is reading : typography in some Early Modern dictionaries / R.W. McConchie -- Whose letters are they anyway? Addressing the issue of scribal writing in Bess of Hardwick's Early Modern English letters / I.J. Marcus.
Summary:
The volume innovatively combines book studies with linguistics to explore the interplay of verbal and visual/material communication in early English manuscripts and printed texts. When reading a text our understanding of its meaning is influenced by the visual form and material features of the page. The chapters in this volume investigate how visual and material features of early English books, documents, and other artefacts support - or potentially contradict - the linguistic features in communicating the message. In addition to investigating how such communication varies between different media and genres, our contributors propose novel methods for analysing these features, including new digital applications. They map the use of visual and material features - such as layout design or choice of script/typeface - against linguistic features - such as code-switching, lexical variation, or textual labels - to consider how these choices reflect the communicative purposes of the text, for example guiding readers to navigate the text in a certain way or persuading them to arrive at a certain interpretation. The chapters explore texts from the medieval and the early modern periods, including saints' lives, medical treatises, dictionaries, personal letters, and inscriptions on objects. The thematic threads running through the volume serve to integrate book studies with discourse linguistics, the medieval with the early modern, manuscript with print, and the verbal with the visual.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.