Abbreviating Middle English Scribal Practices, Visual Texts and Medieval Multimodalities

Abbreviating Middle English: Scribal practices, Visual Texts and Medieval Multimodalities investigates the changing dynamics of scribal abbreviating practices in a corpus of late Middle English manuscripts of Richard Rolle’s, John Lydgate’s and John Gower’s works and reinterprets these practices from new perspectives of visual pragmatics, medieval multimodalities and visual code-switching. Spanning the boundaries of manuscript studies, cultural semiotics and text-image approaches to pre-modern written sources, the book studies scribal abbreviations and medieval visuality and links them with modern practices of textuality by combining tools and methods of traditional disciplines employed in the study of historical texts as well as those developed for the analyses of modern discourse. Justyna Rogos-Hebda outlines the main directions in abbreviation studies, describes research methods and considers the broader developments in manuscript studies integrating aspects of materialist philology, multimodality theory, visual pragmatics and visual and code-switching into descriptive-analytical models of medieval textualities. Rogos-Hebda aims to problematize abbreviation within the socio-cultural contexts of medieval mentalities, Christian hermeneutics and Middle English multilingualism to unpack the multilayered motivations for the practices of scribal communities.

1: Introduction.- 2: Abbreviation in pre-modern texts: from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance.- 3: The symbolic properties of abbreviation.- 4: Abbreviation as image.- 5: Abbreviation as a (pseudo-)linguistic element.- 6: Corpus and method.- 7: Abbreviations in late Middle English literary manuscripts: evolution of forms and functions.- 8: Making sense of abbreviation in late Middle English literary manuscripts.- 9: Synopsis and conclusions.

Justyna Rogos-Hebda is Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of English at the Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland. Her research interests include medieval paleography and codicology, scribal languages, Latin abbreviations, medieval multimodalities, visual pragmatics, paratexts and history of the book.