Book review

Carlquist, Jonas, Handskriften som historiskt vittne : fornsvenska samlingshandskrifter - miljö och funktion. (= The manuscript as a witness of past times. Old Swedish miscellaneous manuscripts - social context and function). Stockholm: Sällskapet Runica et Mediævalia, 2002. 158 pp. ISBN 91-88568-13X.

As has never been completely forgotten within the community of textual scholarship, the very medium of the textual carrier, the document, can fruitfully be regarded as a signifier in its own right, rather than as a transparent and therefore trivial container of abstract works. The external evidence of the material document is quite often specifically related to the contents of the work as well as to the usage and social functions of the document at hand. This is obviously a major theme in any research conducted along the lines of New Philology, which exhibits a shift in perspective from the intentional work to the material documents and their functions. It also forms the rationale for this study by Jonas Carlquist (JC), senior lecturer at the Department of contemporary literature and the Nordic languages at Umeå University, Sweden. JC, an expert on old Swedish manuscript sagas and hagiography, has during the last years extended his fields of research to include matters of textuality, scholarly editing, and media theory. Using these broader perspectives, along with that of New Philology, he gives an overview of Swedish manuscript culture in the Middle Ages, summarises what previous research has been conducted on the manuscripts as physical objects, considers the strengths and weaknesses of previous scholarly editions of this kind of material, and provides a methodological discussion in the light of new media and the promises of electronic editing and presentation of medieval manuscript material.

The very epistemology of New Philology suggests thorough document analyses and documentary scholarly editions of manuscripts as textual witnesses to contemporary history, practices, usages, functions, and significances. JC's study provides such a document analysis on some 20 Swedish medieval miscellaneous manuscripts written in the vernacular. It confines its inductive conclusions to the way the manuscripts presumably were intended to be used, de facto were used, and particularly to how they were read - aloud or silently. It does this by codicologically scrutinising the external evidence such as layout, structure, format, extent, material support, script, headings, formulae, paralinguistic markers (e.g. pointing hands), annotations and glossae, combined with some content observations (genre and overarching theme), and connecting the results of the investigation to previous findings and theories on the reading practices of manuscripts put forward by e.g. Paul Saenger (Space between words : the origin of silent reading, Stanford, 1997). JC hypothesises as to the functions and readings of the manuscripts studied and contributes to our understanding of Swedish manuscript culture. He counters e.g. the argument put forward by previous research that most of these manuscripts were read aloud to a listening audience. JC argues convincingly on the basis of the physical evidence in the documents, that the manuscripts on the contrary for the most part were read silently, suggesting a different view of the social usage and functions of the manuscripts. In putting more emphasis on the physical evidence rather than on the linguistic contents of the textual witnesses, this kind of analysis might well be regarded as analytical bibliography, modern book history, or McKenzie's sociology of texts, indeed as a representative of new cross-disciplinary fields, combining perspectives from both linguistic, literary, media, and bibliographic research. JC's study provides a much-needed overview of extant miscellaneous vernacular manuscripts in Sweden, along with a well-written, intelligent, and relevant methodological discussion.