Our paper illustrates an approach to historical text which we call materialist pragmatics, bringing together pragmatics and materialist philology. Scholarly interest in the visual aspects of the manuscript (or early printed) page is now growing, after a long time with very little collaboration between historians of the book and historical pragmaticians. Their approaches are brought together in our research in order to study both the relationship between the individual version of a work and its manuscript context (cf. Nichols & Wenzel 1996) and the relationship between an utterance and its situational context (cf. Mey 2001). We treat each physical instance of text as an utterance, regarding the book as a communicative object generated by specific producers (e.g. scribes, illuminators, printers) to serve the needs of specific consumers (e.g. readers, benefactors, patrons) within specific communicative settings.
In order to study ‘pragmatics on the page’, we have devised a four-stage methodology which utilizes tools and concepts from both manuscript/book studies (e.g. Mak 2011, Parkes 1992, Peikola 2008) and historical pragmatics (e.g. Brinton 1996, Carroll 2005-6, Moore 2011). This paper illustrates our methodology by comparing visual choices made in different manuscripts and early printed editions of the late medieval Polychronicon, John Trevisa’s Middle English translation of Ranulf Higden’s narrative history of the world. The source material ranges from Manchester, John Rylands Chetham’s MS Mun.A.6.90 and other manuscripts (e.g. BL Cotton Tiberius D VII, Cambridge, St John's College H.1 (204), Glasgow UL Hunter 367) to editions printed by Caxton and Treveris, and thus from the late fourteenth to the early sixteenth centuries (Waldron 2004).
These utterances of the Polychronicon differ from each other in terms of both linguistic form and visual rendition. We demonstrate how images, colours, layout, and styles of script or typeface function as “contextualization cues” (Gumperz 1992) – pragmatic signals akin to intonation, pausing, etc. – having a bearing on how the content and language of the text are received. By matching such visual and material choices with discourse features we are able to analyse producers’ desire to convey information about text structure, authorial stance, and interaction with the consumer.
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