Writing Practices

by

Martyn Lyons

• LAST MODIFIED: 23 September 2024
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199799558-0218

Introduction

The history of writing practices (or of scribal culture) brings together anthropologists, paleographers, cultural historians, literary specialists and sociohistorical linguists in the study of the function and purposes of writing in past societies. It takes as its starting point the advice of Armando Petrucci that the uneven distribution of literacy skills is a key to understanding the workings of any society, the inequalities which distinguish it, and the power relations which govern it. The importance of writing did not diminish with the advent of print, and in the nineteenth century writing became indispensable at every level of society. In the second half of the century, one important event caused a seismic revolution in the volume of writing produced by ordinary people: the mass emigration of millions of people from Britain and Europe to North and South America, Australia, and New Zealand. Many untutored and semiliterate writers were now compelled to become familiar with the act of writing, in order to maintain contact with home. This bibliography places particular emphasis on the writings of ‘ordinary’ people—that is to say, people of modest social origins and limited literacy competence, who usually (there are exceptions) wrote with no literary aspirations. A variety of genres is encompassed here: not only canonical genres such as autobiography and the private journal, but also other forms of what Dutch historians have called “ego-documents,” such as correspondence (of emigrants and paupers), love letters, postcards, commonplace books, petitions, handwritten newspapers, and writing on the body (prison tattoos). Unfortunately, not every form of vernacular writing can be included, because the scholarly literature has hitherto overlooked it or considered it unworthy of serious study. For example, scholars of graffiti in early modern Britain have not yet extended their attention to the modern period. Similarly, further study is needed of the Valentine card, which reached the height of popularity in Victorian Britain. The widespread importance of correspondence to the history of writing practices also demands study of the infrastructure of postal services that made the exchange of letters possible, and determined its cost and timing. The history of writing practices must attend to the changing nature of writing as a technology, and this bibliography accordingly offers a preliminary guide to works on writing instruments and materials, from the quill pen to the typewriter. Here, too, there are important lacunae—namely, lack of scholarly studies of ink and paper in Victorian Britain.

Anthropology of Writing

The history of scribal culture in any period is informed, explicitly or implicitly, by anthropological theories of writing. Anthropological theories are not necessarily connected to any specific place or period, but they present ideas which may inform the history of writing practices in any society. Two of them are particularly relevant: anthropologists have emphasized the role of writing in the expansion of the bureaucratic state, and they have tried to isolate the characteristic differences between oral speech and the written word. Celebrated Cambridge anthropologist Jack Goody (Goody 1977, and Goody 1986) together with American scholars Walter J. Ong and David R. Olson (Ong 1982 and Olson 1994) all made influential interventions to conceptualize the importance of writing systems and the transitions from oral to written cultures. Goody and Ong started from the premise that societies with writing were fundamentally different from those without knowledge of writing. They further argued that the introduction of the Greek alphabet was a radical change, enabling more rational, detached, and analytical thinking to develop. These arguments implied that writing not only changed the administrative and legal structures through which societies organize themselves, but also changed the thought processes of writers themselves. Making lists and plans, for instance, and putting things in hierarchical order, were hallmarks of written culture. Writing was for Goody a “technology of the intellect.” Although the anthropological works selected here have been criticized for their Eurocentrism, and for exaggerating the ‘Great Divide’ between traditional and modern, they remain influential statements about the power of writing. They are cited in this section in chronological order of publication. Offering a critique of these views, scholars of the “New Literary Studies” have more recently argued that writing is not a technical skill, but a cultural practice which is essentially situational. Its role and function depend, in other words, on the sociohistorical circumstances in which it is produced. There are many forms of writing literacy—vernacular literacy, school literacy, professional literacy—and writing ‘acts’ are always embedded in the power relationships governing any society. This ‘ideological’ view of writing is represented here by Street 1984 and Barton and Hamilton 2000. Writing must be studied as a material practice, dependent on specific instruments and support materials, as ancient historians are well aware (Piquette and Whitehouse 2013). Lyons and Marquilhas 2017 advocate a very similar agenda for the modern period.

• Goody, Jack, and Ian Watt. “The Consequences of Literacy.” In Literacy in Traditional Societies. Edited by Jack Goody, 27–68. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1968.

  This collection discusses anthropological fieldwork across the world, but is important firstly for Schofield’s essay on the measurement of literacy (see The History of Literacy, and Oxford Bibliographies in Victorian Literature article “Literacy” by Rosalind Crone); and secondly, because the editors’ chapter has introduced concepts of “restricted literacy” and the “margins of literacy,” using that to distinguish traditional from modern societies. The authors have regarded the Greek alphabet as a radical departure and considered the impact of writing’s transformative powers.

• Goody, Jack. The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1977.

  Goody here rearticulates his original arguments about the influence of writing on cognitive processes and the accumulation of knowledge. But the book also reads like a climb-down from some of the author’s earlier statements. Goody was in this work anxious to avoid a radical, ethnocentric dichotomy between traditional and modern ways of thinking, between the written and the oral. The book’s title, however, seemed to undermine this attempt.

• Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982.

  DOI: 10.4324/9780203328064

  In this book, Ong explores the essential characteristics of oral, as opposed to written cultures. The author assesses the psychodynamics of oral texts, their reliance on memory and redundancies, and oral texts’ lack of analytical capacity. In contrast, writing, Ong argues, encouraged analysis and introspection. Ong claims that the adoption of the Greek alphabet was crucial to these processes—a claim which made the theory vulnerable to accusations of Eurocentrism.

• Street, Brian V. Literacy in Theory and Practice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

  Street argued against regarding writing simply as a technical skill with neutral political implications and detached from any real social context. He criticized anthropologists’ treatment of oral cultures as “pre-logical” or primitive. He wanted to abandon the “great divide” between oral and literate and instead study how oral cultures mix and intersect with the written word.

• Goody, Jack. The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

  DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511621598

  This was perhaps the clearest statement of Goody’s insistence on the power of writing to change thought processes as well as influence social organization. Writing enabled governments to establish greater control, more efficient taxation, and legal reasoning on the basis of recorded precedent, but it also encouraged abstract thinking and a new kind of rationality.

• Olson, David R. The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

  Olson began by questioning the significance of the invention of the alphabet, and the assumption that the development of scientific thought depended on writing. He argued that, in the sixteenth century, writing gave Europeans a new sense of objectivity and distance from their texts. Writing therefore generated a distinction between objective and subjective, between mere description and representation.

• Barton, David and Mary Hamilton. “Literacy Practices.” In Situated Literacies: Reading and Writing in Context. Edited by David Barton, Mary Hamilton and Roz Ivanič, 7–15. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.

  The authors propose that literacy is not an autonomous skill but a social practice, historically situated and patterned by social institutions. They categorize acts of writing as “literacy events,” which always exist in a specific social context.

• Piquette, Kathryn E., and Ruth D. Whitehouse. “Introduction: Developing an Approach to Writing Practices.” In Writing as Material Practice: Substance, Surface and Medium. Edited by Kathryn E. Piquette and Ruth D. Whitehouse, 1–13. London: Ubiquity, 2013.

  DOI: 10.5334/bai.a

  The value of this introduction to a collection principally drawn from ancient history is to demonstrate the significance of “graphic culture” as a material practice. Writing, it is argued, must not be considered merely as text, but as part of the material world. As such it needs to be thoroughly contextualized.

• Lyons, Martyn, and Rita Marquilhas. “A World Inscribed – Introduction.” In Approaches to the History of Written Culture: A World Inscribed. Edited by Martyn Lyons and Rita Marquilhas, 1–20. Cham, Switzerland: Springer-Palgrave, 2017.

  DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-54136-5_1

  A short introduction to the study of writing practices and scribal culture, proposing that written documents should be examined as texts, physical objects, and social practice. Chapters 6 to 11 have a connection with 19th-century history.