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Singing the New Song

Literacy and Liturgy in Late Medieval England

by Katherine Zieman

  • Hardback
  • 314 pages
  • Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
  • 16.6 x 23.1 x 2.9 cm

£71.18

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In Singing the New Song, Katherine Zieman examines the institutions and practices of the liturgy as central to changes in late medieval English understandings of the written word. Where previous studies have described how writing comes to supplant oral forms of communication or how it objectifies relations of power formerly transacted through ritual and ceremony, Zieman shifts the critical gaze to the ritual performance of written texts in the liturgy--effectively changing the focus from writing to reading.Beginning with a history of the elementary educational institution known to modern scholars as the "song school," Zieman shows the continued centrality of liturgical and devotional texts to the earliest stages of literacy training and spiritual formation. Originally, these schools were created to provide liturgical training for literate adult performers who had already mastered the grammatical arts. From the late thirteenth century on, however, the attention and resources of both lay and clerical patrons came to be devoted specifically to young boys, centering on their function as choristers.Because choristers needed to be trained before they received instruction in grammar, the liturgical skills of reading and singing took on a different meaning.This shift in priorities, Zieman argues, is paradigmatic of broader cultural changes, in which increased interest in liturgical performance and varying definitions attached to "reading and singing" caused these practices to take on a life of their own, unyoked from their original institutional settings of monastery and cathedral. Unmoored from the context of the choral community, reading and singing developed into discrete, portable skills that could be put to use in a number of contexts, sacred and secular, Latin and vernacular. Ultimately, they would be carried into a wider public sphere, where they would be transformed into public modes of discourse appropriated by vernacular writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland.
Singing the New Song and The Essential History of Christianity
The Essential History of ChristianitySinging the New Song

  • Author

    Katherine Zieman

  • Book Format

    Hardback

  • Publisher

    University of Pennsylvania Press

  • Published

    February 2008

  • Weight

    609g

  • Page Count

    314

  • Dimensions

    16.6 x 23.1 x 2.9 cm

  • ISBN

    9780812240511

  • ISBN-10

    0812240510

  • Eden Code

    1160952

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