With reference to medieval England M. T. Clanchy argues that “the growth in the uses of literacy [between 1066 and 1307] is indicated by, and was perhaps primarily a consequence of, the production and retention of records on an unprecedented scale.” That is, rather than view literacy as a step on the road to literature, to learning and high culture, Clanchy stresses the interrelationship between literacy and administrative practice. Writing creates the possibility of documentation; documentation brings more people into contact (...) with the written word ; and, in time, as documentation becomes accepted as necessary, as mental habits adjust to it, as reliance upon it increases, so it in turn stimulates further expansion in the uses of literacy. (shrink)

To describe a book as “long-awaited” is a reviewer's cliché. In the case of this book, however, it is a gross understatement. Materials for the new edition of Malalas were initially assembled by K. Weierholt. In the mid–1970s, after Weierholt's death, the project was taken over by Hans Thurn. By the time of Thurn's own death in 1993 the edition was almost ready, but still a further seven years, and the assistance of several other scholars, were required before Ioannis Malalae (...) Chronographia finally appeared. In the interim we had the curious phenomenon of the “Australian Malalas” — an English translation and apparatus based on a far fuller set of testimonia than the edition on which it was principally based (Dindorf's Bonn edition of 1831, shorn of that edition's misreadings of the main witness, MS Baroccianus Graecus 182 in the Bodleian Library). (shrink)