Writing and the Administration of Medieval Towns

The thirty-three essays in these two volumes (Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, vols. 27 and 28) span a wide chronological and geographical range: from the tenth to the sixteenth century, from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean, and from the Atlantic to the Black Sea. Just under half the essays are devoted to eastern Europe, from Livonia to Poland, Ruthenia, Hungary, Transylvania and Croatia. In descending order, a further six treat the Low Countries; five, Austria, Germany and Switzerland; three each, Scandinavia and Italy; two, the Iberian peninsula; and a solitary one, England. This focus, the editors, Marco Mostert and Anna Adamska, assure us, was deliberate—to shift attention away from the earliest manifestations of notarial and literary activity in France and Italy to the northern and eastern European lands and to areas outside the west European mainstream. Only one essay, by Eltjo Buringh (in Vol. II) offers a Europe-wide comparison of book production in assessing the varying extent of manuscript losses. In this—by far the longest essay in the two volumes—it is far from clear that the parade of statistical expertise (a highly unorthodox approach to estimating totals of manuscript production and losses, as Buringh himself admits) tells us anything that could not be gleaned from conventional historical analysis: rather, it strikes one as an exercise in the author’s own cleverness

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