Matti Peikola and Mari-Liisa Varila on the metadiscourse of graphic devices.
Our article examines how tables, diagrams and other graphic devices were made accessible to readers of Middle English texts from the late 14th to the early 16th century. We focus on metadiscourse employed by text producers to identify and describe graphic devices and to guide readers in using them. Such material is found in short descriptive text elements like titles, rubrics and headings, as well as in longer instructive items such as rules and canons, primarily in the domains of science and religion. The material context of the book also features in our analysis, as we discuss visual and spatial relationships between the graphic device and related metadiscourse on the manuscript page.
In the article, we argue that Middle English metadiscourse about graphic devices may be compared functionally to the work performed by (extended) captions in present-day data visualisations for example in science text books. The high degree of reader engagement and detailed procedural instructions sometimes present in the data suggest that graphic literacy competences of the intended vernacular readership might not always have been very high. Evaluative strategies sometimes used by text producers might indicate that some readers had to be persuaded about the efficacy of graphic devices. Scrutinising the relationship between graphic devices and metadiscourse associated with them opens up fundamental questions about the primacy of text versus image and discourse versus metadiscourse. In the framework of the EModGraL project, our article provides a helpful precursor to our examination of similar phenomena in early printed books.
Peikola Matti & Mari-Liisa Varila 2024. Presenting manuscript tables and diagrams to the Middle English reader. Journal of Historical Pragmatics. https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.22004.pei.
Matti Peikola
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