On 26 March, the Department of English celebrated over coffee and cake the latest publication of the Early Modern Graphic Literacies (EModGraL) research project: an edited peer-reviewed volume entitled Graphic Practices and Literacies in the History of English. The 350-page book is published by the Belgium-based international academic publisher Brepols and edited by Matti Peikola, Jukka Tyrkkö and Mari-Liisa Varila. The chapter authors come from Estonia, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK and USA. They include Aino Liira, Matti Peikola, Janne Skaffari, Hanna Salmi and Mari-Liisa Varila from the Department of English at the University of Turku.
Work towards the book started already in 2021 with the workshop ‘Graphic literacy in the history of English’ that we organised in the 21st International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL) in Leiden – or, more precisely, in a virtual conference space provided by the University of Leiden during the COVID-19 restrictions. At the time of the conference, EModGraL had not yet started, but we had already received the great news about our four-year funding from the Research Council of Finland. This allowed us to plan the book thematically as a project publication from the start.
A potential reader who comes across the book in the Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy series (vol. 61) might think that it focuses on the Middle Ages. The chronological range of the contributions, however, spans from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century. In addition to Middle English, also Early and Late Modern English materials are discussed in the volume with regard to their graphic practices and literacies. It was important for us to find a publishing series that would allow us to foreground themes that run across the chapters without requiring us to confine ourselves to a specific historical period or a specific medium like manuscript or print. We are grateful to Professor Marco Mostert for providing us with a place in his renowned Utrecht series.
Like the whole EModGraL project, also the new book starts from the premise that graphic features of communication (such as tables or diagrams) require literacy skills and competencies that differ from the reading of ‘monomodal’ verbal text. In the context of the project and the book, we are particularly interested in finding out how and for what purposes graphic features of communication were historically used in texts targeted at English-language readers. We also want to see how readers were instructed in these graphic practices and in the acquisition of the literacy skills they entail. In addition to finding out more about the history of multimodal communication in English, our research also targets the early history of data visualisation in a vernacular context. At the same time, we also learn more about how various graphic practices were instrumental in the transmission of information and the construction of knowledge in late medieval and early modern English books.
The new volume may be placed under the broad umbrella of historical pragmatics, a developing and expanding multidisciplinary field. The book has two main parts plus an introductory chapter by the editors and an afterword by Professor Emeritus Jeremy J. Smith (University of Glasgow). Part I (five chapters) addresses graphic features of text that in various ways contribute to the construction of meaning and the organisation of information on the page, such as layout, colour, punctuation and abbreviations. Part II (six chapters) focuses on the use of specific graphic devices like tables, diagrams and representative images. Overall, the chapters examine an impressive range of primary sources of different domains: medical texts, history writing, instructive and didactic texts, administrative accounts and letter-writing.
Those interested in the topic area of this book are warmly welcome to attend the Reading Visual Devices in Early Books conference organised by the EModGraL project on 22–24 May 2025 in Turku. For further information about the programme and registration, please see https://blogit.utu.fi/emodgral/events/.
Text by Matti Peikola
Photo by Teppo Jakonen