In “Abbreviating Middle English: scribal practices, visual texts and medieval multimodalities” (The New Middle Ages Series) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) Justyna Rogos-Hebda examines how abbreviation symbols helped create linguistic and cultural meanings of texts before print and why hypertextuality, multimodality and interactivity can be useful interpretative lenses for manuscript texts.
The book examines medieval textuality and the creation of meaning in the pre-print era from the perspectives of contemporary, digitally oriented multimodality, visual pragmatics, and communities of (textual) practice. Following a group of English scribes, who between the 14th and 16th c. were copying popular texts of Richard Rolle, John Lydgate, and John Gower, Rogos-Hebda explores how scribal strategies for abbreviating frequently recurring orthographic and linguistic elements transform the manuscript text into ‘multimodal parchment,’ whose multilayered meanings are inaccessible in a modern print edition but can be recovered by contemporary readers utilizing tools similar to those they employ when engaging with the digital page.
