Ferguson 2003 - Revision history

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			:Ferguson, Margaret. ''Dido's Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France.'' Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

			Dido "opens a space for my inquiry into a topic that is not a recoverable set of facts but rather a set of shifting relations that are constitutively shaped in the very process of being interpreted." (1) -- dramatizes competing histories (2)

			"literacy as a shifting and plural phenomenon" (3)

			:"I argue that the idea of a uniform national language has a long and socially fraught history that, when studied, invites us to complicate our ideas about what it means to be literate in one's national language." (4)

			:"we should study standardization, a key facet of modernization, as a field of ongoing social contest in which various, often hierarchizing, ideas about speech and writing have significant social consequences" (4)

			Behn's translation of Ovid for Dryden; Behn presented as not competent in Latin, but putting those better to shame; "distinctions between translation, imitation, and original creation are often conspicuously blurred" (8)
			* Behn "at once enters and remains marginal to a literary and linguistic domain that she herself helps to define. This, I contend, is the domain of cultural literacy." (9)

			:"the concept of gendered literacies as I use it in this book encompasses a set of practices by persons highly aware that they must write with or against readers' expectations about gender roles; it also includes discursive prescriptions and institutional rules working to divide literate practices into male and female kinds." (10)

			problem of '''missing evidence, gaps in the historical record'''

			:"Although literacy is often conceptually opposed to orality or, in some schemas, si seen as it natural historical successor, my study is concerned with both the material and the metaphorical connections among speaking, writing, reading, and communicating in other ways as well -- through embroidered images, for instance, or through remaining silent when others expect one to speak." (12)

			:"At issue are not only privileged uses and users of language, but also what counts as valuable knowledge in a given language." (16)

			:"''empire'', in this book's argument, like ''literacy'', is a signifier that points to sets of questions rather than to answers. Empirical facts are part of the signified I seek to illuminate, but they are not the whole of it." (18)

	== Competing Concepts of Literacy in Imperial Contexts: Definitions, Debates, Interpretive Models ==		== Competing Concepts of Literacy in Imperial Contexts: Definitions, Debates, Interpretive Models ==

Wtrettien: /* Discourses of Imperial Nationalism as Matrices for Early Modern Literacies */

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Discourses of Imperial Nationalism as Matrices for Early Modern Literacies

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	Anderson and others see nationalism only emerging recently with linguistic commonality brought about by print; but also happened in the past; "not all species of nation -- now or in the past -- have required 'mass' literacy in a single national language supported by print technology, although some definitions of ''nation'' (Gellner's, for example) seem to presuppose just this connection between (a certain) literacy and the emergence of the nation. I am arguing, however, that nationalist ideologies, like those of Protestantism, may officially promote literacy for all subjects of the polity, while in actuality the nations in question not only tolerate but benefit from multiple language uses and highly stratified forms of literacy." (154)		Anderson and others see nationalism only emerging recently with linguistic commonality brought about by print; but also happened in the past; "not all species of nation -- now or in the past -- have required 'mass' literacy in a single national language supported by print technology, although some definitions of ''nation'' (Gellner's, for example) seem to presuppose just this connection between (a certain) literacy and the emergence of the nation. I am arguing, however, that nationalist ideologies, like those of Protestantism, may officially promote literacy for all subjects of the polity, while in actuality the nations in question not only tolerate but benefit from multiple language uses and highly stratified forms of literacy." (154)
	* "Ideas of the nation ~~s a~~ linguistically plural, even divided, entity were available as an ideological resource in the c16 -- a resource potentially as valuable as the fiction of national unity and the desideratum of one language." (154)		* "Ideas of the nation as linguistically plural, even divided, entity were available as an ideological resource in the c16 -- a resource potentially as valuable as the fiction of national unity and the desideratum of one language." (154)

			:"Bourdieu is partly right when he says that 'the process of linguistic unification went hand in hand with the process of constructing the monarchical state.' But such a formulation presents unity -- of state and language -- as an achieved fact or social product rather than as a set of prescriptions and practices that have historically been challenged by various groups and by many linguistic practices, including some that left traces in the written record even when they occurred outside the spheres of influence of the court or the school." (164)

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	Anderson and others see nationalism only emerging recently with linguistic commonality brought about by print; but also happened in the past; "not all species of nation -- now or in the past -- have required 'mass' literacy in a single national language supported by print technology, although some definitions of ''nation'' (Gellner's, for example) seem to presuppose just this connection between (a certain) literacy and the emergence of the nation. I am arguing, however, that nationalist ideologies, like those of Protestantism, may officially promote literacy for all subjects of the polity, while in actuality the nations in question not only tolerate but benefit from multiple language uses and highly stratified forms of literacy." (154)		Anderson and others see nationalism only emerging recently with linguistic commonality brought about by print; but also happened in the past; "not all species of nation -- now or in the past -- have required 'mass' literacy in a single national language supported by print technology, although some definitions of ''nation'' (Gellner's, for example) seem to presuppose just this connection between (a certain) literacy and the emergence of the nation. I am arguing, however, that nationalist ideologies, like those of Protestantism, may officially promote literacy for all subjects of the polity, while in actuality the nations in question not only tolerate but benefit from multiple language uses and highly stratified forms of literacy." (154)
			* "Ideas of the nation s a linguistically plural, even divided, entity were available as an ideological resource in the c16 -- a resource potentially as valuable as the fiction of national unity and the desideratum of one language." (154)

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	Empire; "What is an empire or a nation in transitional-era England or France, if we take into account, in our definitions, the views of those who may dispute the monarch's definition?" (143)		Empire; "What is an empire or a nation in transitional-era England or France, if we take into account, in our definitions, the views of those who may dispute the monarch's definition?" (143)

			"partial literacies" -- "a capacity to receive instruction in the vernacular -- an inferior language for 'imperfect' people, but a language nonetheless being modeled on Latin and intermittently seen as useful for national administrative and propaganda purposes. Such a literacy entails submissive reception of discourse, but not the production of alternative narratives; hence it is appropriate for subjects of nascent empires." (150-1)

			Anderson and others see nationalism only emerging recently with linguistic commonality brought about by print; but also happened in the past; "not all species of nation -- now or in the past -- have required 'mass' literacy in a single national language supported by print technology, although some definitions of ''nation'' (Gellner's, for example) seem to presuppose just this connection between (a certain) literacy and the emergence of the nation. I am arguing, however, that nationalist ideologies, like those of Protestantism, may officially promote literacy for all subjects of the polity, while in actuality the nations in question not only tolerate but benefit from multiple language uses and highly stratified forms of literacy." (154)

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	== Discourses of Imperial Nationalism as Matrices for Early Modern Literacies ==		== Discourses of Imperial Nationalism as Matrices for Early Modern Literacies ==

			Benedict Anderson, print-capitalism (135-6)

			Empire; "What is an empire or a nation in transitional-era England or France, if we take into account, in our definitions, the views of those who may dispute the monarch's definition?" (143)

Wtrettien: /* Sociolinguistic Matrices for Early Modern Literacies: Paternal Latin, Mother Tongues, and Illustrious Vernaculars */

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Sociolinguistic Matrices for Early Modern Literacies: Paternal Latin, Mother Tongues, and Illustrious Vernaculars

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	vernacular language "should thus be seen, however counterintuitively, as a kind of ideological back-formation, a product of political and economic as well as professional-intellectual interests tied to the emergent phenomena we now call nation-states" (119)		vernacular language "should thus be seen, however counterintuitively, as a kind of ideological back-formation, a product of political and economic as well as professional-intellectual interests tied to the emergent phenomena we now call nation-states" (119)
	* figured as "female subject to be improved by the hand of the male writer" (122)		* figured as "female subject to be improved by the hand of the male writer" (122)

			Thomas Wyatt, "Whoso list to hunt" as translational (122ff.)

	:"Subtending the pervasive idea that the vernacular is like female 'nature,' an entity in need either of protection from foreign contamination and/or of improvement -- sometimes by 'borrowing' words from other tongues, sometimes by being rules through grammar, sometimes by retrieving 'old' words from the past -- is the idea that educated men should devise artful ways to cultivate the vernacular as if it were a colonial territory." (125)		:"Subtending the pervasive idea that the vernacular is like female 'nature,' an entity in need either of protection from foreign contamination and/or of improvement -- sometimes by 'borrowing' words from other tongues, sometimes by being rules through grammar, sometimes by retrieving 'old' words from the past -- is the idea that educated men should devise artful ways to cultivate the vernacular as if it were a colonial territory." (125)

	:"process whereby a male-authored book takes the place of a female teacher who used oral means of instruction" (128)		:"process whereby a male-authored book takes the place of a female teacher who used oral means of instruction" (128)

			:"Dante's treatise points to an emergent clerkly investment in addressing but also controlling readers who were 'like women' i nthat they lacked full literacy, defined as command of the paternal language; defective with respect to clerks, as women in general were held (by Aristotelians) to be defective with respect to men, such readers were both threatening and desirable as subjects riper for instruction." (129)

			grammar as cornerstone of ideal language in early modern Europe

	== Discourses of Imperial Nationalism as Matrices for Early Modern Literacies ==		== Discourses of Imperial Nationalism as Matrices for Early Modern Literacies ==

Wtrettien: /* Sociolinguistic Matrices for Early Modern Literacies: Paternal Latin, Mother Tongues, and Illustrious Vernaculars */

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Sociolinguistic Matrices for Early Modern Literacies: Paternal Latin, Mother Tongues, and Illustrious Vernaculars

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	Tower of Babel (linguistic diversity is bad) vs. Pentacost (linguistic diversity can be revelatory); "Looking at the matter from a different angle, however, we can see 'diversity of tongues' and multiplicity of media -- oral, written, and, eventually, printed -- as the components of a complex imperial culture that changed over time, but not in a way that simply supports the idea of an epochal shift from 'oral' to 'literate' societies, much less from oral to literate 'mentalities.' The societies in question were more various, across times as well as spaces, than such generalizations suggest, even when the generalizations are granted some causal force in shaping history." (95)		Tower of Babel (linguistic diversity is bad) vs. Pentacost (linguistic diversity can be revelatory); "Looking at the matter from a different angle, however, we can see 'diversity of tongues' and multiplicity of media -- oral, written, and, eventually, printed -- as the components of a complex imperial culture that changed over time, but not in a way that simply supports the idea of an epochal shift from 'oral' to 'literate' societies, much less from oral to literate 'mentalities.' The societies in question were more various, across times as well as spaces, than such generalizations suggest, even when the generalizations are granted some causal force in shaping history." (95)

			post-Norman conquest, Anglo-Saxon replaced by Latin as a language of record; Latin spread, competed with Anglo-Saxon, written French and eventually Chancery English; switch from Anglo-Saxon to Latin changed the ''structure'' of literacies characteristic of A-S and Norman England (Clanchy's argument) (97-8)

			c12-c16, french associated with sexuality, upper-clss bodies, romance, seductive superficiality of "fashion" (100

			books giving vernacular language lessons in French directed at adult women (100)

			'''colinguisme''': from Balibar; association of certain state languages within an apparatus of languages in which they find their legitimacy and their working material (101)

			first four dictionaries in English, aimed at explaining "hard words" to female readers (105) -- from Fleming's work

			vernacular languages -- learned at home, not mediated by texts, learned orally by imitation; "associated in late medieval and early modern texts with feminine language uses and genres, as well as with mothers and nurses wrongly exercising pedagogical authority" (107)

			clerks -- Latin as having "qualities of fixity, authority, and power" equated with its grammar (108)

			:"Because language standards exist at the level of ideology before (and arguably after) they are thought by historians actually to have come into existence, the historiography of standardization is fraught with problems." (114)

			:"Insofar as modern historians of the language adopt the perspective as well as the metaphors of early humanist scholars -- especially the metaphors of a competition among 'noble' languages, which transfer to the realm of clerkly labor the glamour of aristocratic warfare -- standard histories of the standardization of language work to distract attention from the messier, often quieter, ways in which certain languages or linguistic practices disappear, or at least disappear form areas of culture considered important." -- need to pay attention to ideologies of gender and status (116)

			early modern educators wanting to "replace and somehow incorporate" the mother tongue and in doing so "drastically decrease the authority of mothers, nurses, and female teachers" (117)

			vernacular language "should thus be seen, however counterintuitively, as a kind of ideological back-formation, a product of political and economic as well as professional-intellectual interests tied to the emergent phenomena we now call nation-states" (119)
			* figured as "female subject to be improved by the hand of the male writer" (122)

			:"Subtending the pervasive idea that the vernacular is like female 'nature,' an entity in need either of protection from foreign contamination and/or of improvement -- sometimes by 'borrowing' words from other tongues, sometimes by being rules through grammar, sometimes by retrieving 'old' words from the past -- is the idea that educated men should devise artful ways to cultivate the vernacular as if it were a colonial territory." (125)

			:"process whereby a male-authored book takes the place of a female teacher who used oral means of instruction" (128)

	== Discourses of Imperial Nationalism as Matrices for Early Modern Literacies ==		== Discourses of Imperial Nationalism as Matrices for Early Modern Literacies ==

Wtrettien: /* Sociolinguistic Matrices for Early Modern Literacies: Paternal Latin, Mother Tongues, and Illustrious Vernaculars */

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Sociolinguistic Matrices for Early Modern Literacies: Paternal Latin, Mother Tongues, and Illustrious Vernaculars

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	== Sociolinguistic Matrices for Early Modern Literacies: Paternal Latin, Mother Tongues, and Illustrious Vernaculars ==		== Sociolinguistic Matrices for Early Modern Literacies: Paternal Latin, Mother Tongues, and Illustrious Vernaculars ==

			:"A history of standardization as a heterogeneous set of discourses in which ideas about speech and writing influenced practices in both domains, and vice versa, must relinquish neatly linear dating schemes. At the same time it must deploy a highly skeptical attitude toward evidence pertaining to relations between rpescriptive texts and actual social practices in populations divided by gender, social status, religion, and many other factors influencing how people use languages and -- equally important, from my perspective -- how people feel that language use works as a mark of social difference." (85)

			clerkly discourses created a "standard"; such that many speakers of say English "found themselves in the odd situation of not knowing what some of their countrymen referred to as their mother tongue" (85-6)

			late med/early mod: Latin slowly being replaced by "imperial" languages used by clerks working for monarchies and modeled on Latin (86)

			unskillful literacy -- "partial or imperfect kind of literacy for people defined chiefly as readers, not writers, by educated men in creating texts in a grammaticized vernacular" -- "vision of reader-consumers adumbrated by writers deeply attached to an old idea of Latinity but also invested -- for economic, political, and theological reasons -- in reaching an audience that lacks more than a smattering of Latin" (87)

			diversity of languages in early mod Europe (90ff.)

			problem of '''dialect''' (92ff.)

			Tower of Babel (linguistic diversity is bad) vs. Pentacost (linguistic diversity can be revelatory); "Looking at the matter from a different angle, however, we can see 'diversity of tongues' and multiplicity of media -- oral, written, and, eventually, printed -- as the components of a complex imperial culture that changed over time, but not in a way that simply supports the idea of an epochal shift from 'oral' to 'literate' societies, much less from oral to literate 'mentalities.' The societies in question were more various, across times as well as spaces, than such generalizations suggest, even when the generalizations are granted some causal force in shaping history." (95)

	== Discourses of Imperial Nationalism as Matrices for Early Modern Literacies ==		== Discourses of Imperial Nationalism as Matrices for Early Modern Literacies ==

Wtrettien: /* Competing Concepts of Literacy in Imperial Contexts: Definitions, Debates, Interpretive Models */

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Competing Concepts of Literacy in Imperial Contexts: Definitions, Debates, Interpretive Models

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 * "the epistemological problems of ethnocentrism are central and inescapable whenever we undertake to analyze literacy in cultures distant from our own in time and/or in space" (52)
 * "one cannot simply pay lip service to the methodological problem presented by one's own historical, and in many cases professional, investment in a particular view of literacy" (54)
 == Sociolinguistic Matrices for Early Modern Literacies: Paternal Latin, Mother Tongues, and Illustrious Vernaculars ==
 == Discourses of Imperial Nationalism as Matrices for Early Modern Literacies ==

Wtrettien: /* Competing Concepts of Literacy in Imperial Contexts: Definitions, Debates, Interpretive Models */

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Competing Concepts of Literacy in Imperial Contexts: Definitions, Debates, Interpretive Models

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	flashcard literacy (36)		flashcard literacy (36)

			until c19, "literature" and "literacy" used interchangeably to denote being well-read and ability to read/write (39)

			''how do interpretations of literacy affect performance? see e.g. pg 40''

			"Great Divide" theories -- orality vs. literacy (44) -- often "read like slightly secularized narratives about the Fall of Man", with it being both liberating and damning (45) (Levi-Strauss)

			"culturalist view" (Derrida)

			Levi-Strauss/Derrida debate; lessons to learn:
			* "the epistemological problems of ethnocentrism are central and inescapable whenever we undertake to analyze literacy in cultures distant from our own in time and/or in space" (52)
			* "one cannot simply pay lip service to the methodological problem presented by one's own historical, and in many cases professional, investment in a particular view of literacy" (54)

	== Sociolinguistic Matrices for Early Modern Literacies: Paternal Latin, Mother Tongues, and Illustrious Vernaculars ==		== Sociolinguistic Matrices for Early Modern Literacies: Paternal Latin, Mother Tongues, and Illustrious Vernaculars ==

	== Discourses of Imperial Nationalism as Matrices for Early Modern Literacies ==		== Discourses of Imperial Nationalism as Matrices for Early Modern Literacies ==