Multilingualism and Writing Practices in Defining Communities. Italy in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages

The book aims to study writing practices from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance, and their relations to codified language norms in use at the time, as well as to the social communities in which these practices were produced. The book first provides a state-of-the-art theoretical framework on more well-studied types of language communities, such as communities of practice, discourse, and text, but also discusses other useful concepts for the study of writing communities of the past, such as community agency and delegation, which were relevant in times when people generally had less access to writing and reading skills. Secondly, it offers a series of solid research based on empirical data on writing practices of the past, from a less frequently studied perspective, i.e. by considering the nature of writing practices from ‘below’ as they appear in non-literary products.