Practical scripts: Writing practices, languages, and communities in Italy. Latin Antiquity and the Middle Ages

Writing practices are always anchored in culturally oriented aspects of human society and in those connected to material subsistence. On the one hand, the evolution of writing practices is always culturally motivated through historical data, providing a glimpse into changes of a cultural, economic, and social nature in the observed society. On the other hand, its study can aid in the reconstruction of the development that led to the substitution of Latin with local Italian vernaculars (or volgari in the Italian tradition) during the transition from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages. The book takes a fundamentally multidisciplinary approach. On the one hand, it integrates methods of textual philology, historical sociolinguistics, historical pragmatics, and the history of past communities. On the other hand, each contribution examines similar phenomena from a specific angle (e.g., historical linguistics, theoretical linguistics, sociolinguistics, Greek and Latin linguistics, Romance philology, palaeography, and Medieval history). These different perspectives enable the identification of linguistic and discourse practices that reflect sociocultural dynamics in significant historical contexts, ultimately evaluating the interpretive potential of modern theoretical models applied to past communities and their relevance in historical sociolinguistics.