TY - CHAP AB - During the centuries we focus on here, people communicated in very refined and highly differentiated ways. Therefore the chapter not only tries to focus on literacy, orality, messengers and rituals, but also attempts to shed light on how a combination of these elements in a given situation worked. The objective is to modify the motion that rituals are irrational and literacy means rationalization. Rituals are increasingly seen as an expression of clever political moves, and charters, books and the reading of texts portrayed as ritualized performances. While dichotomies seem to vanish and teleological narrative is discredited, despite long and intense research efforts, the relationship between rituals, literacy and medieval society is still a story ending with ‘to be continued’. DO - 10.4324/9781003080206 KW - ritual KW - literacy KW - orality LA - eng PY - 2020 SN - 978-1-138-64946-0 TI - Practices Of Communication. Literacy, gestures and words: research on late medieval communication UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0070-pub-29460636 Y2 - 2024-12-27T12:46:13 ER -