Over the last few decades the issues of literacy and the written word in medieval Europe, and their relationship to orality, have preoccupied medieval scholars. The problem has been particularly fraught for the uneven and—relative to the High Middle Ages—sparsely documented early medieval period. Especially important in this assessment has been the east Frankish evidence, which is richly documented with monastic charters, some of the most promising materials for shedding light on literacy within and beyond the cloister. The east Frankish region has also been deemed an intriguing area for the study of literacy because of its complex linguistic heritage: its inhabitants spoke and thought in non-Romance vernacular languages, which presented particular difficulties for mastering Latin, the official tongue of administration and liturgy. This linguistic complexity has also posed problems for modern medieval historians, who have been trained mostly to handle Latin, rather than the old vernacular languages. Consequently, although many historians have long noted the precociousness of vernacular composition in central Europe, most have been reluctant to confront the evidence in an intimate and systematic way. The study of vernacularity has largely remained the province of historical linguists, who have, by contrast with historians, tended to mine texts for linguistic data, frequently ignoring historical context and the gritty manuscript evidence. Fortunately, Anna Grotans, who possesses both a sophisticated understanding of the late Carolingian context, a firm grasp of linguistic research and theory, and a thorough command of Latin and Old High German, has produced a meticulously researched monograph that transcends scholarly disjunction and makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of the precise relationship between orality, the written word, and its primary context, the monastic culture of early medieval Europe.

Professor Grotans has chosen to focus on the east Frankish monastery of St. Gall, which has long stood out for its unusually rich body of Old High German compositions, in particular those of Notker Labeo, whose sophisticated commentaries and translations have long fascinated linguists. Grotans's argument is deceptively straightforward: in an area where non-Latinate languages were spoken, the written vernacular at St. Gall evolved in response to the challenges posed by the teaching of lectio, i.e. the oral performance of Latin texts. That itself is not entirely novel: literary and linguistic scholars in recent decades have been insistent on the primacy of Latin as an antidote to the extravagant views of earlier philologists, who wanted to see in the vernacular phenomenon a (proto-nationalist) cultivation of German for its own sake. What is invaluable here is Grotans's sustained and rigorous demonstration of the proposition. Her close examination of the texts and the fascinating manuscript evidence brings readers face to face with the struggle to teach, learn, comprehend, and vocalize Latin texts, a process that required that the vernacular, if it were to be a tool for understanding Latin, be refined and regularized.

The book is divided into two parts, the first comprising three chapters, which explore the contemporary cultural and educational context, and the second encompassing four chapters, which examine the educational challenges, as they are manifest in Notker's texts and the extant manuscripts. The first part introduces readers to the pedagogical milieu: the received tradition of classical ideals about grammar and reading, the goals of monastic learning, the mechanics of the curriculum, the budding curricular emphasis on dialectic as an aid to comprehension, and the diglossic culture of St. Gall, all of which underscore the challenges facing teachers, such as Notker. In the second part, Grotans shows how Notker deployed a number of strategies to help his students master lectio: punctuation and the syntactic rearrangement of Latin and vernacular words, phrases, and sentences to aid comprehension and oral emphasis; and the development of accent marks and the regularization of orthography to assist enunciation. Particularly fruitful is Grotans's careful work in the manuscripts, which reveals the pragmatism of Notker's pedagogical strategies, as opposed to the image put forth by many critical editors, who have treated Notker as a tenth-century field linguist and, thus, presumed to “correct” his “system” of recording German.

The preoccupation with lectio cannot, Grotans concedes, account for all of the patterns in Notker's works. Nonetheless, by placing the accent, so to speak, on pedagogy and reading, Grotans's explication of the work and world of Notker Labeo, the pre-eminent composer of Old High German texts, has presented to us an intimate view of the impulses responsible for the remarkable innovations in the vernacular, indeed in the mechanics of writing more generally, that have impressed themselves on the western written tradition.