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Teaching writing, learning to write: proceedings of the XVIth colloquium of the Comité International de Paléographie Latine

her letters. The second example is more convincing as a ‘success’ – the development of the citizen’s custumal, a term Richardson uses to denote codices most often called ‘commonplace books’, private miscellany volumes collecting together the customs of the city, chronicles, gazetteers, poetry, devotional texts, and a host of other materials. For Richardson, these are handbooks describing ‘what it is, or perhaps what it should be, to be a London merchant of around 1500’ (p. 169). Strikingly conservative, these texts ‘mark both the highest aspirations and the intellectual limits of mainstream London middle-class writing’ (p. 155). I have one major criticism of this admirable book: the use of the term ‘middle class’ in the title and throughout to describe the Londoners whose use of writing Richardson examines. He defines his use of the term, which of course does not appear in medieval sources, as encompassing London merchants and artisan guild members (pp. 10–12), the 7.5% stratum at the top of the urban hierarchy possessing citizenship or ‘freedom of the city’ (p. 6). As Richardson himself says (p. 11), for us the term ‘middle class’ is a rather vague one with multiple meanings; its utility to describe London citizens depends on whether it conjures for the reader a roughly accurate socio-economic cognate. It is likely that different readers will take it in different ways; I would venture, however, that for at least some readers it will not suggest the top 10% slice of the socio-economic hierarchy, but instead ‘average’, ‘middling’ or ‘ordinary’. In North America, famously, everyone thinks they are ‘middle class’ regardless of place on the economic ladder, and increasingly Britons, too, are adopting this denotation of averageness. Yet those whose relationship to the written word Richardson examines in this book were by no means ‘ordinary’ Londoners. This is especially true of those on whom he puts special focus, such as Robert Chichele (the exemplar in Chapter 2) and Elizabeth Stonor (the exemplar in Chapter 4). Chichele, for instance, although described by Richardson as ‘typical’ (p. 17), was twice mayor, immensely wealthy, and highly connected in national politics; to use the parlance of 2011–12, he was the 1%, more CEO than Joe Average. This cavil should not detract from the achievement of this book, which transforms our understanding of writing in late medieval English culture. I hope an affordable paperback edition is forthcoming, as it deserves a place on the bookshelves of any scholar interested in rhetoric, genre, politics, economics, or the history of the written word.