Lawbooks and Literacy in Medieval Wales

European and Scandinavian Research on Literacy

“…This is true not only for the sources from Denmark and Sweden, but also for the earliest written laws of Iceland and Norway. 36 Moreover, this is not an issue particular to the northern peripheries of Europe, for it also seems to cause problems in dealing with laws in terms of the oralwritten continuum in western as well as eastern parts of Europe (Vollrath 1995;Pryce 2000;Kejr ‡ 2004;Jurek 2004). Consequently, it is likely that any conclusions drawn from the study of the majority of genres situated on the threshold between orality and literacy are probably valid for the rest of them -particularly those genres tied to performance, such as poetry, verses and sagas.…”