La lettre volée. Apprendre à lire à l'enfant au Moyen Âge

摘要

The Purloined Letter. The deciphering of micrographed texts in scenes of learning how to read in medieval miniatures allows one to discern which texts children worked on from the 13th to the beginning of the 16th centuries. Their first reading was in Latin, but the texts used were simple and closely related to everyday life events. In addition, tablets and abc primers were combined with educational objects (alphabet belts and platters) to constitute a two fold oral teaching strategy involving both reading and pronouncing out loud, and nutritional symbolism deriving from the double meaning of the verb nourrir [to nourish]: to feed and to educate. The initiation to reading, whose rhythm can be detected in the alphabets' graphic apparatus, involved the senses: taste, sight hearing and touch were required, the latter deriving from the semantic association between text and textile.