that manifest intramonumental mixing are the largest group. In these, one or two discrete texts are written in a language different from the one that dominates in that site. This group can be divided into three subtypes according to the kind of texts involved: didactic tituli; devotional and dedicatory inscriptions; and sacred speech acts. In the first subset, one or two short tituli interrupt an otherwise monolingual pattern of figural identification. Nicholas, who scarcely needed identification, received a double titulus more often than any other saint, although in the crypt church dedicated to Michael at Li Monaci it is the archangel and John the Evangelist who received the double label, done by the same hand [43.st.1]. As in this case, only rarely is the saint with the extra titulus the titular saint,83 so the double name is not warranted by communal significance; nor is the doubly labeled figure the name saint of any patrons or supplicants or artists whose inscriptions survive (there is a low correspondence in the Salento between supplicants and homonymous saints).84 Most likely the special tituli were connected with an individual’s desire to advertise personal devotion by visual means: more text attracted more attention because of the power of script itself. Sacred figures were made more powerful and more insistently present by graphic and epigraphic means.
A second type of intramonumental language mixing occurs when the lessused language is employed for a devotional or dedicatory text. Hence a layman and a Latin text are inserted into the otherwise entirely Greek program at the Orthodox monastery of Santa Maria di Cerrate [114.E–G; Plate 15]. Clearly, the Lord accepted prayers in both Greek and Latin, and language did not preclude someone from patronizing a church of a different Christian confession. The third type occurs when code switching indicates a speech act by a holy person. In the thirteenth-century Annunciation scene in San Pietro at Otranto, the titulus for the archangel Gabriel is in the church’s dominant language, Greek, but his salutation to the Virgin is rendered in Latin.85 The open Gospel book held by Christ at several sites displays text in a language different from the majority inscriptional language in the church. It serves to distance him from the local speech community, and a few individuals likely reaped social benefits from this change of code: the local priest may have been seen as bridging the gap between sacred and secular because of his (relative) scriptural literacy, and the patron’s status would only increase if the language of the sacred citations were also his own public language. This was certainly the case with John of Ugento at Acquarica [1.A].
Only a few sites in the medieval Salento can be termed “bilingual monuments.” In these cases there is no dominant language; both Greek and Latin are used extensively and contemporaneously. Perhaps the best example is the dated crypt at Li Monaci, where the long dedicatory inscription is in Greek [43.A], two saints are identified in both Greek and Latin [43.st.1], the protagonists in the Annunciation and the Crucifixion are labeled only in Latin, and the Crucifixion scene in the apse has the titulus “VICT[OR] MORTIS” [43]. The date in the dedicatory text (1314/15) applies to all of the extant images on stylistic and paleographic grounds. The French-surnamed patron employed a father-and-son team of painters, one of whom used artistic models intended for Roman-rite places of worship even though this site was intended for Orthodox use: it contains an exclusively Orthodox saint, Onouphrios, in the left corner. In the left apse niche, an elderly John the Evangelist—the Byzantine type, not the youthful evangelist favored in European art—holds a Gospel book that has around its edge Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος (“In the beginning was the Word,” John 1:1) [43.st.1]. Above him, a partly preserved fragment of a fish is the one that swallowed Jonah, identified by the letters omicron plus a superimposed pi and rho, the beginning of ho prophetos, “the prophet,” in Greek. The connection between Jonah and John is both liturgical and textual. In the Orthodox liturgy the book of Jonah was read at Vespers on Holy Saturday while John 1:1 was read the next morning, Easter Sunday. The text of Jonah begins “The Word of the Lord came to Jonah” and John’s Gospel begins “In the beginning was the Word.”86
Adjacent to Jonah and John at Li Monaci is the Annunciation, done by a different hand and labeled in Latin [43]. Several Byzantine hymnographers linked Jonah with the Virgin, including an eighth-century ode by Cosmas the Melodist that also references the Logos, as on the Gospel book held by John.87 Farther to the right is the apse Crucifixion with its exceptional titulus referring explicitly to Christ’s victory over death rather than to the usual “Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews” [43.A]. Such an explicitly salvific title reinforces the message of the Jonah image and strongly suggests a funerary function for the church. The presence of the Virgin and John flanking the cross brings the image in line with the deesis imagery more typical of apses in the Salento. At Li Monaci, then, the languages serve to introduce the complexity of the cultural space.
Literacy
The preceding discussion of bilingualism raises the question of literacy, a term that is notoriously difficult to define. Does it imply reading complex texts, or only recognizing one’s name? Does it require the ability to write or only to read? How many spelling or grammatical errors are permitted before one’s supplication is considered illiterate? However it is defined, there are no studies of medieval literacy that focus on public texts in the Terra d’Otranto. Among private texts, historians who have studied notarial documents identify as illiterates those parties or witnesses who cannot sign their names and instead make the sign of the cross.88 In Taranto, the notarial acts in Greek from the tenth to thirteenth centuries reveal approximately 70 percent literacy, 27 percent semiliteracy, and only 3 percent illiteracy.89 At the same time, some of the monks at the important Orthodox monastery of Saint Nicholas at Casole could not read Greek.90 A study of Latin usage in medieval Bari found a high level of literacy among upper- and middle-class laymen and a lower level among ecclesiastics, two-thirds of whom did not surpass the elementary level.91 While functional literacy seems to have been more prized in Byzantium than in Europe, this was no longer true, at least in Italy, by the thirteenth century.92
Jack Goody wrote, “Where writing is, class cannot be far away.”93 Literacy was a source of social power, and the very fact of an inscription connoted status; this was true in antiquity and it remained true in the Middle Ages and beyond.94 The literate, or those who could afford to fabricate evidence of it by commissioning texts, dominated the illiterate majority through the power of the word. “Monumental texts may exercise power through their location in space and the way they look,”95 and many of the local dedicatory inscriptions—solid, framed blocks of words—were inscribed permanently, or at least durably, in prominent interior and exterior spaces. Most are in a church apse or over a doorway, obvious focuses of viewer attention. In this way messages and status were broadcast widely. The multiplication of monumental texts, such as the repeated strips of information in the Otranto mosaic pavement [86.C–G], make grand statements that attract the eye, as do texts supplemented by figural imagery. Devotional and funerary texts are rarely as long, as prominent, or as sizable as dedicatory inscriptions, but when they are disproportionately large or noticeable they command proportionally greater attention. Anyone entering the Carpignano crypt would be drawn to Stratigoules’s burial site, which has the longest funerary text in the Salento in any language and a unique arcosolium setting [32.J]. With its composition underscored by color, its intimate physical connection with sacred figures on the intrados who shelter the tomb, and its literary pretensions (regardless of its dodecasyllabic defects),96 this text for a dead boy mostly helped his father stake his place in the local community, despite his modest title of σπαθάριος.
Linguistic Identities
La‘az
