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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bacon Bits" data-source="post: 6611679" data-attributes="member: 6777737">Just because books exist doesn't mean literacy is universal.  Indeed, without the printing press, logically, literacy should be rare as books are really expensive to produce.  The human mind is more than capable of storing enough information to survive in a medieval society without the aid of books or writing.  Basically nobody knows more than whatever someone else has taught them directly through apprenticeship.  Get this: Most medieval libraries didn't organize the books and scrolls they had because there wasn't enough knowledge to demand categorization.Look at Western history.  Books were lost completely, or in languages like Greek, Latin and Arabic by the time people went looking for them, meaning you'd basically have to learn another language just to learn how to read.  Aristotle, Plato, Euclid, and Pythagoras were all pre-Christian.  Ptolemy was 2nd century.  Galen was 3rd century.  Rome fell in the 5th, and about the same time Martianus Capella wrote his work detailing the seven liberal arts: the trivium, which includes grammar, logic, and rhetoric to be able to speak and write intelligently; and the quadvium, which was arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy which was really everything related to numeric information that was known.  And that work was pretty much the basis of Western knowledge and information theory for the next 800 to 1000 years.  You'd learn that, and that would be the basics from which you could then study theology, philosophy, politics, etc.  Imagine living in this time.  Everything these people knew, even if you were an intellectual, was old.  You can start to understand how revolutionary the idea was that you could go out and check the facts you'd read in a book against the natural world, or even find new facts that nobody had thought of before.Not much else changed until the West decided to recapture the Moorish lands in Spain in the 11th century (El Cid) and they discovered the Muslim nations had much more advanced knowledge than they did, which encouraged people to start looking for all those old books.  The Renaissance didn't start until the 14th century, but it wasn't until the Protestant Reformation and the discovery of the printing press towards the end of the 15th century that rational thought really took off again.Oh, and for reference, the Bardic system survived into the 19th century.</blockquote>

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