Literacy in a medieval fantasy world?

[Dinkeldog]

Adventurers are exceptional people. Probably the only change that would really need to happen would be to say that commoners and warriors are illiterate, and then make sure that most of the people in the world are commoners or warriors.

Remember, just because the PCs are all literate doesn't mean that Farmer Ham is, too.

 

[Kilmore]

Personally, I'd like to see Literacy be a skill like it is in life, with different levels like other skills. But most games treat it as a have-not have thing.

 

[blargney]

Great discussion!

I like the comparison with a magical late Middle Ages/slightly pre-Renaissance Europe. It makes sense that magic and wizardry provide an outlet for creative engineering tinkerers, therefore physical technology is vastly under-developed (and outclassed!). I'm going to need to cogitate some on the long-range consequences of this assumption... I'd love to hear your experiences on the subject!

I think that in order for literacy to be truly widespread, there would need to be some magical equivalent of the printing press. Manually scribing books is simply too long, costly, and tediously boring for it to persist in a magically empowered world. I'll see if I can't make a low-level cleric & wizard spell for copying mundane text relatively easily and cheaply. (I'm actually thinking of Rita Skeeter's Quick Quotes Quill from Harry Potter - it's a quill that automatically writes what it hears (sort of). It's a fun mental image!)

I can accept the fact that adventurers are not normal people by definition, so it isn't too huge a logical leap to arrive at the conclusion that they ought to know how to read.

Reading and writing is basically a trick that you learn once, and ever after you can apply the principle to whatever languages you learn. In that light, I think that I might make Literacy a virtual feat that PC classes possess. There is a pre-requisite though: for any given character to be literate, the player needs to explain to me how their character learned to read. NPC and barbarian classes do not have the virtual feat, but they can learn it by burning a feat on it. Anything that gives me more plot hooks can't be a bad thing!

I actually have a bit of a bone with the Speak Languages skill as well. It simply doesn't reflect the difficulty of learning languages, as far as I'm concerned. Speaking is one thing, but reading a language is something completely different. If you've learned Chinese, you know what I'm talking about. I'm thinking of adopting the following modifications to the skill:

1) It costs 1 rank of Speak Languages to learn to speak (only) a language.
2) It costs one rank of Speak Languages to learn a given alphabet. This doesn't mean you can read the language, just that you've learned the alphabet.
3) It costs one rank of Speak Languages to learn to read a given language. This obviously requires knowledge of the alphabet first.

An interesting side-effect of this is that you can learn to read a language without knowing how to speak it. (Hint: think Ancient Egyptian or Sanskrit.) The fact that it costs more skill points to learn a language is a good thing, in my books. I like granular language abilities.

-blarguage

 

[David Argall]

literacy rates

"That the vast majority of peple were illiterate during the late Middle Ages is an often held misconception of the era. Although that was indeed true during the Dark/Early Middle Ages, by the late/high Middle Ages literacy in Europe has shot up dramatically Historians estimate that by the time of the Reneissance, the majority of people in Europe were literate. "

Figures I find on a quick search are male literacy in 1500 - 10%, 1714 - 45%, 1750 - 60%. Female rates were much lower. This seems consistent with there being little to read prior to the printing press, and thus little reason to be literate.

While D&D is rather a mixture of periods, I say we were well prior to 1500, and thus quite low literacy rates.

 

[WayneLigon]

Re: Re: Literacy in a medieval fantasy world?

Rather, unlike medieval Earth, D&D worlds are 'medieval' for long periods of time; they do not progress industrially because Magic serves the purpose of technological advancement or captures the minds of the dedicated individuals who would come up with steam power, automobiles, and the internet.

I think one reason it does is because most literary fantasy worlds are like that as well. And also, for thousands of years there were only small changes in our real world. The quality of life for the vast majority of people (those away from certain large centers of trade) didn't substancially change for, well, thousands of years. Born, work, raise some goats, die.

I don't think it really follows that a middle ages world will move into the Rennaisance/Age of Discovery/Industrial Revolution pattern in the time it took ours to. I don't think anyone quite knows the answer to the how and why it did happen to us. A couple of timely plagues, a few inventions at the right time, and BOOM. We go from wagons to spaceships inside of 200 years.

My mom and dad adopted me late in life. Mom's mother had her late in life. Grandma in her childhood (somewhere along 1880) was country and poor, off in the hills of rural Kentucky. She was something like 25 years old before she saw light that was not made by the sun, fire or lightning. When she was growing up, they had no running water, no electricity, no motive power other than walking or a horse.

They lived not unlike farmers in the middle ages must have lived, save that they were not living under feudalism (Unless you count the feud with the pig farmers in the next valley, who had stolen a butter churn once) and they could read, after a fashion. Grandma could read her Bible and most store signs, and she could sign her name and the names of her children easily but anything else was hard. Two of her older sisters never bothered with that. By the time she died, people had been to the Moon more than once, and she lived in a nice modern 1970's apartment.

She often commented she felt like she was living on an alien planet

 

[blargney]

Re: Re: Re: Literacy in a medieval fantasy world?

Grandma in her childhood (somewhere along 1880) was country and poor, off in the hills of rural Kentucky.

She often commented she felt like she was living on an alien planet

What a great backstory! I want to make her an NPC in my game
-blargma

 

[WayneLigon]

Re: Re: Re: Re: Literacy in a medieval fantasy world?

What a great backstory! I want to make her an NPC in my game
-blargma

Certainly She would have liked that.

 

[mkarol]

Re: Re: Re: Literacy in a medieval fantasy world?

I don't think it really follows that a middle ages world will move into the Rennaisance/Age of Discovery/Industrial Revolution pattern in the time it took ours to.

That was mostly my point. Granted, the only published D&D world with which I have any familiarity is FR, whose history has been magical/medieval for 5000 years.

Where as we notice literacy tracking to technological advancement (printing press, steam engine, electricity, internet) and therefor 'time' advancement from medieval to renaissance to Industrial Era to modern; in a magical world where the technology doesn’t advance, the literacy still may. Communication is always important in every society (whether in a positive or negative way is dependent on the society). So once there is _some_ literacy, I believe that it would continue to snowball towards %100; even if not making it there.

In other words, I do not think most D&D words are medieval in the sense we think of it. I think that they are in a "magical revolution" or even further along. Granted, in a low-magic world, this all changes...

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

There is a lot of debate over literacy levels in the middle ages in academic circles. While there is a commonly held theory that most textbooks, encyclopedias, and other sources of convenient knowledge will espouse that theory is not nearly as unquestioned as those sources would lead you to believe.

Aside from the question of actual numbers and percentages there are other factors involved, mostly questions over the level of literacy and the use of it and how we define those in terms of our own concept of literacy.

For instance, in America today most of the literate population can read and write in one language, but this would have been an unheard of phenomena in the portion of the population that we normally refer to as literate during the period. Most people would have spoken several languages, and those who could read were likely to have reading knowledge of at least two languages and likely many more. By the standards of the time most Americans are only semi-literate. The main point being that the standards of the current theory are skewed toward the highly literate, a classification that one might argue is even more absent from our society, until we hit the beginings of print culture.

The flipside of this is that there was likely to be a much much larger population who possessed various levels of functional reading. Merchants who could puzzle out ledgers, yeoman who could decipher the bits of public writing that they saw, and people who could make their way through a bit of cultural material know and again.

Then there is the question of use, in a context in which private reading and privacy are kind of stupid concepts the real question might be how much access a community had to literacy, and this was likely to be fairly high. Communities that didn't have a smaller subset who could give everyone some access to the written world are likely to have been very common verging on the vast vast majority. As someone else pointed out, communication is important and literacy is going to snowball into a massive effect on society.

One of the most interesting, IMO, aspects of medieval society is how creative they were in solving the literacy problem and how well adapted they were to the technologies of literacy they possessed. In many ways I feel that the people of the middle ages had a far more sophisticated understanding of textual and communication technologies than we possess today. As a more objective example, look at the manner in which contemporary hypertext theories base themselves off of medieval glossing techniques. Only recently has mankind begun to rerecognize the communal nature of text.