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Message: <blockquote data-quote="WayneLigon" data-source="post: 730710" data-attributes="member: 3649">Re: Re: Literacy in a medieval fantasy world?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 <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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