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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr. Strangemonkey" data-source="post: 731577" data-attributes="member: 6533">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.</blockquote>

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