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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Benjamin Olson" data-source="post: 8493585" data-attributes="member: 6988941">Although it is true that Latin-illiterate people would be referred to as "illiterate", literacy in the "vulgar tongues" was also rather low in most places in most times. You're absolutely right that medieval literacy was higher than it is often cited as being (in late medieval Italian Republics getting up as high as 40% by some estimates, and I've seen it claimed 90% for medieval Iceland, though I'd be surprised if that included the slaves), but it was nevertheless lower than you seem to be imagining and your specific examples betray modern assumptions about how the world and literacy "had to" work. While being able to read would likely help a cook employed by a noble family (there were some books of recipes on how to cook elite dishes) and I think I recall some late medieval cook books geared towards semi-elite housewives, most people learned to cook from some other person teaching them how to cook. Indeed even what medieval cook books we do have often don't have terribly complete instructions, even on the ratios of ingredients, it is expected that the reader already has this knowledge or can give it their own variations.In terms of people knowing the laws, they would be orally announced in a variety of ways and contexts, and generally knowledge of them would spread by word of mouth and be maintained by oral tradition for most communities, reconfirmed when someone ran afoul of the law. And, yes, to some degree law would be disseminated in writing, but this was more on a model of the literate members of the community being able to read and/or explain it to the rest of the community (it has been argued that while individual literacy was, to us, rather low in the middle ages, "community literacy", communities having access to the meaning of writing through literate people, was high). And truly law mostly works like this today for most people. Very few people learn that murder is illegal by sitting down and reading a criminal code.I don't really know why you claim a "guard" would need to be literate. I suppose it depends what sort of guard they are. What I can say is that fantasy medieval media has led to a belief that "towns guard" and the like in some sort of a policing role were much more prevelant than they were in most places in the actual middle ages, and so if you think they need literacy for that the guards you are imagining may not have actually existed.</blockquote>

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