If You Can Read This.......
by Nicolaa de Bracton of Leicester
Have you ever wondered whether your persona could read and write?
If you have, have you ever wondered how common literacy was in the
Middle Ages, or how medieval people defined "literacy"? If these
questions are of interest at all to you, read on...
It is commonly assumed that in the early Middle Ages, knowledge
of Latin was confined to clerics, and even then, to only the most
educated among them. In The Carolingians and the Written
Word (Cambridge University Press, 1989), Rosamund McKitterick
contests this view, contending that knowledge of Latin was far
more widespread than previously thought in the Carolingian age
(approx. 750-950 AD). First, she argues that the language spoken
in the part of Francia west of the Rhine was, for all intents and
purposes, Latin, rather than Old French as was previously thought.
Thus, when a person living in this era encountered a page written
in Latin, he or she read it as his or her native language, even
though pronunciations clearly had changed since the classical age.
One can compare it with the position of English in many Caribbean
countries today: though as written, it looks just like "regular"
English; when spoken, it sounds very different.
Since Latin, in a sense, was still the "vernacular" of the
western part of Francia, there was no need to learn it as a
"second" language, though scholars from Anglo-Saxon England who
had had to learn it this way were often appalled by the bad Latin
of the Carolingians. Thus, there is evidence that a far wider
segment of the population was literate at least in practical
terms. Court officials and counts often possessed a wide
collection of books, including law books, which they were clearly
expected to use. Upper-class men and women who are clearly not
clerics are known to have written works in Latin; and of course,
there was the famous school for sons of noblemen sponsored by
Charlemagne himself. The Carolingians, following in the footsteps
of the Merovingians, also put a great deal of weight on written
legal documents as proof of transactions, though oral modes
continued to exist alongside them. The Carolingian period also is
remarkable for the developments in cataloging and organization of
libraries.
McKitterick thus concludes that the Carolingians were in some
sense a "literate society", in that they valued and made use of
the written word; though she does acknowledge that her study has
concentrated mostly on the upper ranks. It nonetheless adds
another nail in the coffin of that outdated term of "Dark
Ages".
Turning to a slightly later period, there is M. T. Clanchy's
From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307
(Blackwell, 1993). Clanchy's subject is the spread of literacy and
literate culture in England in the centuries following the
Conquest, specifically in relation to the proliferation of written
documents. The evolution of charters, from Domesday book to the
explosion in records-keeping in the late thirteenth and early
fourteenth century is traced, along the corresponding spread in
literacy which made this possible. Also discussed are the
mechanics of literacy-- who kept records, how they were trained,
and what materials (parchment, ink, wax, etc.) they used. Also
discussed are the invention of recordkeeping methods, such as
indexing, and the growth of libraries.
The book's second section is invaluable when attempting to gain
an understanding of the way medieval people perceived writing and
written culture. Included is a discussion on the meanings of
"literate" and "illiterate" in the medieval context (the meanings
today are considerably different), as well as a discussion on the
evolution of writing from pure artwork to something which can have
a purely practical use in some circumstances, and the
corresponding spread of literacy which makes this possible.
Finally, the growing acceptance of a piece of writing over a
memory as evidence of a transaction is detailed, along with
conventions of dating, signing, and sealing which become necessary
to guard against forgery. Readers may want to compare English
society, where Latin never held the sway it did in France and
Italy, with the Carolingian society described by McKitterick.
Reading this book should give you a good idea of what any given
person from the time period covered would have known of writing
and language. I also recommend the book to scribes for its
in-depth treatment of the construction, meaning, and use of
medieval documents.
Copyright 1994 by Susan Carroll-Clark, 53 Thorncliffe Park Dr.
#611, Toronto, Ontario M4H 1L1 CANADA. Permission granted for
republication in SCA-related publications, provided author is
credited and receives a copy.