Miracles.

A look back at Lapham's on the written word in the Middle Ages ...

In medieval Western Europe, the book was an essential tool for rational debate, but its power went beyond reason. This was an age when a book could work miracles: the book was so much more than a container for words inscribed on pages.

The written word wielded power in part because of the rarity of the skills required to comprehend it, let alone compose in it. In the later Middle Ages, books were produced in increasing quantities for increasingly diverse audiences, but even then, as earlier, in Christendom, literacy was always the reserve of the few. This situation contrasted with Judaism where, at least in theory, every adult male was expected to be able to transcribe the holy texts. It was also a situation that continued to pertain in England in the early eighteenth century: most people were incapable of signing their names. If we move back from that date just three hundred years, we find that reliable estimates are difficult to extrapolate from the incomplete and incidental evidence available: some optimistic assessments would have about a third of England’s population being in some way literate; a soberer guess puts the rate of full literacy closer to one in ten. Those contrasting figures partly reflect complexities of definition. The ability to sign does not necessarily demonstrate wider skills of writing or reading; at the same time, an inability to mark the page with more than a cross does not categorically disprove a capacity to read, even perhaps to a level of some fluency. What is certain is that there was substantial variation and some of the factors affecting that are clear. You were more likely to be able to write if you were a man, not a woman, and if you were one of the minority who lived in a town, not the countryside. Even if you were an urban male, the probability remained that you would be illiterate, unless you were fortunate enough to have been born toward the end of our period into a good family in Florence, which probably had the highest rates of literacy in Europe. Both a result of and a reason for the increase in literacy in that city was the development there, and elsewhere in northern Italy, of education in the vernacular. In other places and at other times, school meant Latin, and instruction was primarily intended for boys who were going to enter the church. The bond between learning and religion remains in English, latent in the double meaning of clerical (contrast clerical assistant with clerical garments). The implication is that those who came to gain some facility in reading and writing in their mother tongue may not have had access to the lingua franca of communication shared across Europe. Only a minority of the small minority who were literate were so literate to the level of being literati.

Readers were few, but writing was everywhere. You might not have been able to decipher the letters, but you would have been hard pressed to escape encounters with texts. Words were written on wooden markers or chiseled on stones in your local graveyard and painted on the walls of your parish church. They were carried in your purse, as the legend—the literal meaning of which is “what must be read”—on coins. They might travel close to your flesh, as short texts stored in amulets to bring good fortune and ward off evil. Written records were also a technology of control, the documents held by landowners defining the dues they claimed from those who lived on their land—and so writing was, for some, an object of hatred, a symbol of oppression, to be destroyed when the opportunity allowed, as during the Flemish peasants’ revolts of 1323–28, the Jacquerie rebellion in northern France that began in 1358, and England’s Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.

Some enemy deprived me of my life

And took away my worldly strength, then wet me,

Dipped me in water, took me out again,

Set me in sunshine, where I quickly lost

The hairs I had. Later the knife’s hard edge

Cut me with all impurities ground off.

Then fingers folded me; the bird’s fine raiment

Traced often over me with useful drops

Across my brown domain, swallowed the tree-dye

Mixed up with water, stepped on me again

Leaving dark tracks. The hero clothed me then

With boards to guard me, stretched hide over me,

Decked me with gold

Say who I am, useful to men. My name

Is famous, good to men, and also sacred.