By A.D. 476 Italian, Spanish, and French were not even remotely a concept, at most they were funny accents.
Yes, and even by the later middle ages, when the vernacular languages had differentiated, literacy in Western Europe almost always meant literacy in Latin. By that time even written Latin had changed quite a lot from the Latin used in Roman times, but it remained an international language quite different from what local vernaculars had evolved into (and still relatively close to Roman Latin). Vernacular literature does not really begin before people like Dante and Chaucer in the 14th century, and even then, and after, Latin remained the language of the Church and of Scholarship.
Parish priests, through the middle ages, were often illiterate or barely literate in any language.
This site concentrates on Roman Egypt in the early CE; they also estimate literacy at under 10%. This was a multicultural community; Latin, Greek & Egyptian were spoken and some literates only had command of one language.
What about the northern peripheries of the Empire, where the native languages had no literate tradition? Runes (or Ogham among the wild Irish) were used for brief messages but not for “literature.” These folks learned Latin along with literacy–either because they wanted to prosper within the Empire or because missionaries taught them, later. From a most fascinating source on Medieval Writing.
I haven’t seen a thing indicating the Church forbade the teaching of literacy. But I doubt that’s an Atheist rumor; I could see it preached by a worthy wielding the King James Version…
Litteracy was much more common in Southern than in Northern Europe. The dividing line went very roughly across the middle of modern france. In the south, roman written law tended to be retained, while in the north the norm tended to be orally transmited customary law. There were much more documents such as wills for relatively small inheritances in southern Europe.
Found a book on exactly this topic: Yitzak Hen’s Culture and Religion in Merovingian Gaul, A.D. 481-751. From p. 31-32:
Well it certainly is true that reading, writing and arthamatic are seperate skills and it is only in the last 200 or so years that they have all been taught as a matter of course.
I used to live near a mosque (in DC) that would do precisely this. They offered free Arabic classes for all comers (no religious requirement, both sexes welcome), and my understanding was that this wasn’t unusual.
For people interested in this subject, check out the book, “The Inheritance of Rome” by Chris Wickham
I’m about halfway through it right now, and it’s full of fascinating detail.
Specifically regarding literacy, people in Roman times were both more literate (more people could read) and they were more widely-read (i.e., a proper education consisted of the classics-- Virgil, Herodotus, etc.). Once the Western Empire collapsed, literacy declined, and what literacy remained increasingly focused on the Bible (and, as mentioned above, religious power tended to concentrate literacy as a source of power, i.e. laypeople were not encouraged to be literate, nor was it necessary for their success).
BTW, the most interesting thing I’ve learned from the book is that our modern appreciation of the “Barbarians” is almost entirely wrong. Many of the late Roman era groups outside the Empire were just as advanced as the Romans, and in fact, many of them saw themselves as Romans, or at least as equal to the Romans themselves.
Meaning, once the various Gothic tribes took power, they ruled as the Romans did, appropriating Roman laws, culture, methods and such. What in hindsight we see as the discrete collapse of the Western Empire was seen at the time as merely political transition over a period of decades until one day the Western Empire simply wasn’t there any longer, having been organically replaced by the power of the Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Franks and the rest, all of whom at least consciously began their rule as inheritors of Roman authority, not conquerors/overthrowers replacing it.
Wickham constantly makes the point too that the Roman Empire did survive-- in the East. In hindsight modern readers tend to look at the Byzantine Empire through a late-era prism, post-Crusades to its eventual conquest by the Turks, but at the time of the collapse of the Western Empire, the Eastern Empire considered itself just as “Roman” as the Western half did, and for centuries things went along just as they always did, evolving slowly over time into the more distinct Byzantine entity we more commonly recognize today.
Maybe in the US. But not in Any Muslim country I have been in.
One thing I read too was that classical latin writing was very removed from the “vulgar latin” (?) used by the common masses even by the time of empire. It’s as if they had their own complex poetic language for literature, and different one for speech (t’aint true, y’all?)
Plus, the “dark ages” have that name for a reason. If literacy was still only in the 10% range, then imagine when the average merchant did not really exist, when fighting was more important than accounting, and the successful people had different priorities than reading. It was when practice materials - pens, paper, ink - were expensive and hard to come by. When people died unexpectedly and working the fields was more important than sitting around wasting precious daylight going “ba, be bi, bo, bu…”. If you owned a book at all, odds are it was burned when the latest band of maruaders or bandits came through looking for wealth - useless crap like books wer tossed on the fire… Kingdons become so small that written records are minimal, tax collection is farme out in a feudal manner so records are not kept, correspondence is rarely necessary between realms so oral messengers will suffice.
It’s not had to imagine that once literacy loses its importance and chaos descends, it will quickly disappear.
In fact, one of th corruption complaints in Egypt was that the teachers don’t really teach anything in the government schools with their low government salaries, so they can charge the ambitious parents tution fees to tutor the kids after school.
And all around Cairo are things like “carpet school” where young children are taught to make carpets for a living. “learn by doing” of course.
When you find Egyptian children coming up to you trying to sell trinkets at the tourist attractions, many guides would say “don’t give them money - it all goes to their parents or a bigger boy in the gang - they should be in school.”
But then, you dont need to teach Arabic language in an arab country. Literacy is something that pretty much comes as a requirement (slowly) with a more complex and technical environment.
Books were very valuable.
Not to a bunch of plundering vikings or visigoths. Its not like they’d take it home to sell at the local used book store…
Or even, to some ignorant peasant who took it when the area descended to anarchy - the pages were great for starting the kindling on fire.
Even by the 1500’s _ I recall a historian discussing his book on CBC radio - the largest export of England, for a few years after the dissolution of the monasteries, was paper “…to feed the jakes of europe”. The libraries of the great monasteries were used as toilet paper across the continent. One copy of the Magna Carta was rescued when a noble found that his tailor was about to chop up a document with a big fancy seal to use as a pattern for some new clothes. Some classic greek and roman texts are retrieved as residual images scraped off valuable parchment by monks who recycled it to use as church texts. the Bayeux tapestry was traded for equivalent meaningless cloth by a merchant during the French Revolution, otherwise it would have been chopped up and used as cloth scraps for wrapping items.
While Muslim fanatics in Mali are apparently today destroying the millenia-old shrines of Timbuktu, take a moment to contemplate the ability of humans of all persuasions to destroy history in the name of whatever motivates them this year.
The libraries of teh great monasteries consisted of parchment books, not paper ones, and paper was almost unknown in Europe before 13th century, as the middle ages were drawing to a close. By the time paper books were common, printing and mass production of paper had been invented, and books were cheap and plentiful, but there was still little need to destroy them to provide ass wipes. Paper is is cheap to produce. Parchment, by contrast, was laborious to produce, and thus was valuable for writing on. Certainly once-used parchment was often erased, but that was so it could be used again as writing material. Indeed, that is what your little anecdote is really about. Certainly it is true that documents that we now consider to be important were sometimes erased to make space for documents that people at the time thought more important, but that we now think are of little value. However, this is a far cry from using books to wipe ones ass, as though they were considered of no value.
You may be correct that illiterate barbarians may not always have been aware of the value of books, and may sometimes have destroyed them, but when you are talking about the 1500s you are very far from the time of the barbarian invasions, and even illiterate people would by then have been well aware of the value of books. Actually, many of the barbarians probably were too.
When Henry VIII dissolved the English monasteries, many books from their libraries were indeed destroyed, but this was for regions of ideology and the assertion of power, not because of ignorance of their value.
Not just them.
One of the biggest destructions was the library at Alexandria in Egypt, which Christians burned because it was ‘pagan knowledge, when the only book a good Christian needs is the Bible’. Probably the biggest destroying of learning ever. The nazis burned more books, but most of them had copies elsewhere. Much of the library at Alexandria that was burned has no surviving copy anywhere.
Repeating the Alexandria myth are we? Ceaser burnt down the main liabary and what the Christians burnt down was i) an annex and ii) most if its books had long been lost and iii) as many people have pointed out, Christians and Church leaders would have been familiar with the classical learning at the time anyway.
What would you be reading, if you were your average schmo in 600AD? The only book you might come across would be a Bible in a Church, and that would be written in Latin or Greek. Learning to read meant learning Latin, as not much of anything was written in the vernacular.
Where is your average schmo? If he is in the lands ruled by Constantinople (the erstwhile Eastern half,all of N Africa,Italy and a bit of Spain) then probably if he is reasonably well off, quite a bit. As for the now lost provinces in Britannia and Gaul, I really cannot tell
Your average schmo was not reasonably well off. Your average schmo was a subsistence farmer, a slave, or a laborer.
Your average schmo could perfectly well have read letters, for one thing, but there are all sorts of ephemeral everyday writings that we may not see because they weren’t valuable enough to be copied and preserved for centuries. We have so little writing from the sixth and seventh centuries that you’d be a fool to argue that what we have is representative of what there was.