And Literacy... RE: [Sca-cooks] The rotten meat thread

[Laura C. Minnick]

At 03:34 AM 4/14/2005, you wrote:
>Please remember that the ability to read and the ability to write are TWO 
>DIFFERENT THINGS.  Just because a person signed with an 'X' instead of his 
>name, doesn't mean he couldn't read a receipt.

Quite true- quickest example to mind is that of Charlemagne, who managed to 
read a bit, but couldn't seem to wrap his head around writing any more than 
the rough stylization of his name. Given his intelligence in evidence in 
other areas, I would suspect some form of dyslexia.

Closer to the question of literacy in the era of our cookbooks: a document 
that refers to medieval folk as 'illiterate' may or may not be accurate 
according to our modern standards. 'Literacy', to the educated medieval 
mind, meant the ability to read and write... in Latin. Reading and writing 
in the vernacular didn't always meet up to this exalted state. :-/)

Evidence that reading and writing in the vernacular became fairly 
widespread exists in a variety of places, from the mundanity of our recipe 
books, to the extraordinary event surrounding the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. 
Steven Justice discusses the burgeoning vernacular literacy rates in the 
14th century in  _Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381_ (U of Cal. Press, 
Berkeley, 1994). It appears that not as many people could write, but quite 
a few could read- enough that smuggled letters (alleged to be written by 
John Ball, under several pen names) sent out through the countryside 
sparked a groundswell of support for what became the Peasants' Revolt. It 
was basically an uprising against taxes, and among the things that the 
peasants did (besides burning John of Gaunt's palace- lucky for him he 
wasn't home at the time- and murdering the Archbishop of Canterbury) they 
broke into local treasury offices and manor houses, and destroyed and/or 
burnt legal records and accounting books. Taxes could no longer be 
assessed, because the records showing who owed what- were gone. And how did 
Jack Straw know which papers to burn when he broke open the exchequer's 
desk? Yup- he knew what he was looking for- he could read them. Apparently 
(and we know because they didn't get all of them- the rebellion was put 
down fairly swiftly) many manorial and exchequer records were being kept in 
English, as more people could read English, and fewer civil servants were 
fluent in Latin.

Literature was more available in the Vernacular also- Chaucer, Gower, 
Langland- and epistolary records show middle class people writing each 
other on the most banal of subjects like the weather and the high price of 
stockings in London. And you'll notice that our corpus of available 
cookbooks in English goes up dramatically too!

The more I read, the more I am amazed at our forebears...

'Lainie
___________________________________________________________________________
O it is excellent to have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous To use it 
like a giant--Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, Act II