And Literacy... RE: [Sca-cooks] The rotten meat thread
Laura C. Minnick
lcm at jeffnet.org
Thu Apr 14 04:10:46 PDT 2005
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
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