Medieval misconceptions: No, most peasants could read and write.

[Judeo-communism]

The term "illiterate" during the medieval period strictly applied only to Latin, not native language. The vast majority of peasants/small folk absolutely could read and write in their native languages because it was so dang useful. Sadly, KC:D gets this wrong by pushing the false trope.

It was important to keep Latin out of the hands of non-Clergy because they believed only anointed religious members could correctly read and interpret the Bible, thus then they would tell the masses what they should believe. They thought that the average person wouldn't be able to interpret it correctly, thus condemn themselves to hell, which is largely what Catholicism is based on. You see this predominately in Johanka's half of the Woman's Lot DLC. This inevitably lead to Jan Hus (referenced several times in KC:D) starting the Protestant revolution, sparking the Hussite wars, and even getting Radzig killed. I think Hans Capon, after he became lord, also died in one of these wars fighting alongside his men.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-abyQLl8mPI

[Thermal Lance]

Well, I don't doubt most learned some words out of necessity, especially in larger hubs of population for trading purposes. Like numbers, couple of words... the necessary stuff you know.

But, im highly skeptical about people who barely even have time to crack a book to bother learning to read beyond that.

IMO. The EXTEND to which one could read would be a way more interesting question.

[bb 80]

After a pretty superficial search it seems that !under professional instruction! one needs 600 hours to become literate. Then there is the Flynn effect which points to how our ability to abstract has increased. The ability to think abstract is pretty important for reading comprehension. We would actually have a fairly hard time communicating with people from 1400 because our perception of reality is so different.

Here the Flynn Ted talk and it is an actual ted talk, not a trashy tedx talk! It's pretty entertaining. I love the sentence:" Were our immediate ancestors on the verge of mental retardation." :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vpqilhW9uI

Most people underestimate how much work learning to read is without books, paper, professional teachers, dedicated school buildings and little to no societal incentive.

[AmesNFire]

Dr. BockNstein a écrit :

I watched an old commercial once(From the 80s) for a service in the us that you could call to teach you how to read(Not an ESL service either). If it was a big enough problem to have a service for it in the 80's then it does not take much to imagine what a mostly rural collection of Farming Family's could do or not do with reading in the "middle ages".

bb you are a gigachad and your work is appreciated and I can say for one time in my life I used the internet and actually learned something.

The USA's abysmal education system and systemic effort to have an under-educated population is not the norm.

[n0mad23]

bb 80 - Walter Ong's book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the
Word really dives into how our thinking and social structures have changed since the advent of the printing press. Worth keeping an eye out for a cheap used copy imo.

[Arasine]

What did medieval peasants read ? Books were incredibly expensive in those times. OP is making up stories again...

[DargonBlak]

bb 80 a écrit :

Here the Flynn Ted talk and it is an actual ted talk, not a trashy tedx talk! It's pretty entertaining.

I love the sentence:" Were our immediate ancestors on the verge of mental retardation." :)

if you met my in-laws family back in the homeland - you'd know the answer.

[AmesNFire]

Arasine a écrit :

What did medieval peasants read ? Books were incredibly expensive in those times. OP is making up stories again...

Have you heard of libraries, merchants selling the occasional book, legal writings of various sorts, etc...?

[Lambda]

pseudo-intellectuals: the thread

[bb 80]

n0mad23 a écrit :

bb 80 - Walter Ong's book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the
Word really dives into how our thinking and social structures have changed since the advent of the printing press. Worth keeping an eye out for a cheap used copy imo.

My fields are sociology and political science. Mostly quantitative stuff. Dealing with population data. Confidential population data... (for privacy reasons:)

I have a slight dislike for all those theories that literature studies or historians produce because they rarely stand on firm scientific ground or provide opportunities for testing hypothesis. They are interesting. No doubt. I love history. Still, I always keep in mind that for most of our own history we have extremely limited sources.
I once almost got into a shouting match with a prominent ancient history professor at an elite university because I told him that his entire approach was nonsense. He wanted me to write a paper about it to which I said that I had better things to do. It was quite a scene. Luckily the history department is pretty far away from the social science department. We haven't crossed path since. Applying a sociological theory to ancient history. Give me a break... :)

Looking at the debate in this thread is highlighting the problem that ancient and medieval historians often have. Lack of records. Ancient greek and roman history is essentially based on the writings 50 upper class guys and and a few dozen gravestones. It doesn't look much better for most of the medieval period. If Napoleon's army hadn't stumbled over the Rosetta stone then we would still know very little about ancient egypt. Only because of that do we even know/are pretty certain who build the greatest pyramid on the planet. Apart from that we almost know nothing about Khufu. Just think about it. We know almost nothing about the guy who build the pyramid that was the tallest human made structure for almost 4000 years!

Archeologists really dislike Christianity because before that people would put lots of stuff in their graves which at least gives us some clues of what went on then. Vikings for example would often bury important people with an entire ship and lots of other things. Christians don't do that. They just bury the body. Sometimes there is a sarcophagus that sometimes has a little bit of text on it but that is about it.

Radzig Kobyla is another good example for spotty records from the game. He was an important noble, a royal hetman and a friend of one the most important rulers of his time. Still, we don't know when he was born or where or who is parents were. The first time he is even mentioned is 12 years before his death. Apart from that we know very little and what we do know is based on short mentions in a few sources. Apparently only one of those sources describes actions beyond "he was here" and that is the one that tells us of how he was murdered. Is that source accurate? Maybe the guy who wrote it hated Radzig. Maybe it was just an embellished story somebody told the person who wrote this down. Maybe it did not happen at all. How would we know?!

What's my point you are asking now. Well, I'm fairly certain that I had one when I started writing. Maybe that it could be that far more people were literate in medieval Bohemia but that the argument that the shadiversity guy makes in that video is nonetheless really bad. furthermore, there is a significant amount of pretty solid arguments by many highly respected scholars that literacy rates were very low.

tl;dr Don't tell me you have anything better to do! Read it! :)

[Baronvonchickenpants]

bb 80, thank you for your contribution to this thread.

[n0mad23]

bb 80 - in agreement fully with your post.

Shadiversity may be entertaining, but even in his own focus on medieval armor and weapons, there are others who are doing far more relevant and interesting work. Todd Cutler from Todd's Workshop I'd argue actually does experimental archaeology in conjunction with other craftsmen and academics, and generates some very interesting data in the process.

In a nutshell, what Ong describes in his book is what has happened to the way we think after moving first from a base literacy to the grapholect, i.e. the printed instead of written word. Interesting stuff, especially since it's all so sublimated and internalized now. It makes me wonder what happens as we move from the grapholect into twitter text mentality, and the continual push to use more "economical language," that "keep it short and sweet."

It's pretty obvious that we do not generally think today very much like our ancestors did 800 years ago.

[Judeo-communism]

bb 80 is not a researcher of any kind, he relies on logical fallacies like ad hominem instead of attacking points or arguments. If he did actually read the evidence, he'd at least come up with some counters. He's probably just a paid troll from ADL.

https://medievalliteracy.wp.hum.uu.nl/wp-content/uploads/sites/34/2013/01/Medieval-Urban-Literacy.pdf

"Interest in the uses of writing in medieval urban settlements is not new at all.
Research carried out from the 1980s onwards has led to the virtually un-
questioned opinion that, in the Middle Ages, in towns one seems to have
had more chance of being confronted with writing than elsewhere. Moreover,
there are reasons to assume that it was there, in the cities and in the in larger
and smaller towns, that the ‘modern’ literate mentality was born."

"From the twelfth century onwards, these communes seem oriented towards the pro-
duction and use of written texts (“Schriftorientierung”); they seem to have
possessed a collective will to develop literacy (“der kollektive Wille zu
Schriftlichkeit”). They also preserved written records. This readiness to engage
in written culture can be considered as an important sign of changes in thinking
and in the perception of the world. It shows an increasing growth of the use of
the reasoning faculties (“Rationalisierungsprozeß”)."

"The ‘legal setting’ of an urban community, whether it was a locatio-charter in the area of ‘German’ law, a Castilian fuero or a collection of local customary law put into writing, resulted in the growing production of records which were either necessary or useful for the municipal administration. But the awareness that some records are necessary and others useful in a community’s life could not develop without a basic familiarity with the written word."

"There is no doubt that the institutional, administrative literacy of the
municipalities forced the use of certain written records by individuals. As time
passed, certificates of legitimate birth and testaments were required if one was
to be allowed to function within a community. The ability to show written
confirmations of business transactions and of the ownership of goods, and
receipts for the payment of debts, was proving ever more useful and profit-
able."

"The traditional view that in pre-modern times “two cultures developed side by
side: an urban culture that was essentially literate, and rural culture essentially
illiterate”, can no longer be supported. Since Carlo Cipolla voiced this opinion in 1969, the criteria for judging ‘literacy’ and ‘illiteracy’ have been refined by decades of research on literacy and communication, and also by abandoning the old convictions about the homogeneous, static, and conservative character of the peasantry. Considerable input from historical anthropology and cultural history has begun to reveal a new image of peasant communities as complex structures with their own internal dynamics."

https://web.archive.org/web/20130412183631/http://www.heuristiek.ugent.be/sites/default/files/historiographical%20essay.pdf

"Moreover, these letters show signs of familiarity with the formulae of government documents, the ideas of Wyclif, and passages of Piers Plowman. From here, he goes on to identify several other examples of the rebels’ awareness of and participation in written culture. The insurgents of 1381 were not, then, the brutish, mindless rustics whom the chroniclers and other representatives of official culture perceived and wanted to record for posterity. Instead they were men and women fully cognizant of how writing could be used both to oppress people and to liberate them, depending on whether it was employed in the service of falsehood or truth. Albeit very few of them were literate in the sense of being able to read and write Latin like a clerk. Yet some of them, like Ball, were literate
in this sense, and many of them had some measure of pragmatic literacy; moreover,
they all could gain access to texts through the medium of the spoken word. Together
they formed a group of people whose sense of solidarity at the village level was
extended to a much larger community bound together by a common attitude towards
the uses of documents and a shared interpretation of certain texts. They were, then,
a textual community."

https://www.medievalists.net/2018/08/medieval-daily-life-birchbark/

Several surviving examples of commoners between 11th-15th centuries writing things on birch bark. Some of them are really funny.

Yeah, he lost. It was common for commoners/peasants to read/write and be literate during the 11th-15th centuries in their native languages, just not Latin. The idea that medieval people were stupid and called the "Dark Ages" is wrong as they were some of the smartest men and women have ever truly been, and they were some of the best times for Europeans as a result. Certainly smarter and better than today, largely due to Napolean being evil and allowing the root cause of evil to prevail. Today's "peasants" don't even know how to cook their own food or tie a knot, much less survive without external aid.

[n0mad23]

You've completely overlooked this passage that you quoted: "in this sense, and many of them had some measure of pragmatic literacy; moreover, they all could gain access to texts through the medium of the spoken word." And there it is. Both Piers Plowman, and Wyclif totally lend themselves to oral memorization, which is how the majority of people knew such things.

At best it's the same conflation as people saying today that ANYTHING is a text, and while that might be true at some level, it certainly isn't helpful when discussing literacy.

Ten, 15, or even 20% is not most of the population. Just like everyone didn't need to know how to do metal smithing, there was no reason to have everyone know how to read. Both require levels of expertise as well as resources to teach others.

[Judeo-communism]

That's not overlooking, that just adds more credence to their own literacy. Yes, you learn how to read and write first by learning each letter of the language's alphabet and the sounds they make. It's not different from learning how to speak. These studies show very clearly they are competent in their literacy of reading and writing, as in they can read and write complex words and full sentences. Remember there's a lot surviving records in Middle English, which obviously William the Conqueror and all other high aristocrats would never write in or be intended to read in as instead they would use Latin, or at the very least French. Only the commoners would be reading and writing in Middle English.

It would be at least 50% of the population as an average, meaning some areas would have extremely high levels of literacy and others probably not as much. The claim that "medieval peasants were illiterate in ALL LANGUAGES" really has no solid evidence and thus fails the burden of proof. That's why most studies since 1980 show the complete opposite of it.

Henry, obviously being shielded and cared for by Radzig purposefully giving him to Martin and having his own house literally right outside the castle keep's walls most definitely would've had plenty of opportunities to be literate. Even in the beginning of the game, Martin comments on how the language on the crossguard of the sword isn't Czech, hinting he also is literate as would make sense given his past and the work he still did with Radzig even just the day before the start of the game (In Woman's Lot DLC). It's foolish to think Martin wouldn't teach Henry to be literate, especially when their family trade is smithing and thus commerce.

[Simple Kind of Man]

n0mad23 a écrit :

You've completely overlooked this passage that you quoted: "in this sense, and many of them had some measure of pragmatic literacy; moreover, they all could gain access to texts through the medium of the spoken word." And there it is. Both Piers Plowman, and Wyclif totally lend themselves to oral memorization, which is how the majority of people knew such things.

At best it's the same conflation as people saying today that ANYTHING is a text, and while that might be true at some level, it certainly isn't helpful when discussing literacy.

Ten, 15, or even 20% is not most of the population. Just like everyone didn't need to know how to do metal smithing, there was no reason to have everyone know how to read. Both require levels of expertise as well as resources to teach others.

They think sickness is made up as a scam.....nothing they say has any credibility.

They will never change there mind,because then they cant pretend to be the smartest guy in the room, by taking points that no self respecting intellectual would take.