LITERACY

R. A. Houston

At the end of the fifteenth century in Europe literacy of any kind was rare. Among the laity, the ability to read, write, and count was restricted to a small minority of wealthy, town-dwelling men. As late as 1800 no European country could claim that half its population could read and write. In most regions complete, if basic, literacy was still confined to town-dwelling men of middling status or above. Around 1900, however, many parts of Europe had achieved mass literacy. Perhaps 85–90 percent of adults were deemed to be literate in Britain, France, Germany, and much of Scandinavia. That success created an enormous cultural gulf in Europe, for in huge tracts of the east and south even the rudiments of reading and writing were denied to a majority of the population. Figure 1 and the map below show this development in different ways.

By the start of the twenty-first century literacy was regarded as a birthright, while illiteracy was seen as a personal shame and a national disgrace. This chapter looks at the timing, location, and social distribution of this change from restricted to mass literacy. It also explores more qualitative dimensions such as the reasons for and uses of literacy. Throughout, the acquisition and exercise of literacy in its different forms is understood in its social context, for the spread of literacy across space and time was determined by a complex interaction of factors such as wealth and social status, residence, cultural assumptions about gender roles, language, and religion.

Literacy is made up of several communication skills, which are best seen as bands in a spectrum rather than discrete categories. Reading of print or writing was possible at two levels. Some people could decipher texts, read them aloud, and memorize them in a mechanical or ritual way—although their personal understanding may have been questionable. We should not exaggerate the understanding and facility of those who possessed this intermediate or semiliteracy. Those with better education and a deeper immersion in printed and written culture could comprehend the text with greater precision, reading and thinking silently to themselves. They could understand new texts as well as familiar ones. However, "reading" was not restricted to written or printed words alone. People could gather information and ideas from looking: interpreting pictures and prints in broadsheets and pamphlets or watching and participating in plays and processions. Gesture remained a subtle and important form of nonverbal communication.

If they wanted to transmit their own thoughts other than through speech, people had to learn to write, or rather compose—an advanced skill that required considerable training and practice, and which effectively marked "full" literacy for most people. The other, more common, level of writing was in fact copying: writing without necessarily understanding. It was at this stage that people learned to sign their names on documents, and this ability is commonly used as an indicator that someone could read and understand printed and written texts in the vernacular, the language of everyday life. In other words, he or she was well along the road to "full" literacy. A small minority of men could also copy or compose in Latin, the international language of learning throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period, or in another (later) pan-European language like French. Even those who had none of these skills were not culturally isolated for they could listen—hear a priest's sermons or a friend reading aloud, participate actively or passively in discussions with their peers. Associated with literacy is numeracy, which again covers a spectrum of skills from simple counting of objects to sophisticated accounting and complex mathematical calculations.

Since 1500, both reading and writing have increased in significance, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes independently; sometimes at the expense of oral and visual forms of communication, sometimes in tandem with them. The way to understand literacy in historic Europe is to assess the changing access which people had to the different bands in the spectrum and the ways they used them.

PATTERNS

It was as late as 1995 that the first generally accepted comparison of international adult literacy attainments was published by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The European countries included were Germany, Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, and Switzerland. Based on rigorous, direct, and standardized observations and tests, the study distinguished prose, document, and quantitative literacy, dividing each category into five levels of attainment. Social historians can touch on prose literacy (reports on, or summaries of, tests of reading ability) or elements of document literacy (signing), but quantitative historical studies of numeracy are absent. The social and geographical distribution of historic literacy is relatively easy to demonstrate using the "universal, standard, and direct" measure of ability to sign one's name in full on a document such as a court deposition, a contract, or a marriage certificate. Before the nineteenth century, reading is much harder to measure directly, but various indirect measures such as school provision or book production and ownership can be used. Until then, virtually all sources cover adults rather than children. Uniquely, the Lutheran churches of Scandinavia kept registers of reading and religious knowledge from the end of the seventeenth century. The Scandinavian example is a warning that comparison over time and place is rendered problematic by the many different sources and criteria of historic "literacy" used by churches, governments, social scientists, and historians. The figures given below may appear precise, but they are sometimes no more than broad indicators of different cultural achievements.

Fortunately, both direct and indirect indicators of literacy generally point in the same direction. Male achievements were superior to female, those of the rich to those of the poor; urban dwellers were almost invariably better able to write than peasants; Protestant areas of Europe tended to have higher literacy than Catholic. Expansion occurred first among the middling and upper classes, among men, and in towns. In northern England the illiteracy of the gentry fell from about 30 percent in 1530 to almost nil in 1600, but that of day laborers stayed well above 90 percent and did not fall substantially until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Classified by economic activity, agricultural workers come lowest in the European hierarchy, industrial workers next, slightly inferior to commercial and service occupations, followed by professionals and landowners. Differences between the sexes were pronounced and enduring. A quarter of Amsterdam grooms marrying around 1730 could not sign the register compared with half of brides. In southern Europe sex was more important than status or residence in determining achievements. Between 1540 and 1600 in the Spanish archdiocese of Toledo, 30 percent of town-dwelling men could not sign compared with 93 percent of women; the rural figures were 48 percent and 98 percent. In areas such as southern France, where the faiths coexisted after the Reformation, Protestant literacy was generally higher than Catholic until the eighteenth century. In other parts of Europe it remained so. Catholic illiteracy in Ireland fell from 46 percent in 1861 to 16 percent in 1901, but it remained higher than Protestant. Even among other apparently homogeneous social groups there were pronounced variations across Europe. Convicted criminals are an example. One English prisoner in three was wholly illiterate in the early 1840s. In contrast, "the intelligentsia of the criminal world" were the Germans, with fewer than one in fifty unable to read and write around 1860.

To these gradients can be added a bold geographical summary. If Europe was homogeneous in terms of its restricted literacy at the end of the Middle Ages, it had three massive cultural zones by the end of the nineteenth century: a literate, economically developed (and largely Protestant) north; a center with pronounced regional variations, notably France; and a less literate, underdeveloped (Catholic and Orthodox) south and east. The 1900 distribution was itself the result of four centuries of more robust advances in literacy in the northern parts of Europe than elsewhere. Within this broad-brush picture lay numerous local variations. A single English county at

the time of the mid-seventeenth-century Civil Wars might contain villages with proportions of literate men four times higher than others. Pronounced regional variations were reduced during the eighteenth and nineteenth century in some parts of Europe. However, this long-term trend disguises some astounding differences in the timing of change. Table 1 shows the percentage of Danish manorial peasants unable to sign their copyhold documents, 1719–1850. The dramatic improvement in signing ability on the northern, Jutland estates during the eighteenth century created a huge gulf in literacy between them and the Fraugdegård estate near Odense, which was not bridged until the middle of the nineteenth century. Similarly pronounced regional variations are found across northern Germany around 1800.

The pace of change was everywhere hesitant and irregular. At the time of Italian unification, analysis of the censimento or national census shows that 81 percent of females aged six years or older were illiterate, as were 68 percent of males. In absolute numbers that meant 17 out of 23 million inhabitants. Illiteracy was similarly prevalent in Spain at that date with figures of 81 percent and 63 percent respectively. Even in countries like Italy, where literacy did not advance rapidly before 1800, achievements since 1850 have been considerable. For every 100 illiterate females in 1861 there were just 5 in 1981. However, change has also generated some unexpected side effects. Whereas in 1861 illiteracy was evenly divided between males and females in Italy, by 1981 there were two illiterate women for every man.

The painfully slow pace of change and the late arrival of mass literacy finds its most extreme example in Portugal. Of those over seven years of age in 1890, 76 percent were illiterate, falling only slightly to 74 percent in 1900 and 70 percent in 1911. The figure was still 68 percent in 1930 and it was not until the 1940s that more than half of Portugal's population could read and write: two centuries after the most favored areas had passed that threshold. Portugal's 30 percent illiteracy in 1968 was the highest in Europe. Other peripheral zones were deeply illiterate well into the twentieth century. Greek men were 71 percent illiterate in 1870 compared with 36 percent in 1928; the respective figures for women are 94 percent and 64 percent. Levels of literacy were similarly low throughout the Balkans. In 1880, 90 percent of Dalmatia's people were illiterate and, as in southern Italy, towns were little better in this respect than the countryside.

The patterns outlined above are sometimes complex and varied, but the overall distribution and progress of writing ability is clear. Yet in many parts of Europe before the late nineteenth century reading was taught before writing. Given the discontinuous and brief training most children received (spending no more than two or three years in usually part-time schooling), it would be surprising if reading were not more widespread than the easily measurable ability to sign. For example, a case has been made that Lowland Scotland had near-universal reading by the mid-eighteenth century. The only convincing statistics are based on the Swedish hustavla, or registers of the Lutheran church's household literacy campaign. By c.1780 in Sweden and Iceland, male and female, young and old, rich and poor alike were almost all able to pass the Lutheran churches' tests. Signing ability was confined to less than 10 percent: largely town-dwelling males. As late as 1921, 30 percent of Finland's people could not read and write—an achievement inferior to Italy's. It is argued that the "Scandinavian pattern" may be more extensive, and that between c.1500 and c.1900 Europe comprised two zones: one where reading and writing were taught together; the other where reading alone was taught, this including many areas of Germany and a large part of southern and northwestern France as well as Scandinavia.

Tacitly or overtly, studies that show apparently extensive reading suggest that the breadth of cultural access in early-modern Europe was much broader than the signing statistics imply. The problem here lies with the nature of the reading that people did. It was normally religious and based principally on rote learning and recognition of well-known passages. Indeed, as late as 1750 one authority assigns critical reading ability in the German lands to just 10 percent of the population. Another reports that fewer than 5 percent of the men in the region of Arras and St. Omer in northern France were reckoned "well educated" in surveys conducted in 1802 and 1804. Subjective as such assessments are, they indicate the restricted impact that literate media could have had on ordinary people who were ostensibly "readers." Nevertheless, we must be alert to the possibility that reading was more widespread than writing, especially in certain parts of Europe and among certain social groups: poorer men and most women.

Females generally had less chance to learn writing than males. An investigation of 3,036 women aged above 20 years living in part of northern Italy in 1854 showed that just 410 could read and write though 1,103 could only read. It was not till the 1860s and 1870s that women began to approach complete literacy in this part of Italy. The existence of social forms that privileged visual, spoken, and sung communication (such as the French veillée or evening gathering), and which were dominated by ordinary women, suggests that their cultural lives continued to be cast in an oral/aural and visual framework.

There are prominent exceptions. Women of the eighteenth-century French and English upper-bourgeois and landed classes (and especially unmarried ones it seems) read periodicals and novels; used circulating libraries; joined reading societies; attended the theater and concerts; collected prints and bought paintings. Women seem to have been a crucial component of the anticipated audience for Enlightenment literature. Yet we should not exaggerate the social penetration of extensive female literacy. Book ownership of the kind recorded in post mortem inventories was growing during the eighteenth century (notably in France, Germany, and England), but it remained principally the preserve of middling and upper-class males.

If reading was almost certainly much more extensive than writing, elementary numeracy was probably ubiquitous. Even in the Middle Ages, one test of basic mental capacity was the ability to count to ten. However, formal accounting skills were much more restricted. Though written numeration had been known in the Latin west for several centuries, and paper was in general use, the abacus with counters was still often used in the seventeenth and even in the eighteenth centuries. The celebrated mathematician Leibniz used one. Roman and Arabic numerals coexisted (as did Gothic and Latin type or script), but there is also evidence across Europe of "peasant numerals"—symbols which represented numbers that may derive from roman numerals, but which are distinctive. As an advanced skill in the school curriculum and one more often learned as an adult for economic purposes, higher-grade numeracy probably progressed at the same rate as writing. There are no quantitative studies, but age reporting in documents shows growing precision and reliability in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a fact which may indicate populations who were increasingly conversant with numbers.

EXPLANATIONS

Explaining these patterns and trends requires analysis of the central social, political, and economic relationships in historic Europe. The chances of being educated and of acquiring literacy depended on a wide variety of factors: wealth, sex, projected job opportunities and work experience, school provision and costs, community structures, employments for children, the power of landowners, access to literate media and the opportunities to use them, and even the language a person spoke in everyday life.

Schooling. Literacy and schooling naturally went hand in hand. For example, the German duchy of Württemberg had 89 schools in 1520 compared with over 400 by 1600, and across Germany in this period many rulers issued ordinances providing for or regulating elementary education. Catholics too expanded education. The first "school of Christian doctrine" was opened at Milan in 1536 to teach children the essentials of the Catholic faith. There were 28 such schools by 1564 and more than 120 in 1599. Postelementary education also expanded. Perhaps 1,000 new grammar schools were established in England, 1480–1660. Thus we find rapidly expanding literacy for some social groups in late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century England, the German lands, and in the towns of northern Italy. Much of early-modern Europe truly experienced an "educational revolution."

The case of Italy shows the importance of schools in a later age. In the mid-nineteenth century 80 percent of children aged 6 to 12 years were at school in Savoy (later annexed by France) compared with just 9 percent in Sardinia. Small wonder that illiteracy among adult males was just 50 percent in the former provinces compared with 90 percent in the latter. In one southern province, Nuoro, only 337 of 61,479 women above the age of 20 years could read and write. Using broadly defined regions, proportions in school in the north of Italy grew from 67 percent in 1863 to 85 percent in 1901; figures for the central provinces are 28 percent and 50 percent respectively (incidentally, almost identical to Greece between these dates); for the south 22 percent and 44 percent.

Yet, until well into the twentieth century the vast majority of children anywhere in Europe could expect to receive only a few years of training in the rudiments of reading and writing. Children were contributors to the family budget from an early age in northwestern Europe until the nineteenth century, and until the twentieth century in the south and east. For them, leaving school might as easily mark the start of learning functional literacy rather than its culmination, for literacy has to be practiced as well as learned. As we chart the development of mass literacy we should also recall that schools became central to the acquisition of skills only by 1850 at the earliest. In Sweden, until 1858 the authorities assumed that children would have been taught to read at home; only after this did junior schools take over the tasks of basic education. The Nordic countries (notably Iceland and Norway) and some of the more thinly populated mountain and steppe regions of Europe relied on mobile teachers following a circuit until well into the twentieth century. As early as the eighteenth century, mountain regions of Austria like Tyrol or Vorarlberg seem to have had high literacy, but few schools. Fixed schools began to be common in the rural villages of Russia only in the decades following the emancipation of the peasantry in 1861. The total number of primary schools grew from 8 thousand in 1856 to 25 thousand in 1879 and then 100 thousand by 1911, the initiative coming from zemstvos (local authorities), the church, and the education ministry equally. The number of pupils rose from 450 thousand to 6.6 million between 1856 and 1911.

For all its importance, schooling was neither the only nor always the most significant cause of changes in literacy. Modern readers who live in states with powerful governments will be struck by how the progress of literacy in the nineteenth century was largely independent of major political events or, for that matter, educational legislation. From the sixteenth to the twentieth century, educational legislation was normally designed to consolidate, standardize, and enable rather than to innovate. Before the nineteenth century no European country had a school "system," but instead dozens of sometimes competing, sometimes complementary schools, which were organized and funded in different ways. Even major political upheavals like the French Revolution did little in the short term to change institutions or alter trends in literacy. By the time the republican statesman Jules Ferry realized the Revolutionary aspiration for free, secular, and compulsory education in 1882, France was already a literate nation.

Religion and wealth. However slowly and hesitantly, literacy was increasing. Did the expansion favor Protestants more than Catholics? Protestantism is commonly described as "the religion of the book." Indeed, a glance at map 1 shows the enduring legacy of the sixteenth-century Reformation. The extensive literacy of the Dutch and Lowland Scots in the eighteenth century stands alongside their commitment to Calvinism. The Catholic conservatism of rural France, Poland, or Spain cannot be divorced from deep illiteracy. Was it simply a question of faith? In the north of Ireland during the seventeenth century Protestant farmers were better able to sign their names than Catholic ones, but they were also richer and lived in less remote areas. The point here is that Protestants and Catholics were not distributed equally among all sections of society. In seventeenth-century Poland virtually all the Calvinist minority were either nobles or town-dwellers. Crude divisions between faiths often break down under examination. Ability to sign was as common in staunchly Catholic northeastern France as it was in strongly Protestant England at the end of the seventeenth century. In France and Germany the differences between Protestant and Catholic were less in 1750 than in 1650.

Despite the hothouse atmosphere surrounding it, the early years of the Reformation saw only gradual improvements in literacy, which followed on from fifteenth-century developments and which were not unique to Protestantism. Seventeenth-century achievements were more substantial. The campaign to promote religious literacy in Sweden produced remarkable results in less than a century, widespread literacy being used to consolidate rather than cause religious change. In Denmark and Prussia, on the other hand, it was not the Lutheran Reformation of the sixteenth or seventeenth century that brought about widespread literacy, but the early-eighteenth-century campaign waged by the Pietists with the help of the new "absolutist" rulers.

No more than schools did the competing churches work in a cultural vacuum. Powerful economic, social, and political forces continued to influence literacy levels. The Protestant Vaucluse had lower literacy in the early nineteenth century than the Catholic province of Baden, the reason being that the German region had more communal property and could thus subsidize schooling. Indeed, on closer inspection, it is plain that across Europe factors other than religion entered into the equation. In the 1870s German Catholics were more accomplished than those of Ireland, who were in turn more literate than Italians. High Italian illiteracy cannot be divorced from its economic performance, for not until the 1930s were more than half the population employed outside agriculture. Religion was only one of many social, economic, and political forces that influenced the distribution of literacy.

The Italian and Irish examples just cited point to a connection between wealth and literacy at both an individual and a communal level. The most literate départements of nineteenth-century France were the prosperous open-field ones to the north and east of an imaginary line drawn between St. Malo and Geneva. Townspeople were more literate than rural dwellers because they were wealthier and followed occupations that required reading, writing, and counting. Illiteracy had been almost eradicated by 1700 among London's male merchants and artisans: a remarkable achievement.

Urbanization. There is a connection between urbanization and literacy, but some cities were much more literate than others. Paris in 1850 was far superior to Naples, as London was to Madrid. Furthermore, some rapidly industrializing cities of northern England, northeastern France and northern Germany in the early nineteenth century saw literacy rates decline as overcrowding stretched the social fabric. The more general relationship between economy and literacy also involved positive and negative feedbacks. Literacy may serve to enhance a nation's economic performance, but it is also clear that growth (and political will) is needed to create and distribute the resources to fund the cost and opportunity cost of educating children, especially at the elementary level.

Urban children were likely to attend school longer than their rural cousins. When education was not compulsory, girls were taken away from school earlier than boys. The Russian school census of 1911 allows us to calculate the likelihood of a child attending school for a given period. Some 88 percent of boys would attend for a year compared with 52 percent of girls. But the chance that a boy would complete three years in school was just 39 percent and only 8 percent for a girl. In these circumstances, most functional literacy and other skills were picked up later in life. It was only in the late nineteenth century that regular and extended school attendance became a central part of growing up for British children and not until after 1945 in Eastern and southern Europe. A principal effect of this development was to fix childhood as a definable stage of life and as a social concept. Similarly, in the West, the expansion of secondary and tertiary provision after the World Wars respectively has helped to create modern notions of "youth" and "youth culture" with, among other attributes, distinctive tastes in printed media.

Gender. The Russian case is an extreme example of a common pattern. Males were educated to participate in the public sphere, females in the private or domestic one. This usually meant that girls gained religious knowledge, learned to read, and were given practical instruction in home-focused skills. In the Mediterranean lands, where gender roles were firmly delineated, it was long held to be positively undesirable to train girls in more than the rudiments of religion, reading, and housewifery. The legacy of such negative attitudes toward female education in those areas is clear in women's deep illiteracy well into the twentieth century. Such views are summed up in a French peasant's comment that girls in his canton (Quercy) had been taught to read, but not write, because the nuns did not want them penning love letters to their sweethearts. Reading was seen by educators as a passive skill. Writing enabled (among other things) unsupervised, long-distance communication and gave access to a different cultural world independent of teachers, pastors, family, and neighbors. Little wonder that secondary education for girls was not a serious subject of debate, let alone action, anywhere in Europe until the mid-nineteenth century—after 1868 in Spain, for example. Postelementary education for girls was only formalized in Britain from the 1850s. Previously, the daughters of the rich had been educated at home by governesses. Writing ability among women began to take off at the end of the nineteenth century in Scandinavia as they were drawn into teaching, clerical, postal, and service jobs. Even then, censorious attitudes toward educated women persisted among some sections of public opinion. Simply being literate was not always enough to transcend social conventions.

Because many women could only read, they did not have direct access to the full spectrum of literate culture. Worse, the growing dominance of written and printed forms in late-nineteenth-century Europe involved simultaneously devaluing the oral traditions of women and the elderly of both sexes, social groups who were commonly left behind in periods of rapidly advancing literacy. However, the presence of informal cultural intermediaries meant illiterates were never wholly isolated from the world of print and writing. Inability to decipher letters and words did not preclude access to the products of literacy. In the city factories and in the squares of small towns and villages of early-twentieth-century Spain and Portugal, newspapers might be read aloud by one person to anyone who cared to listen. Varieties of oral tradition survive in the mainstream until today, complementing rather than substituting for these traditions.

Linguistic variety. Intermediaries might bridge the gap between literate and oral culture, but the possibilities that literacy could open up usually depended on an individual possessing it for him or her self. In assessing why some areas or populations were less accomplished than others, it is hard to exaggerate how important linguistic variety could be. If education and writing or publishing were conducted in a language different from that of everyday life, literacy tended to suffer. Italy had had a relatively uniform written language since the late Middle Ages, but a great diversity of spoken tongues: just 2.5 percent of Italy's population spoke "Italian" (Tuscan) with any fluency in 1861. Four-fifths of the inhabitants of Wales were habitual Welsh speakers as late as the 1880s, while at least a fifth of the population of France did not speak "French" (langue d'oeil) in 1863. It is no accident that the corners of France where Breton, Basque, and Occitan (langue d'oc) were the languages of everyday life were also the least literate in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Gaelic-speaking parts of the British Isles generally lagged far behind the advancing literacy of English-speaking areas. The west of Ireland is an example. Roughly 55–60 percent of Ireland's people born in the 1770s spoke only Irish. Three quarters of those in the 12 counties of Munster, Connacht, and Donegal (with 45 percent of the population) were Irish speakers at the end of the eighteenth century compared with just 10 percent in the remaining 20 counties with 55 percent of Ireland's people. Irish speaking was low and literacy probably high in northeast Ireland even in the early eighteenth century because of the prevalence of English-speaking Presbyterians, many of them of Scots origin or descent. This example reminds us that language is not the whole explanation of literacy trends. Different religious priorities, a more balanced wealth distribution and greater aggregate prosperity in this region also contributed.

Irish was an oral and manuscript language, writing being confined to a very small learned class (almost a caste) in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. English possessed these attributes, but it was also a printed language and the medium of education. During the eighteenth century printed literature for Irish speakers was developed (albeit slowly) by Dublin publishers using a phonetic spelling based on English language orthography. This helped bring about growing English language literacy, but it also contributed to the decline of spoken and written Irish because print-literacy in Irish was secured through English, even for Irish speakers. There were almost no secular works printed in Irish during the eighteenth century and very few religious ones. Other parts of the so-called "Celtic fringe" experienced different fortunes. From the mid-seventeenth century, northwestern French Catholics used printed religious literature in Breton to further the Counter-Reformation, thus fueling the development of reading and writing in the language of everyday speech. Breton was not the language of education, but it was part of everyday religious life and this helped secure higher levels of literacy. Welsh became more deeply embedded as a literate language for this reason too, and because there was more literature available. There was a full Welsh Bible in 1588 and three thousand works printed prior to 1820 compared with fewer than two hundred in Irish. In the southern Low Countries at the end of the eighteenth century illiteracy was higher along linguistic frontiers and in mixed areas. However, the context here was also created by a legacy of ecclesiastical conflict and political fracture, which made education and literacy a weapon as much as a prize.

The state. Since 1500 Europe has seen the retreat of dialects and of separate languages like Gaelic, turning some from majority into minority tongues. Even in the late twentieth century, Europe had a sort of "fault line" between the speakers of Romance languages like French and Italian, and Teutonic ones like German (or its dialects like Alsatian). The influence over time of the state and of printed and later electronic media has been to standardize language as, say, French or German, leaving only the older generation speaking dialect variations. Attempts to revive regional dialects, suppressed or surrendered through political and economic change between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, began in the early nineteenth century. A Provençal revival led to the foundation in 1854 of the Félibrige—a society of regional poets who sought to codify and purify Occitan and to restore its usage by promoting it in literary works. Such movements remained uncommon compared with the late twentieth century. Gaelic was the first language of perhaps 50 percent of Scots around 1400, 30 percent in 1689, but just 20 percent in 1806. Gaelic-speaking in the Highlands of Scotland continued to decline throughout the nineteenth century as monoglots recognized the powerful advantages to be gained from literacy in English. At the end of the twentieth century, Gaelic in modern Scotland was spoken by just two percent of the population (most of them in the urbanized region of Strathclyde), having being artificially resuscitated in the guise of an independent "national" language—although it was never spoken by all Scots, even in the Middle Ages.

In the historical case of the Félibrige, language was used to assert particularism, in the modern case of Gaelic, nationalism. Historically, it was more often an alien imposition designed to create a "national" identity. For example, German was forcibly reintroduced as the language of government and teaching in the Hungarian lands from 1849–1867 following earlier efforts to Magyarize the country. From the 1880s a revived campaign used Magyar in elementary schools while secondary schools taught "national consciousness." The country's 92 teacher-training colleges used Magyar exclusively. However, this was not just against the German-speaking Austrian empire, but was also done at the expense of Rumanians, Ruthenes, and Slovaks. The effect was slow to be felt. Around 1880, 14 percent of Hungarians spoke Magyar and 23 percent in 1910 but, significantly, 90 percent of university students. Modern Swiss cantons allow the local majority the right to dictate the language used in courts and schools, but it is harder to learn in a language that is not used in everyday discourse. Both the modern Swiss example and the Hungarian one of the late nineteenth century were seen by some minorities as not only hindering literacy, but also as an unwelcome form of "linguistic cleansing."

However robust the generalizations about language and literacy, neither linguistic pluralism nor the spread of a dominant tongue necessarily meant low or only slowly improving literacy. German was the vernacular in the Alagna region north of Turin (near the modern Swiss frontier) until relegated to the home by the spread of Italian during the nineteenth century. The region also suffered other apparent disadvantages such as few settled schools and a dispersed, largely agricultural population. Yet, more than four-fifths of confraternity members, albeit from a privileged section of society, who subscribed a document in 1781 did so with their full names. The need of inhabitants of the Alpine foothills to migrate seasonally in order to find work and their location in an interstitial zone helped foster demand for multilingual literacy. In contested regions that frequently changed hands between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries—northern Italy is one example, Lithuania another—the languages of public affairs and education might change more than once in a generation. Overlying this were more enduring cultural relations with a single culture such as German. Ecclesiastical visitations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries revealed extensive possession of books in German and of manuscript (heretical) religious works. A long, heretically based tradition of vernacular literacy in manuscript and print may also help to explain the phenomenon, notably in the former Waldensian areas of northern Italy. Certainly, the Alagna district seems to have been unusually literate in the eighteenth century, the statistics backed up by contemporary comment. However, the advantages were selective, for high male literacy could coexist with low female, even in an area so apparently well-favored. In subscribed marriage registers, beginning in the 1840s, nearly all grooms could sign, but less than half of brides.

USES AND IMPLICATIONS

Being able to use a pen or decipher letters and words on a page opens up new possibilities. Literacy has economic and cultural uses, the latter including recreational and religious dimensions. The quantity of books grew from the Renaissance onward, and qualitative changes in their uses occurred, notably in the eighteenth century. Until the latter period, reading involved an intensive perusal of a small number of texts; thereafter readers sought out multiple titles and novel subjects. However, mass literacy does not necessarily mean the widespread functional use of literacy. For the majority of early-nineteenth-century Europeans, the literacy they possessed was a blunt tool, quite insufficient to reshape their lives. In western Europe as late as 1900 the ability to read and write fluently was confined to town-dwelling men of middle class status or above. Furthermore, while literacy potentially offered a singular commodity, the ways in which people related to its products were emphatically plural. Reading, as much as writing, was a creative process which involved selective appropriation.

Germany had businesses that typeset, printed, and sold books and pamphlets in most major towns by 1520, producing an unprecedented outpouring—perhaps 300 thousand copies of Luther's writings, 1517–1520. From the dawn of the Reformation new religious ideas were available to the reading public. By 1530 perhaps 4 thousand pamphlet titles had been produced in Germany and over the sixteenth century as many as 200 million copies may have been turned out Europe-wide. They could be bought from publishers or shops and stalls in towns, from itinerant peddlers in the countryside. For all faiths religious titles made up the bulk of books owned until the Enlightenment. Across southwest Germany, works of modern literature were largely to be found in the libraries of the upper classes. Even in the closing decades of the eighteenth century, no more than a fifth of books owned by people from Tübingen had an obviously secular tone and in the Württemberg village of Laichingen the figure was close to zero; more than a half of books owned were spiritually oriented. Book ownership was largely informed by the Lutheran revivalist movement called Pietism rather than by Enlightenment precepts. This does not mean that change was not occurring, for it may be that eighteenth-century people were more interested in devotions and meditations on practical morality rather than on old-style divinity.

More obvious changes, like secularization, that were associated with new developments in thought can nevertheless be detected in book collections. Pious books made up nearly half those owned at death in nine western French towns around 1700, compared with less than 30 percent in 1789. Another aspect of changing tastes was the new value placed on originality and novelty. The real growth area in reading material was not the staple texts, which people perused closely, but the more varied, ephemeral, and entertaining fare that was becoming available. Between 1700 and 1789 there were published 1,200 French-language periodicals of at least one year's duration. History and travel books became more popular. Also in France, pornography became a mature genre.

While the fully literate indulged themselves in its novelties, the semiliterate remained within their traditional mental world. In his autobiography, Goethe recounted childhood memories of enjoying a chapbook literature of magic, chivalry, and saints, which had changed little for centuries. Educational reformers were not slow to condemn the youthful preferences exemplified by Goethe. Whatever their faith in literacy (some argued that the poor should not be educated lest they got ideas above their station), its advocates from Luther onward can be found bemoaning the uses to which people put its products. It was cheap recreational pamphlets of perhaps thirty pages, known collectively as the bibliothèque bleue after the blue paper used as binding, which provided mass reading in France between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Russian peasants who read newspapers in the 1890s were interested mainly in sensational events like wars or natural curiosities. The poet Matvei Ivanovich Ozhegov (1860–1933) wrote of peasant readers being interested only in "the news of the evils of the day or about the birth of a dog with twenty heads." Saints' lives remained the most popular mass-commercially-produced reading in early-twentieth-century Russia, long after more secular items had taken their place in the west. Yet, reading tastes were changing, as shown by the explosion in detective and adventure stories after the 1905 Revolution and of "women's novels" from the 1910s. The lesson here is that making people literate is one thing, controlling what they do with their abilities is quite another. Most people used their literacy primarily for recreation. In the 1970s a tenth of Russia's population never read a newspaper and a fifth hardly ever read books. For those who did, the focus on practical and escapist literature of a century ago remains, a pattern replicated in the west.

By the end of the Napoleonic wars the population of the urbanized provinces of Holland had come within easy reach of books and newspapers, even if most readers still preferred almanacs, chapbooks, and broadsheets. In contrast, rapid growth in the volume of novels and newspapers did not begin in Finland until the 1880s and 1890s. Norwegian postal subscriptions to such materials grew from 11 million items a year in 1880 to 56 million by 1900—this in a country where reading had supposedly been universal for over a century. Even then, the reading public for serious literature and current affairs was restricted to the prosperous urban middle and upper classes. Norway had 185 public libraries in 1837, but roughly 300 by 1860, almost all in small towns. In late-nineteenth-century France and Germany too, most subscribers to books and periodicals were townspeople and it is unlikely that most rural dwellers saw reading and writing as central parts of their economic, social, or cultural lives before the twentieth century. Literacy surely created the potential for increased cultural participation, but it could take a long time to be realized.

People were using their literacy more extensively as the nineteenth century progressed. All the journals printed in Paris in 1840 amounted to 3 million copies, but by 1882 44 million were being produced. Table 2, based on the Statistique Générale du Service Postal, gives the number of stamped letters and postcards sent per head of population in selected European countries in 1886 and 1900. This is not purely an indicator of the use of literacy because the density and reliability of the postal network also played its part. The German imperial postal service had already developed quite extensively by the mid-seventeenth century, but competition from the posts of individual states produced an increasingly dense and frequent (if no quicker) network thereafter. Two points are clear, however: first, in almost all of Europe, increased letter sending; second, the marked differences between the "core" countries

of western Europe and those on its eastern and southern fringes.

What was in the correspondence? Dictionaries were not widely used among the population at large until the nineteenth century. While copying was a central part of writing instruction, only the best-educated used standard spelling in their composition anywhere in Europe until the twentieth century. A careful study of writing among Danish soldiers was carried out by the Reverend J. L. Bang in 1882. He found that 32 percent could write well and 47 percent adequately, but only a fifth had good spelling and 44 percent were unsatisfactory. Of course, as long as what was written was understood, few letter writers worried about correct forms. Denmark was the first Scandinavian country to institute compulsory writing instruction in schools (1814), followed by Norway in 1827, Sweden in 1842, Finland in 1866, and Iceland in 1907. Most children were taught "passive" skills like reading. For example, a survey of over a thousand Danish rural schools in 1848, the year of revolutions across Europe, showed that 99 percent taught reading and 92 percent the rudiments of spelling (needed for writing). However, composition was taught in only a handful of schools and then only to the gifted few. This is reflected in the restricted use of writing among the population at large. For example, Danish rural diaries (Bondedagbøger) prior to 1850 record simple facts and were almost all written by affluent peasants. Thereafter, these writings become more abstract and reflective (especially about religion). More cottagers and artisans, and for the first time women began to keep such personal records in the second half of the nineteenth century. Extensive use of literacy was spreading rapidly among more social groups in late-nineteenth-century northern Europe.

Religion. Issues of grammar and orthography illustrate that, even among the literate, the ways people related to writing could differ. We can also identify qualitative differences in the uses and importance of literacy that distinguished, for example, Protestants from Catholics. Reading the Scriptures was central to the reformed faith. Religious books were probably read more frequently among Protestants and the very status of reading was special. Studies of eastern France in the seventeenth century have shown that, despite having comparable basic literacy, Protestants tended to own more books on a wider variety of religious topics than their Catholic neighbors and to use them differently. Protestants accepted the overwhelming authority of what they knew or thought was in a religious book.

This does not mean that we should condemn Catholicism as obscurantist and antireading. Catholic leaders wanted literacy to spread, but in a controlled way, with the priest as intermediary in the process of understanding. They regarded some types of reading as a threat, rather than an invitation, to sound beliefs. An Italian priest, writing around 1530, could claim that "all literate people are heretics." Indeed, it is plain that being unable to read was construed by authorities in, for example, eighteenth-century Spain and Bohemia as a sign of Catholic orthodoxy, immunizing from contamination by this powerful force. Simply possessing a book was a sign of heresy. In short, there is no conclusive proof of the direction of the relationship between Protestantism and literacy, but the bond was stronger than that between Catholicism and literacy.

Limited literacy was not necessarily an obstacle to Catholic religious instruction. Illiteracy may have been an increasing disadvantage in everyday life, but the extent of any handicap was not uniform in all contexts or in all parts of Europe. Generally only the church imposed direct penalties on those without the rudiments of reading and religious knowledge. Illiterates might be refused religious rites such as communion or marriage in church—as in Sweden from 1686 and in Saxony from 1802. Literacy was not formally required for political participation and even in highly literate countries the franchise remained in any case highly restricted. One percent of adult males in Scotland could vote in parliamentary elections in the 1780s and 13 percent after the Reform Bill of 1832; just one Dutchman in ten could vote in 1853.

Advantages of literacy. In the course of the nineteenth century the practical, civil disadvantages of illiteracy became more apparent. After 1874 Russian conscripts who could prove they had been to school and had basic literacy were allowed to leave the military sooner than illiterates. Other countries used recruitment to foster literacy. The French army favored literate conscripts after 1872 and provided further training for soldiers. The rate of illiteracy among recruits to the Italian army fell much more rapidly than among the population at large: from 59 percent in 1870 to just 10 percent in 1913. For comparison, Swiss recruits had illiteracy as low as 6 percent in 1879 and 1 percent in 1900.

Access to the written or printed word could open up new horizons. Until the 1870s emigrants to North America came from Europe's most literate and economically developed countries. Within Europe, migrants to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cities were generally more literate than those who remained in the countryside. Was it literacy that made them move or was this desire to learn part of a wider set of dynamic personality traits? French, Spanish, and Greek people who arrived in North America in the 1890s were much more literate than those who stayed in the old country. In contrast, Austrian, Belgian, German, and Italian emigrants mirrored the abilities of their former compatriots. Irish who emigrated to North America showed above-average literacy, but those who went across to Britain were indistinguishable in this respect from those in the counties they had left. Contemporary migrants toward Europe's eastern limits seem to have depended less on literacy (almost all were illiterate peasants) than on possessing an independent and pioneering spirit.

Those who stayed behind in Europe were not blind to the value of education and literacy. A marginal annotation made in a Bulgarian liturgical book in 1834 reads: "You should care for education not money, for education brings money." By the end of the nineteenth century in western Europe simply being able to read and write made little difference to a person's chances of being upwardly socially mobile. However, basic literacy may have helped to prevent those from the lower classes being adversely affected by a changing job market. The most pronounced benefits came increasingly from higher-quality literacy associated with prolonged schooling and the possession of certification to that effect.

Education. During the nineteenth century education was also increasingly seen as a pathway to political participation, for example among the Norwegian workmen's associations who founded schools from the 1850s. Like workers all over Europe after the Revolutions of 1848, they recognized that education was one way of winning knowledge and freedom, of creating a sense of collective "class" identity while maximizing their potential as individuals. Optimism was tempered by experience. In the first flush of Italian revolutionary fervor during the 1790s and 1800s radicals advocated mass education in the principles of democracy. Later revolutionaries like Giuseppe Mazzini recognized that only the urban classes would be likely to pick up his propaganda. He was pessimistic about the opportunities to use literacy in the cause of political reform. He wrote: "As for speaking to the people . . . I would speak: but the paths are lacking, and we wander around in a circle . . . The people cannot read." Sicilian radicals of the mid-nineteenth century advocated extending the franchise to all men, but only those who could read and write.

The connection between politics and literacy is shown in twentieth-century Russia, but so too is the politicization of literacy. Lenin, the son of a school inspector, believed that "the illiterate person stands outside politics." Postrevolutionary Russia built on an existing liberal drive to promote learning and a growing mass desire for literacy and its products. Under Stalin, education made strong advances, but this was in the context of tight censorship and an obsession with the inculcation of political orthodoxy, including a vigorous attack on religion. Against a background of forced collectivization of the peasantry, rising literacy in 1930s Russia did not imply an invitation to understand and change the world in which the Soviets lived or to emancipate self and society, but a demand that they approve of an existing system.

There are other examples of literacy and education acting for stability rather than change. Take the example of the "fertility transition," which affected all parts of Europe between roughly 1870 and 1910. Until the second half of the nineteenth century, contraception was not widely practiced among the population at large. Couples could not, or did not, limit the number of children a woman would bear during her fertile years. The age at which a woman married for the first time was the primary determinant of fertility. The adoption of modern birth-control methods brought about a drastic reduction in fertility within marriage, couples had fewer children, and their standard of living improved as a result.

In some parts of Europe the relationship we might assume between education and modern attitudes is borne out. Regions of Italy and Spain with high basic literacy had low marital fertility by the early twentieth century, but in Germany the low illiteracy of adult males was only one precondition of an early and large reduction of marital fertility. In Brabant prior to 1920 it was in general only literate couples whose parents and grandparents had been literate who adopted new ways of limiting family size. In Portugal the expected relationship is reversed: marital fertility in 1930 and 1960 was lower in the less literate southern provinces than in the north. Indeed, we can turn the relationship between literacy and modernity on its head. Ron Lesthaeghe's The Decline of Belgian Fertility (Princeton, 1977, p. 194) concludes that: "the eradication of illiteracy through the development of primary-school education contributed more to the continuity of the existing moral norms than to their change . . . the degree of literacy in Belgium could be a better indicator of traditionalism than of modernization." Education and the literacy it brings is almost never value-free.

The Belgian example reminds us that education by itself may do little to alter the way people think. It can liberate an individual or society, but it can also be used to police attitudes and behavior. Its effect depends on whether the prevailing ideology supports continuity or change. The Belgian Catholic church effectively monopolized education in rural areas as late as 1900. Educational provision was excellent and illiteracy among adults under age 55 years was almost unknown by 1910. But the church was able to damp down changes in the moral climate that might have encouraged greater use of contraception.

At the same time, people may think or rationalize in a way that is "modern" thanks to their education, but behave traditionally because of the way they were socialized outside school. Literacy's growth may therefore sometimes have had limited effects. A further example is the continued dominance of middle-aged and older males in periods when their juniors were rapidly becoming literate. Reading ability was nearly universal among the under-fifties in mid-eighteenth-century Finland, but half the over-sixties could not read from the Bible. Illiteracy among Belgian men aged under 30 years was a fifth in 1880 compared with over a half for those aged over 80 years. But age brought wealth, status, and power in patriarchal families and communities, which illiteracy did little to diminish. It is the overall context of a society that makes literacy important or otherwise.

CONCLUSION

The areas and social groups that saw early and deep penetration of literacy were wealthier, more commercialized, and Protestant. Literacy became embedded in the society and culture of these regions and peoples, with the result that reading and writing were practiced more extensively and a "virtuous circle" was created. At different periods for different groups in different parts of Europe, the ability to read and write became a component of important areas of economic, social, political, and cultural life. In the seventeenth century, literacy was an integral part of Calvinist faith; in the eighteenth century it became central to the bourgeois and élite sociability that was a keynote of the Enlightenment; in the nineteenth century it was an agency both of political centralization and of particularism; in the twentieth century a firm connection with economic betterment became established as education and certification became synonymous.

Explaining the social and geographical distribution of literacy in historic Europe involves understanding failures as well as successes. Of the structural features of historic literacy, sex-specific differences have been all but ironed out in European countries covered by the OECD survey. The differences that remain reflect the other two historic givens, class and residence, which determine that in some countries, most obviously Poland, the population clusters into a much narrower (and lower) band of proficiency than others. Another international body, UNESCO, estimated that perhaps 15–20 percent of the population of late-twentieth-century France has some sort of literacy shortfall and perhaps 15–30 percent of Portuguese. "Residual" or "latent" illiteracy may exist even in nations with complete basic literacy. These figures are remarkably similar to the 10–15 percent illiteracy obtained in the more "advanced" European states of the late nineteenth century or in Russia in 1939. Perhaps at any given stage in social development after the introduction of mass education there is always a core of adults who are judged "illiterate." The reason is clear enough for some modern groups. For example, some Turkish Gastarbeiter in Germany run Koranic schools for their children as a way of preserving Islamic culture, but, since the same children are legally obliged to attend German state schools, a linguistic and cultural conflict arises, which inhibits learning. Elsewhere in Europe, older generations tend to be dialect speakers (or to use archaic Gothic or "black letter" script), and European educators perceive adult illiteracy to be their greatest remaining challenge. Any group left behind by mainstream cultural change, or which is socially or geographically marginalized may be so affected. Gypsies or "traveling folk" are another example.

Many of the positive implications of changing literacy are still with us. Scandinavia's early-modern reading campaign may be associated with the very high levels of book production there in the late twentieth century. Iceland had the largest number of published titles per capita of any Scandinavian country in the late 1980s and the highest average per capita book purchasing in Europe. Scotland's past literacy superiority may be exaggerated, but the very fact that people believe in it makes this vision of history a potent force for both continuity and change. In both tangible and intangible ways, the changing patterns of historic literacy have powerful legacies.

In the early twenty-first century, technological advances are said to be rendering obsolete the different literacies outlined above. Those with a calculator possess an electronic alternative to counting. Having access to a word processor may help us to dispense with all but a few uses of writing (including the need to authenticate by signature—and even that is being rendered unnecessary). However, television, radio, and electronic communication provide only imperfect substitutes for the ability to read. In some cases they actually require it. Indeed, economic and technological change may require the acquisition of new literacies to compliment rather than replace traditional skills. Two or three centuries ago being able to read and write marked a person out and gave him (rarely her) many opportunities denied to the illiterate. Simultaneously, the disadvantages of illiteracy were less pronounced. Since then, there has been an inflation of qualifications required of those wishing to use education to distinguish and advance themselves. The types of literacies and the levels of achievement needed to function in a modern society and economy have increased rather than decreased.

See also other articles in this section.

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