Literacy in Lombard Italy

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Table of Contents

Introduction1

Discussion1

Research on Urban Literacy2

Peasant Literacy4

Institutional and Private Uses of Writing7

Using and Keeping Written Records9

Conclusion11

End Notes12

Literacy in Lombard Italy

Introduction

An important topic in recent research on literacy is the growth of the so called literate mentality. Different from other social scientists, such as, e.g. anthropologists, historians usually try to keep their distance from the fuzzy term 'mentality'. Students of medieval literacy avoid exclusive definitions, and prefer to enumerate factors contributing to the development of 'literate mentalities'. Among the most important factors are the realization that, once writing has become an option in any medieval society, it is a 'natural' thing to preserve human actions through writing, and that written records can be used to reconstruct the past. Writing gradually becomes trusted as an instrument for fixing, and thereby defining, events. A quantitative factor is progress in alphabetization: the spread of the elementary skills of reading and writing among ever more social groups. The development of literate mentalities can be measured by the growth (or decline) in the prestige of those individuals who can read and write.

Discussion

In the Middle Ages, in towns one seems to have had more chance of being confronted with writing than elsewhere. Certain urban milieus participating in written culture, however, have caught the scholars' attention more than others. Studies of the urban communes of northern Italy have suggested a direct link between the reception of the written word in daily life and the emergence of literate mentalities. From the late twelfth century onwards, these communes seemed oriented towards the production and use written records; they seemed to possess a collective will to develop literacy. They also preserved written records. This readiness to engage in written culture could be considered as an important sign of changes in thinking and the perception of the world. It showed an increasing growth of the use of the reasoning faculties.

The results of this research, which was mainly carried out in the 1980s and 1990s, seem to have been taken for granted in most studies of urban written culture carried out over the last ten years. Many publications on urban literacy deal with two related topics. First, they consider the different types of written records produced in the towns. Secondly, they study the history of the institutions producing, using and keeping these records. However, there have been other currents of research as well. Recently, there have been studies of such phenomena as the use of public space in towns, secular and religious ceremonies, and the forms of expressing the town's identity (so-called urban memoria). This type of study has been an important stimulus for renewed discussions of the nature of urban literacy.

Research on Urban Literacy

The interest in 'urban' literacy is, however, much older. Already in 1956, at the Freie University in Berlin H. defended a dissertation on the relation between 'town' and 'literacy' in the German Middle Ages. The work was seen as a contribution to the social history of writing. This thesis is, to my knowledge, the first ...