A Companion to the History of the Book (84 page)

Literacy has long been an object of quantitative speculation by those interested in the religious or political well-being of the state, from the Florentine Giovanni Villani’s observation that there were “from eight to ten thousand boys and girls learning to read” in late 1330s’ Florence to sixteenth-century assessments of the number of English readers by Thomas More and others (Ferguson 2003: 79, 76). The signature archive that Stone and others have mined relies on such documents as charters, oaths, marriage registers, and, by the nineteenth century in Europe and the United States, a variety of census and school records. In England, the Protestation Oath of Loyalty to Parliament implemented in 1642 was meant to be signed – or “marked” – by all English men; the 1754 Marriage Act required signatures on marriage registers; in France, from 1827, army recruits were asked about their education.

These dates, and a series of others (beginning, in England, from as early as the ninth century), which express the reach of church and government bureaucracies, loom large in the history of literacy research. Most historians surround with qualifications the figures drawn from these archives, and the numbers themselves get re-crunched and reinterpreted by succeeding scholarly generations. Signature evidence in particular arouses intense debate. By definition exclusive, it charts only men (in the case of most oaths) or only property owners (in the case of deeds and wills), threatening the historian with the familiar dilemma of reproducing the very conditions that restricted the archives in the first place. In literary historian Margaret Ferguson’s assessment of signature data, “so long as literacy is bound up with questions of social status, people are going to misrepresent or ‘produce’ their kinds and degrees of this form of cultural capital” (Ferguson 2003: 79). Social historian David Vincent suggests that while signature evidence “offers no direct evidence of an ability to read, and the capacity to inscribe two words on just one occasion in an individual’s life provides the slightest possible indication of command over the skills of writing,” he is nonetheless swayed by the advantage of a “standardised body of evidence” that permits historical and regional comparison (Vincent 1989: 17). As a “measurable” trace of a literacy practice, signatures remain inescapable in many kinds of research, especially for the early modern period to the mid-nineteenth-century period of expansion.

While the evidence itself may have merit, it is often dearly paid for. The rhetoric of statistical certainty seems inevitably to bleed into the text that surrounds the charts and graphs. A triumphalist language of war, sport, and the hunt (on the one hand) or of pathology and disease (on the other) tends to infuse even the most careful of these works, as reading and writing are “conquered” or illiteracy is “wiped out” (as in the Lawrence Stone passage above), and as some group is always “catching up” and another is “gaining the upper hand” (these examples from Vincent 1989.)

The Ethics and Politics of Literacy History

Beyond the narrative of development that signature evidence tends to create, statistics generally tell a story of state interest in the reading and writing skills of citizens, and histories of literacy often begin by calling attention to the politics of literacy. “The history of literacy has aroused fierce passions in France,” François Furet and Jacques Ozouf, historians affiliated with the Annales School, write at the beginning of their 1982 study of French literacy. “This is because it has been studied not for its own sake, but rather in order to furnish ammunition in the political debate over education which until recently constituted one of the major lines of cleavage between left and right” (Furet and Ozouf 1982: 1).

Unique, as all national cases are, the French case nonetheless mirrors other such histories. Linguistic, ethnic, and cultural hegemony and homogeneity have often been the implicit or explicit aim of literacy campaigns, whether subtly or aggressively prosecuted. In the United States, the history of literacy is interwoven with, and implicated in, the history of racial conflict, Indian “removal,” and slavery. “Race in particular,” Michael Warner writes,

was made one of the social meanings of the difference between writing and speech by racial division in the reproduction of literacy, and by the consequent overlap between determinate features of the medium and traits of race. Black illiteracy was more than a negation of literacy for blacks; it was the condition of a positive character of written discourse for whites. (Warner 1990: 12)

Literacy testing has a long history in the United States as a device of racism and nativ-ism, used to restrict voting in the post-Reconstruction South and (starting in 1917) to limit immigration nationwide.

Just as the Birmingham School was motivated in part by post-war British adult education, contemporary research often echoes scholars’ engagement with institutions of literacy on their own campuses and in their own communities. Histories of literacy today, more than ever, cross disciplinary boundaries, influenced (for example) by work in composition and rhetoric, by “popular” or “informal” education movements in Africa and Latin America, and by the consciousness-raising, “problem-posing” pedagogy of the Brazilian theorist and activist Paulo Freiré. Promoting an “ethnographic understanding,” Brian Street (in Cushman et al. 2001: 433) has persuasively critiqued what he calls the “autonomous model” of literacy, which figures literacy as a neutral technology: “What is taken in the ‘autonomous’ model to be qualities inherent to literacy are in fact conventions of literate practice in particular societies” (Street 1984: 4). He poses instead an “ideological” model, viewing literacy as always embedded in, and expressive of, rather than somehow transcending, ideology. In tune with much recent theoretical work in the humanities and social sciences, Street urges a kind of defamiliarization: “Faith in the power and qualities of literacy is itself socially learnt and is not an adequate tool with which to embark on a description of its practices” (Street 1984: 1). In line with Street’s critique, literacy as an aspect of “discipline” in Michel Foucault ‘s terms, and as “symbolic capital” in Pierre Bourdieu’s, has also influenced current thinking, while postcolonial approaches have contributed to understanding the hybrid nature of colonial and creóle literacies.

Finding Literacy in All the Wrong Places

As some of their titles indicate (“consequences of,” “development of”), earlier studies implied a theory of development, culminating in the current status and prestige of Western industrialized literacy. Recent histories attend instead to
mentalités
or the “mental world” of readers and writers, across a broad range of historical, social, and cultural situations. Marked by a heightened awareness of social power dynamics, by conversation across disciplines, and by a critique of modernity, these works attend less to demographics and more to individual readers and writers or groups of readers and writers. The archive has accordingly shifted to include such materials as library records, autobiographies, diaries, children’s literature and literacy practices, scrapbooks, school-books, visual representations of reading and writing, and histories of related media techniques and technologies. Recent histories tend to question prevailing “common-sense” assumptions about literacy: that literacy and economic progress automatically go hand in hand, that mass literacy depended on government support of schooling, that ordinary readers left no records and are therefore lost in the mists of history. As David Hall puts the current case, “To inquire into the uses of literacy is not to ask about the distribution of literacy as a skill, but to explore how reading [and, one might add, writing] functioned as a cultural style” (Hall 1996: 41).

New histories of literacy find reading and writing in unexpected places and tease out the historical significance of these newly discovered (or newly perceived) texts. In his study of the English peasant uprising of June 1381, Steven Justice uncovers the overlooked literacy of these revolutionaries and suggests that literate skills might have been “more widely diffused than we have thought.” Countering long-held assumptions that the rebels’ destruction of church and state documents expressed a kind of mute and abject (and “illiterate”) rage against these symbols of power, Justice finds instead that the rioters destroyed only documents that bore on their demands, conveying thereby a “familiarity with and an investment in the documentary culture by which a realm was governed” (Justice 1994: 52). The rebels, then, were not longing for a return to orality and memory as depositories of institutional covenants: they aimed to “re-create, not destroy, documentary culture” through
“acts of assertive literacy”
(Justice 1994: 188, 24, emphasis in original). Justice speculates that the mysterious scraps of rebel writing embedded in contemporary chronicles may have circulated as manuscript broadsides. “[Mjerely by existing, [the broadside] asserted . . . that those who read only English – or even could only have English read to them – had a stake in the intellectual and political life of church and realm” (Justice 1994: 30). Contemporary chroniclers, representing the authority that in the end crushed the insurgents, have been allowed to own the rebels’ story; by examining the scant traces of rebel writing in the official story, Justice undermines the chroniclers’ power using their own tools. The chroniclers so little expected the possibility of a peasant voice that they “did not efface those voices, because they could not understand them well enough to efface them” (Justice 1994: 261).

“[0]fficial culture,” Justice concludes, “need not be read as it wishes” (Justice 1994: 261). This could be the motto of much recent work on contemporary and historical literacy. In the case of the fourteenth-century English peasants, literacy was used, as it so often has been, to demand economic and civil rights, but more than this, vernacular peasant literacy challenged the authority of French and Latin. Like the literacy of medieval peasants, the literacy of African-American slaves and Native Americans, with the exception of a few famous cases, has been until recently underrated and under-studied. Hilary Wyss counters “the assumption . . . that Native Americans were not literate before the end of the eighteenth century” (Wyss 2000: 3) by pointing to seventeenth-century wills, deeds, marginalia in Bibles, letters, conversion narratives, and the evidence of Indian literacy found within texts by whites. She draws out Indian “autoethnographies” (in Mary Louise Pratt’s term) “in which colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways that
engage with
the colonizer’s own terms” (Pratt, quoted in Wyss 2000: 4).

While Native Americans were encouraged to become literate to “civilize” them and to incorporate them into English land-use conventions, African-American slaves were excluded (through social and often legal constraints) from access to literacy: “A form of capital themselves, slaves were strictly debarred . . . from acquiring any cultural or monetary capital of their own” (Nelson Salvino 1989: 147). And yet, Janet Cornelius estimates that against crushing odds as many as 10 percent of the antebellum United States’ slave population became literate, sometimes taught by whites, sometimes, at the risk of amputation (a punishment so widespread that many thought it was legally mandated), teaching themselves or learning from other slaves. This hard-won literacy could have powerful real-life effects, including escape or manumission. But in the American South, as in most other historical and geographical sites, literacy alone, despite the blinding myth of its empowering force, often had very little social or economic payoff. “While blacks embraced and subverted the white ideology of literacy for the freedom it could provide from physical bondage,” Dana Nelson writes, “their hard-earned literacy skills did not mean very much in terms of social and economic acceptance among whites” (Nelson Salvino 1989: 152). Studies of literacy among the enslaved also highlight what often gets effaced in discussions of literacy: the cultural and historical differences between the practices of and attitudes toward reading and writing. Reading traditionally came first in the curriculum, with writing, requiring more training to teach, reserved for more elite (and, until the mid-eighteenth century, usually male) students. For Native Americans, and to some extent for African Americans, reading pedagogy’s gloss of Christian proselytizing made it culturally invasive; for the same reason, from the point of view of whites, teaching reading could seem benign. Writing, on the other hand, always seemed to represent the promise – or threat – of empowerment (Monaghan 2005).

While slaves risked gaining the literacy skills whose potential benefits, including escape or manumission, outweighed the potential dire punishments, northern, middle-class African-American men and women were establishing literary societies “as a means of self-defense and to fight for the right to enter the sphere of politics” (McHenry 2003: 57). At the same time, according to Thomas Augst, young, white, American men in the nineteenth century, attending lyceum lectures and confiding their aspirations to their diaries, “learned to pursue independence within a dense landscape of literacy” (Augst 2003: 2). For the young American man, writing

in a blank book enables him to rectify past mistakes, to trust in God, to form the determination to “win” on which his success and freedom as a man depends. With his cursive “hand,” an ambitious clerk invests his diary with moral utility, the power to shape the outcome of one’s struggles in the protean world of market culture. Through such gestures, young men vested writing with magical, if not mythical, powers of freedom. (Augst 2003: 9)

Diaries offer to historians accounts of ordinary lives with the detail and intensity once reserved only for histories of elites. Letter writing, too, once a domain of privilege, became democratized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. “The easy possibility of letter writing,” wrote Franz Kafka, “must – seen merely theoretically – have brought into the world a terrible disintegration of souls. It is, in fact, an intercourse with ghosts, and not only with the ghost of the recipient but also with one’s own ghost which develops between the lines of the letter one is writing” (quoted in Siegert 1999: 4). Along with silent reading and diary writing, letter writing evinces and creates a new relationship between self and others, and what seem to be distinctly modern reaches of both interiority and alienation. For David Vincent, “[l]iteracy in modern Europe came of age on 9 October 1874” with the Treaty of Berne, authorizing the Universal Postal Union, which would connect “[e]very inhabitant of every country” in Europe “in a common system of flat-rate postage” (Vincent 2000: 1). Valentine’s Day emerges strikingly as an exemplary site of this transition: with the English penny post, something like 400,000 Valentines were mailed in 1841 and, in London alone, mail increased on February 14 by 1.5 million items in 1871 (Vincent 1989: 44). The cheap and speedy exchange of letters, postcards, and commercial holiday cards profoundly transformed everyday life, allowing affective bonds to withstand the increased mobility of modern life.