A Badge of

Class
Effects of print and rising standards
of literacy in Early Modern Europe

By Pablo Lima
A Badge of Class
A Badge of Class
Effects of print and rising standards
of literacy in Early Modern Europe

By Pablo Lima
© 2022 by Pablo Lima

All rights reserved. No part of this book

may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form or by
any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise,
except as may be expressly permitted by
the applicable copyright statutes or in
writing by the Publisher.

Cover painting: Saint Anthony Abbey, by the

Master of the Osservanza Triptych, Louvre
Museum, Paris, France.

ISBN: 978-65-00-47409-1

Lima, Pablo. A Badge of Class: Effects of

print and rising standards of literacy in
Early Modern Europe. Belo Horizonte: PL
Editor, 2022.
Dedicated all my friends from Nottingham
University - Jozien, Judith, Matt, Petros,
Ruggero, Tej and all the others from
Broadgate Park, Beeston, UK.
Contents

Contents .................................................6

Preface ...................................................7

Introduction ..........................................11

Chapter 1: From Speech to Print.............14

Chapter 2: Oral and Written Cultures .....18

Chapter 3 - A Badge of Class ..................26

Epilogue - A Badge of Class ....................34

References ............................................39

About the Author ..................................42

Preface
This short book has its origin in a paper
written at the University of Nottingham, in
the United Kingdom, in the spring semester
of the year 2000. Back then, I was an
undergraduate History major exchange
student from the Federal University of
Minas Gerais, Brazil. At the University of
Nottingham I was enrolled in a module
entitled “Culture and Conflict in Early
Modern Europe”, in the Department of
History & Art History, lectured by Professor
J. M. Ellis. One of the research topics
proposed by this module was “How deep
an effect did rising standards of literacy
have on the lives of early modern
Europeans?”.
To answer this question, I undertook a
bibliographical research on the topics of
print and literacy in Early Modern Europe
and wrote the paper. It was very well
evaluated and included in the papers that
would be assessed by a visiting committee
at the University of Nottigham that year.
Since then, it was stored in my
computer. I thought of adapting it into an
academic article, but it would require an
updating in the research, something which
can still be done in the future. Meanwhile,
in order to put it out to the public, I
decided to adapt it and make it into an e-
book.
The reader will find a work that
develops a historiographical dialogue
between renowned researchers and
authors of print, literacy, the history of
book, reading and writing practices, such
as Roger Chartier, Natalie Zemon Davis,
Lucien Febvre, Henri-Jean Martin and
Tessa Watt.
The authors analyze the complex
historical process by which Western
European societies where impacted by the
development and dissemination of print
and of literacy, specially in Northern
Europe. The Protestant Reformation, as
well as the early development of a
capitalist class society, played important
roles in this process, along with the
technical invention of print itself.
 But did literacy really change the deeply
oral culture established long before the
invention of print? Or was it a sign of the
new times brought about by a growing
urban bourgeois class, eager to differ itself
from medieval illiteracy? In Henri-Jean
Martin’s words, was literacy a “badge of
class” in Early European History? This
book is an attempt to answer these
questions.
Introduction

I
n the early modern period, from the
mid-15th until the mid-18th centuries,
Western Europe societies witnessed
the process of changing from an overall
oral and illiterate culture into a
predominantly literate one.
In 1580, illiteracy was a characteristic
of the majority of the population in all
European countries while, one hundred
years later, it was a characteristic of the
poor. According to David Cressy, In
England, during the 1550’s, 20% of the
male and 5% of the female populations
were literate. In the 1880’s, these figures
rose to around 90% and 70%, respectively
(CRESSY, 1993, p.314-7).
This change was influenced by three
decisive factors, mainly: the birth and
dissemination of print; the Protestant and
Catholic Reformations; and the augment of
public or popular education. At the same
time, it influenced people’s culture,
religion and world knowledge. It also
occurred in a time when Europe was going
through serious religious and economic
crises. The impact of literacy, as well as of
print, and how deep its effect was upon
Europeans’ lives is the theme of this book.
And to view this complex process of
‘cultural transformation’ it is necessary to
dive into the deep waters of social and
cultural History, questioning crystallized
assumptions and focusing on works
surrounding the notion of ‘popular
culture’.
Chapter 1: From Speech to
Print

I
n traditional history, a distinction has
been made between popular and elite
cultures in which the first is
supposedly oral while the later is literate.
But the definition of literacy is not a simple
one. It ranges from the capacity that a
person has to sign his or her name to the
ability of reading — or even writing — a
book. Therefore literacy is understood
here in its broad sense. A literate culture is
one in which the major it y of the
population can extract meaning from
graphic representations and symbols: in
Europe, letters and words. But, naturally,
no literate culture is only literate and, with
the spread of literacy, popular culture was
no longer only oral. There are not clear
borders between them.
 Popular culture, according to Roger
Chartier, is an intellectual “category (…)
aiming to encompass and describe artifacts
and behaviours situated outside learned
culture”. It must be stressed that it is a
concept used to characterize practices
“never designated by their actors as part of
popular culture” (CHARTIER, 1995, p.83).
Furthermore, popular culture is
never simply manipulated by the elite.
Neither are popular and elite cultures ever
radically or symmetrically opposite. For
Tessa Watt, it is possible to identify an
“area of consensus and integration”
between popular and elite cultures (WATT,
1991, p.325). David Cressy also understands
that in Early Modern Europe,
“Instead of a great divide between oral
and literate culture, there was
substantial overlap and interaction, in
which visual, verbal, gestural, scribal
and print elements intermingled”
(CRESSY, 1993, p.311).

Roger Chartier also remembers that

popular literature was “shared by social
groups not exclusively
popular” (CHARTIER, 1995, p.88). For
Robert Scribner, popular culture is a total,
unified culture, not a homogeneous set of
doctrines but a mosaic of changing,
contradictory elements (SCRIBNER, 1984,
p. 77). Tessa Watt defines it as “a system of
shared attitudes and values” (WATT, 1995,
p. 2). Social stratification and relations of
economic or symbolic domination did (and
still do) exist but were never symmetrical
(CHARTIER, 1995, p.96). Since the spread
of literacy and print, a combination of
literate and oral elements has been present
in western cultures.
Chapter 2: Oral and Written
Cultures

A
lthough there is not a clear
dividing line between literate and
oral cultures, there are basic
differences between an overall literate and
a mainly oral culture. According to
Jonathan Barry, while a literate culture
seems more susceptible to new ideas and
rather individualistic, an oral culture tends
to be less dynamic, more traditionalist,
more likely to adapt than to change. At the
same time, it is more collective inasmuch
as a communal establishment of meaning
takes place (BARRY, 1995, p.71). For the
popular strata reading, specially the
recently invented printed texts, was a
much more public experience which
blurred even more the boundaries between
oral and literate cultures (BARRY, 1995,
p.82). Social mutual assistance concerning
literacy was common. Literate people
actually took their time to read to
illiterates, a point that also reinforced
‘good’ neighbourhood relations.
It is important to analyze the forms of
reading: public or private; loud or silent;
fast or slowly. Reading is not a submissive
or passive action but an inventive and
creative one (CHARTIER, 1995, p.90). Using
Michel de Certau’s terminology, the tactics
used by the popular strata to interpret the
elite’s (domination) strategies many times
constructed meanings different from those
originally intended. Therefore, instead of
viewing two cultures apart, it is important
to apply the notion of ‘appropriation’ to a
cultural historic analysis: how messages or
values intended to be imposed by an elite
can be interpreted, selected and modified
by the popular strata. As Roger Chartier
puts it:

“If ‘opportunities still exist within the

mass-communication process for
individuals to resist, alter, and
reapropriate the materials designed
elsewhere for their purchase’ it would
lead us to assume, a fortiori, that
similar possibilities were offered to
readers of societies of ancien regime in
an era when the control of models
transmitted by print was (except for
particular situations) less complete
than that of the twentieth century.”
(CHARTIER, 1995, p.91-92)

Furthermore, to understand popular

culture in the early modern period it is
essential to “shed the notion that literacy
was necessarily as important in the past as it
appears to be in the present” (CRESSY, 1993,
p.306). For traditional skills, such as
farming, literacy did not really make a big
difference. “For many people literacy was
not an essential part of life even in the
nineteenth century” (HOUSTON, 1983,
p.274). Besides, “reading and writing does
not necessarily mean understanding”.
(HOUSTON, 1983, p.281)
 But this inference does not alter the
fact that literacy really did spread. And the
development of print had a fundamental
importance in this process. In the early
sixteenth century, books were luxurious,
decorative objects of the nobility but, by
1560, there were cheap books being printed
in national languages, most (but not all)
with religious themes (MARTIN, 1993, p.82)
and full of illustrations. In oral cultures,
printed images have much more influence
than printed words (HOUSTON, 1983,
p.278). The poor got “intimately acquainted
with (…) print on the posters” (MARTIN,
1993, p.370) all over the place: sales
advertisements, state regulations, taxes, and
decrees. Therefore, for them the familiarity
with print came before the capacity to read
script (CRESSY, 1993, p.312). These printed
works, considered by Henri-Jean Martin as
“street literature”, such as ballads,
broadsides, chapbooks, functioned as
bridges between oral and literate cultures.
Martin affirms that these humble books
offered possibilities to promote cultural,
economic and social changes and had great
influence in disseminating new ideas

“because they were bought purposively

to inform and stimulate minds of some
acuteness in the bourgeoisie”
(MARTIN, 1993, p.353).

On the other hand, some historians,

such as Robert Houston have a different
perspective. For him, on the contrary,

“popular literature tended to reinforce

traditional patterns of thought, rather
than opening up new mental
horizons”
 (HOUSTON, 1983, p.274).

And Tessa Watt states that these

popular printed works were also
instruments of “social cohesion” (WATT,
1991, p.5).
It is possible to picture a dialectical
relation between oral and written cultures
in these broadsides. These works carried
printed songs that combined music and
lyrics. As time passed, these popular songs
or ballads spread, thus helping the people to
identify words with sounds (WATT, 1991,
p.257).
Also, according to Wyn Ford, with
print, eventually “spelling became less
phonetic, and increasingly conformed to
accepted conventions”, which means
simpler symbolic representations of words,
not so much attached to the sounds (FORD,
1993, p.31).
 For those who became intimate with
print, especially in the urban centres, there
was real euphoria about the possibilities
that it provided.
This is visible in Jacques Peletier’s
“Euvres Poetiques”, printed in Paris in 1581:

“Ah… one can print in one day

What it would take thirty days to say
And a hundred times longer to write
by hand.”
(DAVIS, 1975, p.220)
Chapter 3 - A Badge of Class

N
evertheless, in the words of
Henri-Jean Martin, reading
“then as now was a badge of
class, the privilege of an elite” (MARTIN,
1993, p.637). For Jonathan Barry, “the
world of print was indeed an elitist one, at
least until the eighteenth century.” (BARRY,
1 9 95, p. 8 0 ) A m o n g t h e f a c t o r s o f
accessibility of books, there were the
audience’s ability to read and the cost of
the book. The clergy, doctors, civil servants
and lawyers “formed the bulk of the
reading public; the aristocracy was less
interested” (MARTIN, 1993, p.371). The
average tradesman had only his books of
hours for praying and perhaps an almanac
for the dates of fairs. Barry gives evidence
that allows to infer an ‘upside-down
literacy pyramid’ from 1600 to 1800. At the
wide top there were the male gentry, the
mercantile and upper middling sort. Under
them, the male occupants of market or
business transactions. At the lower half the
less skilled craftsmen and husbandmen.
And at the narrow bottom the labourers
and women (BARRY, 1995, p.77).
The first 125 years of print in France
brought little change in rural areas, but it
“strengthened (…) the vitality of the
culture” in urban areas where there were
“active users and interpreters” of printed
works (DAVIS, 1975, p.225). The greater
impact that print had in the cities was
fundamental for the consolidation of
official state languages, as the case of
French overcoming Provençal. According
to Natalie Zemon Davis, print penetrated
peasants’ lives in function of the literacy
rates, cost and availability of works in
vernacular languages, social ‘read alouds’,
and the need or desire for information
(DAVIS, 1975, p.194). One of the few ways
that literacy entered rural life France was
through the veillée: an evening gathering,
usually from November to March, in which
literate people would read a book aloud,
often simultaneously translating the text to
the local dialect (DAVIS, 1975, p.201).
But in the eighteenth century print was
also part of the “repression of popular
culture” (CHARTIER, 1995, p.84). Both
Protestant and Catholic reformations used
it as an attempt to acculturate the
population and to assure that religiosity
was kept within the boundaries of the
established churches. In this manner, the
Protestants’ vernacular bible and Catholics’
devotional booklets, with sermons and
lives of saints, gained wide circulation. It is
questionable if they did cause real change
in popular religious practices, but it
represented an effort to spread literacy, as
it required that people were able to read
(BARRY, 1995, p.78).
Jonathan Barry states that reading and
writing were thought separately, in
sequence. Reading was learned within the
family while writing required a master.
Thus the number of readers was much
greater than that of writers (BARRY, 1995,
pp. 76; 260). With the churches’ need to
spread ‘the Word’ (or ‘Words’) through
print and the State’s requirement of literate
people to work in its administration, the
spread of literacy gained a crucial impulse:
the school. From 1500 to 1850 in West
Europe, “l’apprentissage des condutes et des
savoirs” (learning of behaviours and
knowledges) moved decisively from the
family to the school (HOUSTON, 1983,
p.275). The concern with the spread of
education became even greater after the
1640’s. With more free or public education
the number of readers increased drastically
(MARTIN, 1993, p.637).
But institutional education also
ensured continuity among the political,
ecclesiastical and intellectual elites. It
meant a massive way of initiating students
into the rituals of the dominant culture
(HOUSTON, 1983, p.281). Roger Chartier
reminds us that it was also associated with
an increase of the means to control what
was read: censorship, not only towards the
popular strata but also the upper ‘classes’,
that could have access to ideas of religious
and social change (CHARTIER, 1995, p.88).
Spain was, in the early modern period,
the centre of Catholic intelligentsia and
literacy was incredibly spread there in the
sixteenth century due to public access to
education. In 1600 there were around
4,000 Latin grammar schools throughout
Spain, one for every 2,100 inhabitants.
Popular access to these schools was
significant. The popular “cartillas de
leer” (reading primers) provided by these
schools allowed many people to learn how
to read without having to actually buy or
own books.
But, according to Sara Nalle, with the
Inquisition and Catholic Reformation the
Spanish phenomenon of popular reading
was put under attack for “endangering
soc iet y ’s religious and moral
health.” (NALLE, 1989, p.93-4). In 1623, a
law limiting popular access to Latin schools
was passed in Spain, which drastically
halted the spread of literacy. Consequently,
in 1700 there were less than 100 Latin
schools in the country. According to Nalle,
Spain’s spread of literacy experienced in
this period a “stunning success and
dramatic decline while other countries
went forward.” (NALLE, 1989, p.95). The
Spanish case is an example of the religious
censorship of printed works and repression
of the spread of literacy. It shows how
complex this process was and also warns of
the danger of making general assumptions
about the development of literacy in
Europe as a whole.
Therefore, as David Cressy concludes:
“In practice, the importance of literacy
varied with social, cultural and
historical circumstances,
and some of those circumstances could
restrain literacy as well as advance it.”
(CRESSY, 1993, p.309)
Epilogue - A Badge of Class

I
n the countryside the impact of
literacy was limited. It opened
few lines of communications
between peasants and the intellectual
community. Contrary to what may be
thought, it was not so effective as a means
of control either. For greater State or
Church control over peasants, it was
necessary to send messengers or preachers
to the villages, not books. Oral culture was
still dominant. Natalie Zemon Davis
believes that oral culture

“transformed everything it touched;

and it still changed according to the
rules of forgetting and remembering,
watching and discussing.”
(DAVIS, 1975, p.208)

In the cities the impact was far

greater, but not simply progressive. With
the development of industry, urban
literacy declined due to the larger labourer
than commercial population and the rural
exodus, which increased poverty in cities.
The effects of literacy and print “took
time and favourable circumstances fully to
be felt.” (HOUSTON, 1988, p.8) To
understand its influence it is necessary to
search for evidence from the audiences
(who actually read) and not only from the
public (for whom the authors wrote to)
(SPUFFORD, 1981, p.193).
Roger Chartier conceives the book as
a c arrier of relationships. He also
remembers that it is important to see the
differential access to writing, and how the
f o r m s o f exp re s s i o n “ t h a t w r i t i n g
encouraged has structured our sources for
popular culture” (CHARTIER, 1995, p.75).
Even though it actually spread, it is
probably possible to assume, as Robert
Houston does, that high standards of
literacy and print did little to alter society
(HOUSTON, 1983, p.283). Henri-Jean Martin
concludes that , at the end of the
seventeenth century, Europe was still a
predominantly oral culture, but the
minority of readers and writers “had the
future in its hands.” (MARTIN, 1993, p.640)
Perhaps in fact this minority had not the
future but History in its hands, or at least
the majority of written registers available
today.
Literacy changed the lives of early
modern Europeans, although not so much.
As Tessa Watt states, the “basic mental
deco did not change as suddenly or
completely as we may think”. Literacy was
also an agent of continuity. In her words:

“We need to recognize how the culture

could absorb new beliefs while
retaining old ones, could modify
doctrines, could accommodate words
and icons, ambiguities and
contradictions.”
(WATT, 1991, p.332)
 Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin
point to the extreme that

“by popularising long cherished

beliefs, strengthening traditional
prejudices and giving authority to
seductive fallacies, it [print, and
consequently literacy] could even be
said to have represented an obstacle to
the acceptance of many new views”
(FEBVRE; MARTIN, 1976, p.278).

Therefore literacy had a considerable

impact, but it did not radically change the
society from which — and in which — it
spread. In a still predominantly oral world,
such a change would perhaps hardly be
possible.
References

BARRY, J. “Literacy and Literature in

Popular Culture: Reading and writing in
Historical Perspective” In Harris, T.(Ed.)
Popular Culture in England c.1500-1850.
1995.
CHARTIER, R. Forms and Meanings.
Philadelphia, 1995.
CRESSY, D. “Literacy in Context: Meaning
and Measurement in Early Modern
 England” In Brewer, J.(Ed.) Consumption
and the World of Goods. Routledge.
London, 1993.
DAVIS, N. Society and Culture in Early
Modern France. Stanford University
Press, 1975.
FEBVRE, L. MARTIN, H. The Coming of the
Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800.
1976.
FORD, W. “The Problem of Literacy in
Early Modern England” In History,
vol.78, No.252, Feb. 1993.
HOUSTON, R. “Literacy and Society in the
West, 1500-1850” In Social History,
No.8. Cambridge University Press, 1983.
______________. Literacy in Early Modern
E u r o p e : C u l t u re a n d E d u c a t i o n ,
1500-1850. Longman. London, 1988. p.8.
MARTIN, H. Print, Power and People in 17th
Centur y France. Scarecrow Press.
London, 1993.
NALLE, S. “Literacy and Culture in Early
Modern Castile” In Past and Present,
No.125, 1989.
SCRIBNER, R. “Ritual and popular religion
in Catholic Germany at the time of the
Reformation”, in Journal of Ecclesiastical
History, 35 (1984), p.47-77.
SPUFFORD, M. Small Books and Pleasant
Histories: Popular Fiction and its
Readership in Seventeenth Century
England. Methuen & Co. London. 1981.
WATT, T. Cheap Print and Popular Piety,
1550-1640. Cambridge University Press,
1991.
About the Author

P
ablo Lima is Associate Professor
III at Federal University of Minas
Gerais’ Education College (FaE/
UFMG), in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, where he
works since 2010 with History teaching in
undergradu ate classe s for Hi stor y,
P e d a g o g y, C o u n t r y s i d e E d u c a t i o n
(Licenciatura em Educação do Campo -
LeCampo) and Indigenous Education
(Formação Intercultural para Educadores
Indígenas - FIEI) students and graduate
classes at the Professional Master’s course
(Promestre/UFMG) in the research line on
Education, Teaching and Humanities. In
2000, he studied Early Modern European
History at the University of Nottingham, in
the United Kingdom, where he developed a
bibliographical research on the impact of
print and literacy in early modern
European culture, which originated this
book.