Literacy and Written Culture in Early Modern Europe by István György s> Tóth (review)

Abstract

550 SEER, 8o, 3, 2002 The answer to the author's question found in one of the most important sections of the book, entitled 'Riforma della Chiesa o eresia' (Churchreform or heresy), becomes clear through the close re-reading of the writingsof the protagonistsand of those near them or those who were criticalof their ideas. Thus, the conviction of Bashkin,Artemii and Viskovatyifor heresyconcealed obvious political motives. In reality, the object of the trialswas their manner of thought, whose nucleus had absolutely nothing to do with dogma. Furthermore,this style of thought generated a reformistcurrentthat became part of the history of European religious radicalism and gave it an original contribution.This currentwas so vital that it gave riseto a daringproject:the renewal of the Faithand the Church, beginning with the recovery of the true Christian message found in the Bible. Among the protagonists of this movement the eagernessto attain individualperfection wasjust as important as the desireto realize a model of genuinely Evangelicalsocial coexistence, in which the study of and conformity to the sacred texts were to be central to every moment of the believer's life. The prevalence of ethical concerns over dogmatic and doctrinal ones made none of them feel excluded from the Orthodox Church, which they continued to consider the only true Christian faith;it only needed to be reformedfromthe inside and led backto its roots. Thus, the superficialcomparisonof thismovement to the Westernheretical ones of the time is replaced by another comparison. If we pass from a synchronic to a diachronic level, we can draw a much more productive parallelwith otherRussian reformistmovements, which, in differenterasand contexts, bore the same values. This substitutionof perspectiveisproposed by Ronchi, who pointsout the re-emergenceof themesonce voiced by Nil Sorskii and the nestiazhateli in the sixteenth-centuryreformers.It might be added that the same subject-matter would be central to the Russian Rosicrucian movement during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Then, as in the sixteenth century, the debate concerning the way of understandingChristian life would end up involvingthe sphereof power relationshipsand would have significantinfluence on the ecclesiasticalas well as the lay hierarchies.Then again the insistence on the unique authorityof the Scriptureswould become more dangerousthan the directattackon power structuresand earthlygoods. Thus, the sixteenth-century trials can be read as an episode in the long historyof persecutionsthatthe 'Evangelical-reformist' movement (understood here by the author in the true sense of the word), has been subject to throughoutthe modern age. Department ofCentral andEastEuropean RAFFAELLA FAGGIONATO Languages andCultures University ofUdine, Italy T6th, IstvanGyorgy.Literacy andWritten Culture inEarlyModern Europe. Central European University Press, Budapest, 2000. 266 pp. Tables. Plates. Maps. Appendix. Bibliography.Index. [25.95. THEpresent work was firstpublished in Hungarian in I996 under the title, Mivelhogy magadirastnemtudsz... ('But since you are illiterate.. .'). It is now REVIEWS 55I published by CEU Press in not only flawless English but also under a quite differentand rather more earnest title. Nevertheless, as with its predecessor, the volume is overwhelminglyconcerned with the development of literacy in Hungary and, more particularly,in the westernmost Hungarian counties of Vas, Sopron and Zala. In view of the original Hungarian title, the conclusion of the work is predictable. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Hungariansocietycan onlybe consideredprofoundlyilliteratewhen measured against both contemporary England and France and also (and rather more surprisingly)parts of Poland. It stood comparison thus with Moravia, Styria and large swathes of Upper and Lower Austria, but contrasted badly to the Tyrol and even to the villages of the Pyrenees. In reaching this conclusion, I. G. T6th drawsnot only on an arrayof statisticalmaterialbut also on many telling anecdotes garneredfromlong studyof Hungarianlocal archives. T6th's statisticalconclusions can be summarizedas follows. In Vas county, which lay within one of Hungary's more prosperous regions, about I5 per cent of children attended school in the late eighteenth century. The majority of these, however, did not learn to write (in many cases their schoolmasters could not do so either)but acquiredonly a passive grasp of reading, referred to at the time as 'syllabificationand the knowledge of letters' (p. 22). As a consequence, only about two per cent of Hungarian peasants could actually writetheirnames. Amongst nobles, thingswere a littlebetter, even though for the most part they attended the...