Medieval Literacy outside the Academy: Popular Practice and Individual Technique

Abstract

Perhaps the most intellectually stimulating result of the literacy crisis has been our recognition of literacy as a continuum of expertise, practices, and beliefs. We know that literacies range from oral and orthographic practices involving print and electronic texts to isolated and social behaviors encompassing the informational sphere of home, society, or school. Academic literates have come to recognize the wide range of literacies in play today and to realize that many literacies are outside our own literate experience-or rather, we have come to realize that we are outside observers to those literacies that we have not experienced. Although we are indelibly inscribed with our own literate practices and deeply entrenched in our academic culture, we can still recognize the continuum of literacies. However, we have difficulty fully understanding and valuing those literacies that function outside the academy. No matter how wide-ranging our twentieth-century views of literacy might be, whether we refer to Shirley Brice Heath's studies in the American Piedmonts, Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole's Vai project, E. D. Hirsch's cultural literacy, or Walter Ong's and Eric Havelock's theories of orality and literacy, we continue to privilege the written word. Even our respectful explorations and discussions of Vai and Piedmont literacies are implicitly situated in comparison with schooled literacy. Our concepts of literacy are inevitably colored by our own dependence on the physical artifact (on handwriting, on hard copy) and on our deep-seated insistence that reading and writing are inseparable language arts. Thus, the text-dependency-reading books, writing books, and reading and writing about those books-in our own documentary culture and noetic world makes very difficult an accurate conception of alternative literacy practices, be they current or distant in time. But medieval popular literacy can provide a crucial link for understanding those alternatives; medieval practices prefigure and explain some of our own literacy practices, especially those outside the academy.