Primers and Literacy in Muscovy: A Taxonomic Investigation

Abstract

The Slavic primer has long been accepted as the basic first text of Muscovite primary education, mastery of which was essential to learning to read. Archival research, so we are told, has shown that over a third of a million primers were printed in Muscovy during the second half of the seventeenth century and tens of thousands more were printed by other East Slavic presses.' In principle, students who began instruction with the primer were expected to continue on to the breviary and teaching psalter in order to be deemed capable of reading basic prayer books.2 In practice, however, these latter books were reproduced far less frequently and in far smaller press runs than primers, a circumstance which suggests that most of those who took up the primer proceeded no further.3 In all probability, therefore, the extent and functionality of literacy in seventeenth-century Russia depended in large measure on the effective dissemination of primers and their usefulness in teaching children to read without the benefit of supplementary texts. Under ideal circumstances one could lear about the primer's impact on literacy by examining three basic issues: the pedagogical contents of the texts, the manner in which they were used, and the institutional context in which the pedagogy of literacy took place.4 Like most of early