Ferguson 2003

Competing Concepts of Literacy in Imperial Contexts: Definitions, Debates, Interpretive Models

"I attempt to explore some of the ways in which our views of early modern empires and their literacies are not only shaped (as they must inevitably be) by our own historical position but also deformed (in ways they needn't continue to be) by inadequate reflection on some of the investments in empire that we, as modern writers and readers, share (in part) with some of our educated forebears." (31)

much literacy scholarship produced in modern universities "has had the expansion and/or the decline of empire as a major condition of production" (32)

• us (literate) vs. them (illiterate)

flashcard literacy (36)

until c19, "literature" and "literacy" used interchangeably to denote being well-read and ability to read/write (39)

how do interpretations of literacy affect performance? see e.g. pg 40

"Great Divide" theories -- orality vs. literacy (44) -- often "read like slightly secularized narratives about the Fall of Man", with it being both liberating and damning (45) (Levi-Strauss)

"culturalist view" (Derrida)

Levi-Strauss/Derrida debate; lessons to learn:

• "the epistemological problems of ethnocentrism are central and inescapable whenever we undertake to analyze literacy in cultures distant from our own in time and/or in space" (52)
• "one cannot simply pay lip service to the methodological problem presented by one's own historical, and in many cases professional, investment in a particular view of literacy" (54)
• Derrida's concept of arche-writing has more implications for understanding literacies of the past, present and future than have been fully explored (55)

"one should stop using the dyad writing/nonwriting (or literacy/illiteracy) to make a heuristic division between 'them' and 'us,' ignoring all the different kinds and degrees of literacy -- products of various subcultures and also of demographic hybridizations -- that have existed in most societies, including those of early modern Europe and our own." (57)

clergy and literacy (63ff.)

"In some recent studies of medieval literacy, scholars write women out of the picture simply by pronouncing so authoritatively on medieval culture that it becomes difficult to think about groups including women who might have contested -- in practice and/or in theory -- the definitions of literacy made visible by institutions such as the Church and the monarchical court." (66)

late medieval/Ren "seem not to have considered either reading or writing as valuable skills necessary for their ways of living. ... access to written documents for most people, ranging from nobles to peasants, usually depended on hearing texts read and/or commissioning clerks to write them, without being able to read or write themselves" (68) -- reliance on written texts "coexisted, if uneasily, with widely held attitudes of scorn for clerks and their skills"

literacy and the law; showing you could read == being clergy == chance of pardon through benefit of clergy (70); c.f. "plea of the belly", pregnant women could get lesser sentence

mixed media literacies (72)'

"Instead of distinguishing broadly between 'preliterate' and 'literate' societies, as historians and anthropologists sometimes do without examining the teleological assumptions in the former phrase, and instead of describing entire societies on the grounds that they possess 'craftsman's literacy' as opposed to 'mass literacy,' I suggest that we construct our narrative of historical change on more finely calibrated analyses of how in a given society different kinds of knowledge, transmitted in different forms, gain and lose prestige in part through changes in institutions, economic structures, and governments, but in part also through struggles over cultural meaning carried out in various sites with various kinds of traces." (73)

"literacy as a site of social contest, of complex negotiations" (73)

statistics tell us little (76ff.)

no "direct," "uncontaminated" evidence of early modern literacies (81)

Sociolinguistic Matrices for Early Modern Literacies: Paternal Latin, Mother Tongues, and Illustrious Vernaculars

"A history of standardization as a heterogeneous set of discourses in which ideas about speech and writing influenced practices in both domains, and vice versa, must relinquish neatly linear dating schemes. At the same time it must deploy a highly skeptical attitude toward evidence pertaining to relations between rpescriptive texts and actual social practices in populations divided by gender, social status, religion, and many other factors influencing how people use languages and -- equally important, from my perspective -- how people feel that language use works as a mark of social difference." (85)

clerkly discourses created a "standard"; such that many speakers of say English "found themselves in the odd situation of not knowing what some of their countrymen referred to as their mother tongue" (85-6)

late med/early mod: Latin slowly being replaced by "imperial" languages used by clerks working for monarchies and modeled on Latin (86)

unskillful literacy -- "partial or imperfect kind of literacy for people defined chiefly as readers, not writers, by educated men in creating texts in a grammaticized vernacular" -- "vision of reader-consumers adumbrated by writers deeply attached to an old idea of Latinity but also invested -- for economic, political, and theological reasons -- in reaching an audience that lacks more than a smattering of Latin" (87)

diversity of languages in early mod Europe (90ff.)

problem of dialect (92ff.)

Tower of Babel (linguistic diversity is bad) vs. Pentacost (linguistic diversity can be revelatory); "Looking at the matter from a different angle, however, we can see 'diversity of tongues' and multiplicity of media -- oral, written, and, eventually, printed -- as the components of a complex imperial culture that changed over time, but not in a way that simply supports the idea of an epochal shift from 'oral' to 'literate' societies, much less from oral to literate 'mentalities.' The societies in question were more various, across times as well as spaces, than such generalizations suggest, even when the generalizations are granted some causal force in shaping history." (95)