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1 results

  • 1 - Literacy, books and readers

  • Edited by Lotte Hellinga, J. B. Trapp
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    09 December 1999, pp 31-44

  • Summary

    An overall growth in the ability to read and write English during our period is certain enough. To what precise extent the same applies to Latin literacy is less clear. That books large and small were composed is beyond dispute. That there was a reading public for them, varying in size from one person to many, from book to book and according to means, motive and opportunity, is therefore equally certain. Church institutions recognize the danger of misorder and abusion in Church and state implicit in the ability to read. The confiscations and bonfires of books under Wolsey and Cuthbert Tunstal, Bishop of London, in the 1520s, the warnings to booksellers, the processes against De Worde, Berthelet and others in the 1520s and 1530s and the rest, all imply a readership, if of indeterminate size, at least with determination to read. So do known instances of the prosecution of known individual readers.