Continuity and Change in Studying East Central European Literacy

Abstract

This chapter discusses the main developments in the ways in which literacy and the varieties of written culture in medieval East Central Europe have been studied from the 1990s onwards, focusing on continuities and changes in scholarly attitudes and tools. Over the last 25 years, the broad introduction of a comparative perspective into this research has been accompanied by attempts at “mapping” places of the production and use of written texts and taking into consideration the milieus not only of their creators but also of their users, who approached written texts in various ways (also in the absence of practical literacy skills). Scholarly attention, traditionally concentrated on ecclesiastical and lay elites, is becoming ever more focused on social groups which participated in written culture in an indirect and passive way. A new paradigm of research is clearly emerging, with awareness of the softening of the organisational boundaries of literacy and with the need to study literacy in the broadest possible context of all forms of communication available in the Middle Ages. However, to be successful, this new paradigm has to be accompanied by a change of scholarly attitudes, which still are too much concentrated on the “peripheral” (i.e., “inferior”) position of the region in medieval Europe and the (alleged) scarcity of the sources at our disposal.