The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Culture and Society

"This book will be a monumental contribution to the topic and a staple of scholarship for decades." --Michael B. Katz

"A remarkable volume of critical synthesis and passionate revisionism." --Journal of Economic History

"... ambitious and stimulating... required reading not only for social historians but also for policy-makers and activists." --Histoire Sociale

"Clearly an important book... marks a significant point in the history of literacy studies." --History of Education Quarterly

"A stimulating challenge to traditional assumptions and scholarly commonplaces." --Journal of Communication

This book will be a monumental contribution to the topic and a staple of scholarship for decades. -Michael B. Katz

This wide-ranging synthesis of literacy research explores the dimensions and meanings of literacy in the West, examined in terms of its social and historical contexts, and suggest important ways of connecting the history of literacy to significant questions of Western civilization in the late twentieth century.

Preface

Acknowledgments

Part One: Setting the Stage

Introduction: Literacy's Legacies

1. The Origins of Western Leteracy

1. From Writing to Literacy

2. Literacy's First Legacies: From Athens

3....to Rome, and Beyond

Part Two: Before the Printing Press: The Middle Ages

2. Th Light of Literacy in the "Dark Ages"

1. Fifth-Seventh Centuries

2. Seventh Century

3. Eighth Century

4. Ninth-Tenth Centuries

3. New Lights of Literacy and Learning: From the Tenth-Eleventh to the Thirteenth Centuries

1. Italy and Commercial Revolution

2. The Church, Papacy, and Schools

3. Patterns of Literacy

4. Thought, Theory, and Practice

4. Ends and Beginnings: The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries

1. Humanism and the Italian Renaissance

2. Continental Conditions in Literacy

3. The English Example

5. Print, Protest, and the People

1. The Advent and Impact of Print

2. Renaissance(s) Revisited

3. Print, Reform, and Reformation

4. Reforming Literacy Provision

6. Toward Enlightenment/Toward Modernity: 1660-1780

1. Thinking about Literacy and Schooling

2. Patterns of Literacy: Paths to Literacy

Part Four: Toward the Present and the Future

7. The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Our Times

1. The Setting

2. Literacy's Paths and Patterns

Epilogue: Today and Tomorrow: Revisioning Literacy

1. Twentieth-Century Trends in Literacy Levels

2. Imputed Impacts and Consequences; or, Great and Other Dichotomies

Revisited

3. A Crisis in Literacy?

4. Literacy, Culture, and Society: Communications and the Future of

Literacy

Notes

Index