Literacy and Historical Development: A Reader
Representing three decades of research, Literacy and Historical Development: A Reader presents some of the most important historical scholarship on literacy in Europe and the United States. The approaches, research, and conclusions reflected in this collection of fifteen essays has changed how historians and many others conceptualize literacy and represents a body of scholarship that is transforming both contemporary and historical literacy theories.\ \ In this revised and expanded...
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Representing three decades of research, Literacy and Historical Development: A Reader presents some of the most important historical scholarship on literacy in Europe and the United States. The approaches, research, and conclusions reflected in this collection of fifteen essays has changed how historians and many others conceptualize literacy and represents a body of scholarship that is transforming both contemporary and historical literacy theories. In this revised and expanded edition of the groundbreaking volume Literacy and Social Development in the West, editor Harvey J. Graff provides a new introduction and nine new essays by nationally and internationally renowned contributors from a range of disciplines. Replacing an unquestioned certainty that literacy’s powers are universal, independent, and determinative, Graff brings together studies that support new concepts, contending that the importance and influences of literacy depend on specific social and historical contexts, the impacts of literacy are mediated and restricted, the effects of literacy are social and particular, and the role of literacy must be understood within the burgeoning array of communication technologies.
List of Figures and Tables ixAcknowledgments xiIntroduction Harvey J. Graff 1Literacy, Myths, and Legacies: Lessons from the History of Literacy Harvey J. Graff 12Literate and Illiterate; Hearing and Seeing: England, 1066-1307 Michael T. Clanchy 38Some Conjectures about the Impact of Printing on Western Society and Thought: A Preliminary Report Elizabeth L. Eisenstein 82The Importance of Being Printed Anthony T. Grafton 106Printing and the People: Early Modern France Natalie Zemon Davis 126Oral Culture and the Diffusion of Reformation Ideas Robert Scribner 161The Literacy Myth? Illiteracy in Scotland, 1630-1760 Rab Houston 183First Steps in Literacy: The Reading and Writing Experiences of the Humblest Seventeenth-Century Spiritual Autobiographers Margaret Spufford 207The History of Literacy in Sweden Egil Johansson 238Growth of Literacy in Colonial America: Longitudinal Patterns, Economic Models, and the Direction of Future Research Farley Grubb 272Dimensions of Illiteracy in England, 1750-1850 Roger S. Schofield 299''We Slipped andLearned to Read": Slave Accounts of the Literacy Process, 1830-1865 Janet Cornelius 315Sense and Sensibility: A Case Study of Women's Reading in Late-Victorian America Barbara Sicherman 334Sponsors of Literacy Deborah Brandt 357"Welcome to the Jam": Popular Culture, School Literacy, and the Making of Childhoods Anne Haas Dyson 379Bibliography of the History of Literacy in Western Europe and North America 417Contributors 441Index 445
