Reading/Literacy – For the Lower Orders?: Part 1: From Wycliff to the Seventeenth Century
The first part of this account of struggles over literacy begins with the later middle ages and follows issues in the construction of a literacy addressed to the lower orders through to the seventeenth century. After the suppression of the Lollard Bible had left the English peasantry without that spur to literacy, the sixteenth-century formation of Renaissance grammar schools, with their classical education based on rhetoric, created a new cultural and linguistic gap from the lower orders. Only the most original English writers, steeped in this classical tradition, managed occasionally to bridge the gap. But after 1650, Hobbes led the way in avoiding figurative language, at least for philosophical and scientific discussion, and Lucy Hutchinson, from a dissenting family, showed in her autobiography how a fondness for the servants’ stories could open the way to a colloquial idiom.