Patrick Nugent <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>A "good cross section of the populace", if taken of the whole populace, would
have been mostly illiterate.
good point.
my working hypothesis is that, for the pre-1250 period, maybe 98% of the
population were peasants/serfs, out endlessly working the land, feeding
everybody else, of no more importance to their secular or ecclesiastical
landlords than any other beasts of the field (cf. Suger's account of his
remodeling of the fiscal situation of St. Denny's holdings --left out of
Panofsky's edition, btw).
reading just wasn't a part of those gus's program.
(that means, btw, that virtually *all* of the named folks we know and
care about as middlevilists belonged to that remaining 2%.)
>If literacy rates in the middle ages were never above 5%, then most people
had no access whatsoever to any saints' lives.
--no *written* access.
>What they did have was preaching about the saints....
and Art (o.k., part of "preaching," if you like).
they did have Art: the interior of their parish churches likely covered with
paintings (99.9999% since lost), the major churches of the towns and regional
centers ditto and, increasingly from the end of the 11th c., dressed up with
glass painting and (overly important for us because of
its happenstantially better survival rate) stone sculpture, both of which
media were frequently concerned with locally important saints.
this puts me in danger of bringing up the specter of the "Bible in Stone"
chestnut, which is a musty ole can of worms which i'd rather not open in
a closed space or on a family list.
but, it does seem rather inescapable that these (often quite extensive
and complex) iconographic programs, deliberately placed at considerable
expense in public, secular spaces, were, at the very least in part,
pedigogical in intent.
best to all from here,
christopher
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