PIERRE BOAISTUAU - eTheses Repository - University of Birmingham

where books were rarer, literacy had a much smaller impact than has been suggested.
The habits of group reading, lending each other books, and passing on books as gifts
were dominant, while many were taken into taverns for shared reading or selling on to
others. 315 The situation was slightly better in urban areas, where books were more
widely distributed and people were in closer contact with printed texts. Scholars have
evaluated literacy by the ability of people to sign their own names, although this
method has its limitations; according to François Furet and Jacques Ozouf, limiting
literacy to reading was the norm at the time. 316 Thus, the high signature rates from the
Narbonne area in southern France for example, where 90% of the middle class and
65% of the artisans were capable of signing their names, did not necessarily mean
high literacy rates. 317 Similarly, the fact that 60% of men in Beauvais could sign their
marriage acts but less than 10% were able to do so in Brittany, presents the varied
picture of the phenomenon but cannot be used to draw reliable conclusions. 318 The
majority of people who could ‘read’ do not seem to have been in direct contact with a
book!
Therefore, a distinction should be made between literacy and actual reading. The
owner of a book in sixteenth century France was not always capable of reading it.
This was also aggravated by the various dialects used across the country which
widened the gap between the spoken and the printed word. However, low literacy
levels did not stop the widening of circles of readers, as is shown by the steady
315 There was also the ‘veillée’, evening gatherings which included socializing, singing and reading
aloud, although their role should not be overstated. On the idea of books as gifts see Davis, N. Z., The
Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Oxford, 2000).
316 Furet, F., Ozouf, J. (eds), Reading and Writing: Literacy in France from Calvin to Jules Ferry
(Cambridge, 1982). Reading in the sixteenth century gradually became a personal experience. As
Terence Cave has noted, ‘reading becomes in various senses, a much more prominent activity’ – see
Cave, T., ‘The Mimesis of Reading in the Renaissance’ in Lyons, J. D., Nichols, S. G. (eds), Mimesis:
from Mirror to Method, Augustine to Descartes (Hanover, NH, 1982), p. 149.
317 Ladurie, E. le Roy, Les paysans de Languedoc (Paris, 1969), pp. 183-185.
318 Kamen, H., Early Modern European Society (New York, 2000), p. 214.
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