Critical Survey

Literacy, in the sixteenth century, was construed as multiple, variable, subject to redefinition by edict from above and by practices from below. The importance of regulating changes in skills and behaviors, in particular, increased reading of the Bible, was hotly debated as the Reformation got underway. In England, the Tudor state intervened erratically, first encouraging the reading of the English Bible for all, then forbidding its reading to all but a privileged few. In 1538, every parish church was required by a royal injunction to purchase an English Bible and place it in the choir. The Great Bible, published in 1540 with a new preface by the Archbishop of Canterbury, stressed the ideal of an England peopled by ‘all manner’ of readers of Scripture in the vernacular: ‘Here may all manner of persons, men, women, young, old, learned, unlearned, rich, poor, priests, laymen, lords, ladies, officers, tenants, and mean men, virgins, wives, widows, lawyers, merchants, artificers, husbandmen, and all manner of persons, of what estate or condition soever they be, may in this book learn all things’. Only three years later, however, in 1543, the selfvauntingly named Act for the Advancement of True Religion and for the Abolishment of the Contrary attempted to undo that opening of the floodgates by lowering them again to allow for only a trickle of elite readers to have access to Scripture. Reading the Bible in English was prohibited outright for women, artificers, journeymen, serving-men of the rank of yeoman and under, husbandmen and laborers; noblewomen and gentlewomen could read the Bible silently; only noblemen, gentlemen, and merchants were permitted to read it aloud to others.

In the 1603 edition of James I’s Basilikon Doron, the epistle from James to Prince Henry ends with a characteristic conflation of paternal and royal identities in James’ printed signature – ‘Your loving Father, I.R.’ – which moves the king from intimacy to authority as much through the shift in form from upper and lower case letters to all capitals as it does in the shift in language from the vernacular to Latin.1 The seventeenth-century printer Joseph Moxon explains the rationale behind capitalizing certain words in print and not others

Included in a work revealingly titled Terrors of the Night, Nashe’s reminiscence from childhood reveals the extent to which he had become a full communicant in the superstitious mysteries shared by the old women of his childhood. As Adam Fox has noted for this and other passages, ‘At the juvenile level… the repertoire of unlearned village women coincided for a brief but significant period with that of the educated male elite’. As Nashe’s evocative title suggests, however, these repertoires did more than coincide. The ‘witchcrafts’ that Nashe valued enough as a boy to learn by rote not only lost their usefulness: they became objects of contempt. The more common use of the phrase ‘old wives’ tales’ to refer to the lore of unlearned women conveys a similar sense of stigma. In this essay, I discuss various texts, finally focussing on Peele’s Old Wives Tale, to explore the implications of this shared repertoire within the wider context of a culture whose antagonism to illiterate old women participated in ideologies deeply formative to early moderns and their literatures.

Defining the term ‘literacy’ in medieval and early modern England is not a simple task; it defies the more modern (and relatively uncomplicated) definition of having the ability to read and write. In medieval terminology, a litteratus was someone who was learned in Latin, while an illitteratus was someone who was not. Eventually, litteratus and illitteratus came to be associated with the clergy and laity respectively. But these terms were not used for describing literacy in the vernacular, or the various categories and levels of competence in both reading and writing, either in Latin or in the vernacular. Recently, scholars have increasingly been thinking in terms of multiple ‘literacies’, especially when considering the more elusive female literacy. In her 1998 book, Gender and Literacy on Stage in Early Modern England, Eve Sanders asserts that literacy practices following the Reformation played a role in the formation of gender identity, and that ‘different levels and forms of literacy’ were assigned to each gender. Sanders contributes to what is the project of a growing number of literary scholars, such as Margaret Ferguson and Frances Dolan, who study literacy using gender as a category of examination. By adding gender to the mix, these scholars challenge the more narrow definitions of literacy such as those established by David Cressy’s influential Literacy and the Social Order. They have sought instead to define literacies by exploring the multiple ways in which the ‘products of a culture can be acquired and transmitted.’

Recent scholarship has defined literacy in early modern England as a culturally and historically constituted term rather than simply as a technical, objectively quantifiable skill.1 In becoming more sensitive to the diverse range of meanings and functions that attached themselves to literacy in the early modern period, scholars have begun to investigate the ways in which different segments of society engaged with language and textuality.2 In response to a growing awareness that identity did not fit into strict categories of the ‘literate’ and the ‘illiterate’, the more flexible and expansive concept of ‘multiple literacies’ has gained critical currency.

Elizabeth Tanfield Cary dashed off her History of Edward II during the course of a month in 1627 to ‘out-run those weary hours of a deep and sad Passion’. While historical accounts of Edward II were much in evidence during the reigns of James I and his son, no single, authoritative interpretation prevailed. Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577) focuses on the idea of misgovernance; Marlowe’s dramatic rendering, Edward II (1591), directs attention to the nature of the King’s relationship with his favourite, Gaveston; the Mirrour for Magistrates’s 1610 addition highlights Edward’s flattering courtiers and Isabella’s passion for Mortimer, and Drayton explores the story within the boundaries of several genres and thematic foci. Francis Hubert’s poem, The Deplorable Life and Death of Edward the Second (1628), written as a complaint from the King’s perspective, was almost contemporaneous with Cary’s history. Edward’s story was thus very much in the air at the time that Cary composed her text; neither the genre nor the subject she chose was precedent-setting. In this paper, our principal concern is to demonstrate how Cary marshals the linguistic and rhetorical features of orality to dramatise and render transhistorical this conventional early modern literate genre for the teaching of ‘Truth’. Cary’s achievement was to produce a self-conscious text that participates in oral as well as literate rhetorical practices and linguistic forms and that safeguards her self as speaker while simultaneously allowing her the space to make pronouncements that she may attribute to the wisdom of history.

In the tumultuous 1640’s amid the barely controlled chaos of the Interregnum, George Fox, the spiritually inclined son of an Leicestershire weaver, wandered up and down the local countryside in search of revelation, disputing with local ministers, debating theology with anyone who would speak with him. Years later, in his autobiographical Journal, Fox described the pivotal moment of his awakening: But as I had forsaken all the priests, so I left the separate preachers also… for I saw there was none among them all that could speak to my condition. And when all my hopes in them and in all men were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could tell what to do, then, Oh, then, I heard a voice which said, ‘There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition’, and when I heard it, my heart did leap for joy.

Pluralizing has increasingly become a norm of cultural criticism, offering a (literally, if not exclusively) nominal escape from totalization: ‘meanings’ not ‘meaning’; ‘histories’ not ‘history’; and, here, ‘literacies’ not ‘literacy’. The plural forms are neologisms perhaps (as my spell-checker insists), but they are also registers of a discomfort with nouns that imply a singularity of effect belied by the multiple activities and agents that produce it. They mark the scholar’s resistance to monolithic understandings of complex and various cultural phenomena.

The Three Wise Monkeys RICHARD POOLE

Who’s Joking with the Photographer? ANNE STEVENSON

Samuel Locke of Boston BARRY COLE

Enchantment of Mina Loy LINDA KEMP

Of Science Poems edited by David Morley and Andy Brown (Tonbridge: Worpole Press, 2001) ISBN 0 9530947 4 X paperback £6.00

Omm Sety by John Greening (Shoestring Press, 2001) ISBN 1 899549 51 X £5.95

Notes on contributors