Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"This book will be a monumental contribution to the topic and a staple of scholarship for decades." - Michael B. Katz"A remarkable volume of critical synthesis and passionate revisionism." - Journal of Economic History" ... ambitious and stimulating ... required reading not only for social historians but also for policy-makers and activists." - Histoire Sociale"Clearly an important book ... marks a significant point in the history of literacy studies." - History of Education Quarterly"A stimulating challenge to traditional assumptions and scholarly commonplaces." - Journal of Communication
Table of ContentsPreface
Acknowledgments
Part One: Setting the Stage
Introduction: Literacy's Legacies
1. The Origins of Western Leteracy
1. From Writing to Literacy
2. Literacy's First Legacies: From Athens
3. ...to Rome, and Beyond
Part Two: Before the Printing Press: The Middle Ages
2. Th Light of Literacy in the "Dark Ages"
1. Fifth-Seventh Centuries
2. Seventh Century
3. Eighth Century
4. Ninth-Tenth Centuries
3. New Lights of Literacy and Learning: From the Tenth-Eleventh to the Thirteenth Centuries
1. Italy and Commercial Revolution
2. The Church, Papacy, and Schools
3. Patterns of Literacy
4. Thought, Theory, and Practice
4. Ends and Beginnings: The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries
1. Humanism and the Italian Renaissance
2. Continental Conditions in Literacy
3. The English Example
5. Print, Protest, and the People
1. The Advent and Impact of Print
2. Renaissance(s) Revisited
3. Print, Reform, and Reformation
4. Reforming Literacy Provision
6. Toward Enlightenment/Toward Modernity: 1660-1780
1. Thinking about Literacy and Schooling
2. Patterns of Literacy: Paths to Literacy
Part Four: Toward the Present and the Future
7. The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Our Times
1. The Setting
2. Literacy's Paths and Patterns
Epilogue: Today and Tomorrow: Revisioning Literacy
1. Twentieth-Century Trends in Literacy Levels
2. Imputed Impacts and Consequences; or, Great and Other Dichotomies
Revisited
3. A Crisis in Literacy?
4. Literacy, Culture, and Society: Communications and the Future of
Literacy
Notes
Index
