Books and Reading in Young Adult Literature Set in the Middle Ages

In fourteenth-century France a complete Bible cost the same as half a house or forty sheep or a team of hired assassins—no small potatoes (Ladurie 37, 45). ¹ So what is the daughter of an apothecary in eleventh-century Cologne doing with her own book of herbs? And in an age when memory and the spoken word were trusted more than writing, why does a French teenager long to read about medicine when she can learn by working with a surgeon? From Howard Pyle to Rosemary Sutcliff to Marguerite de Angeli and beyond, writers of young adult literature have mined the Middle Ages for settings and materials. In so doing they have often perpetuated anachronistic fallacies, allowing their didactic tendencies to overshadow historical accuracy. Several recent novels set in the medieval period, while well researched, unintentionally reinforce misconceptions about books and literacy in the Middle Ages.

These historical novels span the later Middle Ages: Karleen Bradford’s There Will Be Wolves is set in late eleventh-century Cologne; Karen Cushman’s Catherine, Called Birdy and The Midwife’s Apprentice move us to England of the thirteenth century, and Nancy Garden’s Dove and Sword: A Novel of Joan of Arc takes place in fifteenth-century France. In some measure, each novel concerns the transmission of medical knowledge. Each has likable, resourceful characters, wonderful role models for readers, and each book is accurate in most of its details about the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, twentieth-century attitudes creep into the stories in the portrayals of reading and learning. ²

Our bias in favor of literacy is so strong that we often overlook or look down upon other ways of learning, ways that can be equally valid. When we want to learn about a subject, we go to the library. We look it up. We search it on the Web. But whatever we do, we read about it. For modern audiences, reading is an essential way of gaining knowledge. We value literacy and equate it with civilization. In the Middle Ages, however, especially before printing came to Europe in the fifteenth century, books were only one of many ways of storing and gaining knowledge. Reading was not nearly as common as it is today, and it was valued differently. You didn’t need to own a psalter if you wanted to know the text of a psalm; instead, you would rely on your memory or someone else’s. Your mother or your nurse taught you your first texts: the Paternoster, the Creed, the Ave Maria, some psalms—but that doesn’t mean they knew how to read (Shahar 210). Even if they did know how to read, they wouldn’t necessarily have trusted the words their eyes saw over the words they heard aloud. Michael Clanchy demonstrates that even highly literate government officials preferred oral to written information; in England, it wasn’t until the late thirteenth-century that bureaucrats seeking information began to refer to written material (330). Further, Clanchy notes, “Writing was distrusted and for good reason, as numerous charters of the twelfth century in particular were forgeries” (332). Whereas we tend to trust written documents over oral information, the situation was quite the reverse in the early Middle Ages. We rely on our libraries with their encyclopedias, dictionaries, and other books crammed full of information; for a person in the Middles Ages, the memory was her library, filled with bits of knowledge like a honeycomb filled with pollen from different flowers. Nevertheless, some writing was always valued. George Hardin Brown notes that religious texts like the Bible were considered authoritative even by those who could not read them (109)—the word Scripture itself means that which is written.

Even books as physical objects differ today from the ways they existed in the Middle Ages. Few books had indices or even page numbers, and the very concept of looking something up is modern. We think of single, bound volumes that encompass only one subject: a Bible, a novel, a history of England. Yes, Bibles were one of the most common...