The Functions and Purpose of Vernacular Literacy: An Introduction

One key to understanding any past society, Armando Petrucci argued, is to grasp the uses it makes of reading and writing, its unequal social distribution of literacy skills and the functions it assigns to written and printed products.¹ Bearing these principles in mind, historians of reading and writing now investigate literacy not as a skill which is either acquired or not, but as a set of cultural practices which we must situate historically in time and place. Literacy competence is unevenly distributed throughout any society. Hence Roger Chartier spoke of the “two literacies” of reading and writing, with writing skills always being scarcer than reading skills and also highly dependent on gender and social status.² Literacy practices further reflect political power relations and social inequalities. These three studies, which emerged from a panel at a conference of Nordic historians held in Joensuu (Finland) in 2014, illustrate a few of the uses of literacy in the modern era.³

The reading and writing of humble and partially educated people provide the main focus for this research. Some historians call the writing of the lower classes “ordinary writing” in order to emphasize the modest social position of the writers. Here we have preferred the term “vernacular literacy,” a designation that serves to distinguish the literate culture of ordinary people from that of the dominant classes. Indigenous and colonized people, working-class people and European peasants all had different relationships with the written and printed word, and they used reading and writing for specific purposes. Their practices were embedded in the demands of each particular situation that required the adoption of literacy skills. To understand them better, historians sometimes need to borrow the insights of anthropologists, as Lyons suggests in the first article of this dossier, with reference to the work of James C. Scott on everyday resistance.

In nineteenth-century Europe, reading and writing became everyday skills, appropriated by sections of society who had rarely experienced the need to write and who had only enjoyed short and intermittent periods of formal schooling. The literacy skills of these new readers and writers can no longer be adequately measured by simple literacy statistics, based as they used to be on the signature test. As the proponents of New Literacy Studies have insisted, literacy is not an autonomous skill, but a continuing social practice, embedded in social structures and responding to specific cultural needs.⁴ Reading in the nineteenth century could also be a political problem, as Mäkinen’s contribution suggests: Once the masses could read, how could their reading be directed into politically desirable channels? Historians must situate literacy practices within the political, sociohistorical and cultural contexts that generated them. While emphasizing the Nordic perspective, this dossier of research into vernacular literacy in the nineteenth century will demonstrate that the development of reading and writing literacy among common people was not a uniform process and that there were significant differences between communities and cultures.

The main focus of the articles that follow in this set is on readers and writers who are usually obscured from the historians’ view, such as peasants and indigenous people. Their literacy skills and articulateness have been underestimated. How did they encounter written and printed culture? How did they adapt it for their own political, religious or more private purposes? What writing models did they adopt in order to articulate their grievances? In suggesting a few answers, the dossier builds on an increasing body of published work devoted to the reading and writing culture of common people.⁵

We must note how the significance of reading skills and reading literacy were defined ideologically in the nineteenth century and the ambivalent attitudes of the upper echelons of society towards the enhancement of popular literacy. We discuss how common people—peasants, small farmers and workers—expressed their thoughts and opinions and communicated with their social superiors or with others in their local community through the medium of written culture. We consider how the acquisition of literacy and formal education might have influenced living conditions and social advancement. In this...