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3. Beyond the Protestant Literacy Myth
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45 3. Beyond the Protestant Literacy Myth Carol Mattingly Literacy historians have long credited the Protestant mandate to read Scripture for advances in literacy, with historians of American literacy pointing to New England Puritans as the model for the Protestant impetus to literacy.1 This belief is commonplace in our best histories. For example, Lawrence Stone identifies the “critical element” of mass literacy “not so much as Christianity as Protestantism” (1969, p. 77) and declares, “At the deepest psychological level, Tridentine Catholicism remained a culture of the image. It intensified the worship of saints, and indulged in ever more lavish embellishment of churches with paintings, glass and sculpture. Protestantism , by contrast, was a culture of the book, of a literate society” (1969, p. 78). Kenneth Lockridge similarly claims that “it is possible to hold great respect for the Protestant impulse as the sole force powerful enough to work a transformation in the level of literacy” (1974, p. 45). Harvey J. Graff finds that Irish Catholics in nineteenth-century Canada had a lower literacy rate than Protestants because Irish Catholics’ religion “importantly influenced their disadvantaged status” as “Protestantism provided a greater impetus to literacy than Catholicism—a link that historians should well expect” (1979, p. 58); and E. Jennifer Monoghan, in noting the complex “religious, social, political and economic base” influencing literacy, nonetheless assumes, “The [Protestant] religious motive was paramount” (2005, p. 32). The claim surfaces in numerous other texts related to literacy studies. In the most used history of rhetoric text in English Departments, for example, Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg claim, “The spread of Protestant Christianity in the eighteenth and nineteenth century aided women’s efforts to become better educated. . . . Protestantism encouraged women to be literate so that they could read the Bible” (2001, p. 987).2 This overarching, seemingly self-evident belief in Protestantism and firsthand experience with biblical texts as the primary promoter of literacy in America has overshadowed other important efforts, leading to an incomplete understanding of American literacy history. Carol Mattingly 46 The Protestant narrative was created amidst patriarchal and religious attitudes that have shaped how we see ourselves and the stories we continue to tell, obscuring other valid narratives and promoting prejudicial inaccuracies . In this chapter, I use Catholic literacy efforts as a test case to question some accepted assumptions about American literacy, including beliefs that Protestants valued literacy while Catholics did not and that women were always less literate than men. I suggest that competition among religions to attract and maintain members may have been more important in the sponsorship of literacy than religious beliefs per se. The American Protestant grand narrative arises partly because historians have synecdochically focused on early English colonies, primarily the New England colonies, to craft a narrative of literacy for all of America ; however, prior to English settlement, French, Spanish, and Portuguese conquerors and missionaries introduced themselves to the New World as sponsors of literacies from a European Catholic tradition. As Jamie Candelaria Greene (1994) has noted, the presentation of American literacy as an English (Protestant) enterprise demonstrates an ethnocentric bias. For example, members of the religious Franciscan order both accompanied the first Spanish conquistadors to the Americas and continued to emigrate with the purpose of educating and “civilizing” native inhabitants. Franciscans and other religious orders created schools for natives and for children of the invading armies and settlers, teaching in both Spanish and Latin languages throughout Spanish-conquered Americas, including areas that would become part of the United States (Barth, 1945, p. 50; Gallegos, 1992, pp. 26, 34). The primary purpose, of course, was to extend the Christian religion and Spanish/European culture, to “impose a foreign world view on the native population” (Gallegos, 1992, p. 67). Similarly, members of Catholic religious communities followed French explorers and settlers to the New World to spread French and Catholic culture . Jesuits had arrived in Quebec as early as 1610, and Ursuline sisters joined them in 1639, establishing the first schools for girls and young women in the Americas. The Ursulines also settled a community of religious women in New Orleans in 1727, shortly after their arrival founding a school for girls. Like Protestant groups, Catholics saw the Americas as a place to extend their religious and cultural vision. During the colonial period, Catholics established early schools in what would become Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana , Maine, New Mexico, New York, Maryland, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, some as early as the sixteenth century (Buetow, 1970, pp. 1–37). An important...