The Functions and Purpose of Vernacular Literacy: An Introduction

Martyn Lyons, Sofia Kotilainen, Ilkka Mäkinen, The Functions and Purpose of Vernacular Literacy: An Introduction, Journal of Social History, Volume 49, Issue 2, Winter 2015, Pages 283–286, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shv034

Extract

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