A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [49]
In one important sense these figures, though reasonably accurate, are misleading. They represent comprehension of the vernacular, or colloquial, tongues—Spanish, Portugese, English, French, Dutch, Flemish, Danish, German, and Tuscan (Italian). Some grasp of the vernacular was sought by everyone who wished to raise himself in the world, but in most of Europe Latin was still the language of the elite—the Church, scholars, scientists, governments, and the courts. During 1501, for example, in France eighty volumes were published in Latin and only eight in French; in Aragon, between 1510 and 1540, one hundred and fifteen were printed in Latin and just five in Spanish. Indeed, throughout the sixteenth century Latin dominated works displayed at the annual Frankfurt book fair. Several reasons account for its survival. It was still the language of international communication; if you wanted to address the European public and be universally understood, you had to use it. In countries whose languages were rarely learned by foreigners—Flemish, German, and, yes, English—Latin was the language of choice.
Those who preferred the colloquial were few, and were sometimes resented by their peers; when the great French surgeon Ambroise Paré chose to publish his work on the method of treating gunshot wounds as La méthode de traicter les playes faites par les arquebuses et aultres bastons à feu, he was reproached by colleagues on the Faculty of Medicine at Paris. The Church aggressively opposed vernacular languages. Authors hesitated to use their native tongues because they were at the mercy of printers’ foremen and compositors. Thus, in an English manuscript, “be” could come out as “bee,” “grief” as “greef,” “these” as “thease,” “sword” as “swoord,” “nurse” as “noorse,” and “servant” as “servaunt.” Yet in the long run native languages were destined to triumph. The victory was not altogether glorious. It meant that the dream of a unified Christendom, with a single Latin tongue, was doomed.
That outcome was not evident in the early 1500s. The curricula at monastic schools were unchanged. All teaching there was in Latin; younger monks and country youth were led through primary instruction in the trivium—grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics (the art of reasoning)—and bright students were encouraged to tackle the quadrivium: astronomy, arithmetic, geometry, and music. The monks had made some progress in botany and geology, collecting curious minerals, herbs, and dried bird and animal skins, but a monk reincarnated from the eighth century would have found little that was unfamiliar. Boys from the surrounding countryside who attended classes picked up a kind of pidgin Latin, adequate for the comprehension of political and religious pamphlets. Later that would become important.
MEANTIME, outside monastery walls, the reading public was surging, though not by design. No new literacy programs were introduced, the educational process continued to be chaotic, and those who received any degree of systematic teaching had to be either fortunate or unusually persistent. The number of people who were fortunate remained stable. It was persistence, and the number of schools, which rose. As the presses disgorged new printed matter, the yearning for literacy spread like a fever; millions of Europeans led their children to classrooms and remained to learn themselves. Typically, a class would be leavened with women anxious to learn about literature and philosophy, and middle-class adolescents contemplating a career in trade.
Instruction was available in three forms: popular education, apprenticeship, and the courses of study at