ACTILIT, Women’s practical Literacy and Learning Practices in the late Middle Ages (1350-1500)

Project summary

Female literacy and female literate education are a crucial topic. During the Middle Ages, moralists and preachers repeatedly insisted on the careful attitude educators had to adopt when teaching letters to girls, as it was considered as a useful but a dangerous skill. Modern historians have long tended to consider literate women as exceptions, defining medieval literacy as an almost exclusively male domain. In recent years however, the study of medieval women’s cultural role and literacy has become a dynamic research area (see the volumes of the project Nuns’ literacies, ed. V. Blanton, V. O’Mara and P. Stoop; see also Liturgical Life and Latin learning at Paradies bei Soest, 1300-1425, ed. M. Fassler, J. Hamburger, S. Marti, E. Schlotheuber).

Project ACTILIT is centered on the concept of female practical literacy. It considers literacy not only as a cultural ability, but especially as a social and economic skill necessary for the improvement of personal agency and social empowerment. As such, ACTILIT will shed light on the role of medieval women, be they nuns or lay women (mothers), in the transmission of literate knowledge, and on the specific goals of girls’ literate education. The study will be based on the methodical exploration of archival funds, especially from nunneries: it will consider the type of scripts used by women, accounting techniques, language, nature and purpose of the documents, for the period 1350-1500; letters written by lay women will also be taken into account. Another key-point of the project will be the study of the education of lay girls into female convents, and thus the transmission of knowledge between religious and lay women. Tuscany will be the starting point of the research. The second step of the project will consist of the comparison between the Tuscan data and the German case, thanks to the ongoing research projects of prof. Schlotheuber’s team.