hmm. German, French, English etc seem to be missing from your list and the Bible was on list of "forbidden books" in Europe.
No it wasn’t, as I addressed in my prior reply. I beg your pardon, but it would be greatly appreciated if you were to avoid reposting, in replies to me, verbatim statements which I have already addressed; if you have something new to say or evidence that contradicts my earlier assertion, I would be happy to read and address it, but when you just repost precisely the same sentence I responded to, it is somewhat frustrating, because it feels like you are ignoring my post, and that’s kind of hurtful.
I am pretty sure there were plenty of English, German and French peasants that could not read latin books.
Literacy among peasants was virtually non-existant prior to the Renaissance, and even after the renaissance, literacy among the peasant populations of much of Europe remained extremely low into the late 19th and early 20th century, with the implementation of compulsory schooling, et cetera. There were of course exceptions, some on a national level, others on the level of certain ethnoreligious minorities such as the Mennonites, and of course in the US and Canada, given that the key driver of emigration to North America tended to be the desire of religious minorities for greater freedom, these religious communities, such as the Puritans of New England, the Mennonites of Pennsylvania, and others, ensured that from the start the rural population of North America was remarkably literate compared to many parts of Europe.
But we are also talking about a period of time long after the end of the Middle Ages. During the actual Middle Ages, European peasants were illiterate, but not only peasants: many members of the landed nobility were either illiterate or barely literate. The most literate communities in Western Europe at that time were the Benedictine and especially the Carthusian monasteries, with their vast libraries and a focus on manuscript production. And indeed elsewhere in Europe, Asia and Africa during the same era, it was Christian monasteries which functioned as veritable storehouses of knowledge; for example, the works of Aristotle and other Greek philosophers were preserved by Syriac speaking monks in Egypt*, Syria, Palestine and Mesopotamia, and these monks in turn, on the request of Islamic scholars, translated the classics of Greek philosophy into Arabic. Then, as the impressive achievements of Islamic intellectuals such as Avveroes, Avicenna, and others, at the turn of the last millenium, became widely known, these works were then translated into Latin, sparking the Renaissance.
And other Christian monasteries elsewhere stored, and continue to store, reams of priceless information; the rich treasure of historical manuscripts in the monasteries of Ethiopia, Mount Athos in Greece, and the recently catalogued collection of the severely threatened St. Catharine’s Monastery in Sinai, is priceless, and this vital heritage of humanity has been tirelessly preserved over the centuries thanks to the institution of Christian monasticism in the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Anglican and Lutheran churches (there also used to be Assyrian monasteries but sadly these were all destroyed by the genocidal warlord Tamerlane).
In fact, Oxford, Cambridge, and other secular universities did start out life as collections of monasteries. A very large number of the great colleges at Oxford and Cambridge were, in the past, either Benedictine monasteries or friaries, homes to the British operations and seminaries of mendicant orders like the Dominicans, Fransiscans, Carmelites and so on. Even today, Roman Catholic, Anglican and Coptic Orthodox monastic orders remain heavily involved in education.
* The famed “Syrian Monastery” is a Coptic Orthodox monastery in Egypt which in antiquity was populated by Syriac speaking monks who hailed from the Syriac Orthodox Church, which has always been extremely closely related to the Coptic church.
to look at these texts and consider whether it is ok to just ignore context.
