![]() ![]() Girls and boys began by learning the letters of the Latin alphabet and the sounds they made. 5 The teaching of reading began in infantia with parents and nurses, if the family could afford such help. Medieval scholars commonly thought of childhood in three divisions: infantia (birth to about 7 years), pueritia (about 7 to 14 years), and adolescentia (about 14 to 21 years). In fact, most of the evidence for literacy survives from the upper classes uncovering the history of less privileged groups remains difficult. 4 Whether children’s reading knowledge became advanced depended on the importance of reading in their lives and what socioeconomic station they attained. 3 Because medieval English people would have heard and used all three languages in daily life, children were taught to read and speak all of them. 2 By the mid-fifteenth century, though, English had reasserted dominance as the primary vernacular language, while the Church, clerics, and higher education continued to use Latin. 1 English had been its primary vernacular from the time of the Anglo-Saxons (about 450) until the Norman Conquest of 1066, when French became the language of the nobility, government, and diplomacy. ![]() ![]() ![]() Medieval England (on which I’ll focus this blog) was a multilingual nation. As a specialist in the study of women’s education and literacy in England in the Middle Ages, I’m asked this question a lot. ![]()
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