THE CONTEXT OF LITERACY

Nearly forty years ago, Ganshof published ‘The use of the written word in Charlemagne's administration’. That paper, in only eighteen pages, provided a comprehensive survey, and a lucid classification, of the documentary evidence, especially the capitularies, of Charlemagne's reign. Ganshof's study remains fundamental. The limited aim of the present paper is partly to supplement it, partly to set the material in a different context. Literacy can be examined, not just in quantitative terms of measurable ‘uses’, but in qualitative terms, as a form of ideology through which power is constructed. The adjective ‘written’ refers to things, ‘literate’ to persons. Hence in dealing with literacy rather than with Ganshof's ‘written word’, I hope to consider aspects of social practice with which Ganshof was not concerned.

Ganshof's definition of ‘administration’ rested on a sharp distinction between ‘written records’ used ‘to furnish proof of individual rights’ and ‘documents which formed part of an administrative routine’. Implicit here is a further distinction between the private and public domains. Only the latter came within Ganshof's purview: for him, administration was the sphere of the state. But what in the Carolingian period was the public domain? Was there a Carolingian state at all? Such questions – and they are important ones in the history of political ideas – have generated much debate precisely because the categories they employ are hard to pin down to early mediaeval realities.