Few SEAFARER modules are so obviously relevant and significant as the Book, so to ask "So What?"--the rude but necessary question that plays a large part in this program--might seem unnecessary here. But in this case as in many others, things are not always what they seem. The book is an obvious topic, and the connections between its significance in the modern and medieval periods are easy to trace.
Here are some thoughts from Jonathan Kozol's Illiterate America (quoted at the start of Part 3 of the narrative), one of the most important and passionate books written about the meaning of literacy--and hence about the meaning of books. Following the sentence we quote--that "from early centuries, the Hebrew people have been known as 'People of the Book'" (140)--Goody continues:
"It was 'The Book,' not 'books--'The Word,' not words--which gave a sacret character to literate tradition. After the destruction of the Second Temple, Jewish scholars carried on that literate tradition (one that was both reverential and defiantly pragmatic, critical, and analytical) through twenty centuries of program, pilgrimage, and persecution."
"The first great literacy campaigns of modern history were fostered by the followers of Martin Luther--and, with a more lasting force, during the English Reformation--woud of the desire to allow religious persons an unmediated access to the Bible and to undermine the absoluteness of a sacerdotal domination by anointed heirarchs. Even the most notable of literacy campaigns conducted in the past three decades, those of the Chinese and the Cubans for example, drew much of their energy and exaltatoin from the sanctity assigned to other kinds of 'holy writ.' The writings of Marx and Engels, Lenin, Mao Tse-tung, were not used specifically as literacy primers but the ideologies and passions they conveyed surely infused with special energy both of these fervent undertakings." (140)
There are a lot of issues in Kozol's paragraphs that can help you answer the question "So What?" about the book and literacy in the medieval period. This is a topic that until very recently was not discussed in academic at all, for obvious reasons!
The English Reformation was also the period of great destruction of Anglo-Saxon books, however. See Link 6 in this module for further information and the bibliography.
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