In a society with medieval tech, where the population is largely rural and agricultural, is there any way a majority of people could be literate?
I have a religion that that actively encourages asking questions, and places a very high value on individual thought, philosophy, science. What if children learned to read and write in the equivalent of Sunday school? Could a religion that was powerful enough manage to keep the population literate?
The major factor which prevented having a high-ish literacy level in medieval Europe was the lack of writing materials. It is very hard to have a highly literate society when they have nothing to write on.
In the classical world, they had papyrus to write on, and it was cheap. And they had reusable wax tablets. As a consequence, we have both literary (e.g., in Plautus), and direct (e.g., Pompeiian graffiti) testimonies that the society was highly literate; even surprisingly many slaves knew how to read and write. (And because papyrus was cheap, lots of books got published by all kinds of people.)
In the Middle Ages, Europe had only parchment to write on, and parchment was (and still is) horribly expensive. As a consequence, only really important stuff got written down, and therefore only a small number of people remained literate.
So that the key to maintain a highly literate society is to have cheap paper. There is no particular technological reason why they didn't have cheap paper. They just did not. When paper production ramped up in the 15th century, so did the literacy rates. Not everywhere, of course; it varied from region to region, but some regions, for example late medieval England, reached surprisingly high levels of literacy.
And yes, religion can play a role. There are quite convincing indications that in the Middle Ages in western Europe the rate of literacy among Jews was much higher than among Christians. (But not in Eastern Europe, where the Jews were just as illiterate as everybody else.)
In todays historic understanding the general population in medieval times were most likely not so illiterate as most people think. The whole "common people were illiterate" trope roots in historic accounts of literacy rates, though that literacy to them probably didn't mean "able to read and write" but actually meant "able to read and write LATIN (the language of the bible)". The newer consesus among historians is that most of the general population was able to read and write in their common language albeit probably slowly and with horrible spelling.
As a matter of fact the german monk Martin Luther translated the bible from latin and greek into german to make it accessible to the general population. If the barrier of entry was "being able to read and write" his translation would have had an negligeble effect but it revolutionized the german church because common people could now look up what their priest said the bible claimed (which more often than not was nowhere to be found in the bible). The barrier of entry was therefore "able to read LATIN". The historic relevance of Luthers translation in and off itself is already a proof that the german common people were usually able to read the german language in the 15th century.
First of all, lets get an obvious ugly elephant out of the way:
...individual thought, philosophy, science, and basically everything the church hated in the dark ages...
"Dark ages" is a bad term, ill-defined in terms of both time and place. Thankfully, it is quickly becoming obsolete as a term related to real life history. The traditional definition of times when "Science, philosophy and literacy" didn't exist, don't really hold looking in detail at what was happening in the Europe after the Western Roman Empire fell. Clinging too much to this term only helps to propagate the nonsensical and tired "dirty, rainy gray-brown Middle Ages" trope.
Also, claiming that the Christian Church is somehow responsible for the "Dark Ages" is ill-informed and the opposite of what really happened.
Even before the fall of the Roman Empire, the Church had its own philosophers and philosophical school of thought. This era of Christian philosophy is called the Patristic era. During them, the goal was to establish unified Christian theology and philosophy and was done through, in a great part, by arguing with classical philosophy. St. Augustine, for example, promoted the knowledge of Greek philosophy, though in order to be able to dismiss it with Christian arguments. Nonetheless, the method of classical philosophy and argumentation were widely adopted by the scholars.
To be truthful, certain cherry-picking occurred and some Greek philosophers were disproportionately more cited, copied, and preserved. Early Christian scholars loved them their Plato or Aristotle.
There were also the people like Tertullian who openly opposed the idea of studying non-Christian works, but those views were more fringe views. As a result, many scientific and philosophic texts were kept, translated and copied in monasteries. For example,
The best know of those scholars of the Dark Ages was Alcuin, a polyglot theologian who worked closely with Charlemagne to restore study and scholarship in the whole of West-Central Europe. In describing the holdings of his library at York he mentions works by Aristotle, Cicero, Lucan, Pliny, Statius, Trogus Pompeius, Virgil. In his correspondence he mentions Horace, Ovid, Terence. And he was not alone. The abbot of Ferrieres (c. 805-862) Lupus quotes Cicero, Horace, Martial, Seutonius, and Virgil. The abbot of Fleury (c. 950-1104) demonstrated familiarity with Horace, Sallust, Terence, Virgil.
The greatest of abbots after Benedict, Desiderius, who eventually became Pope Victor III in 1086, personally oversaw the transcription of Horace and Seneca, Cicero’s De Natura Deorum and Ovid’s Fasti. His friend Archbishop Alfano (also a former monk at Montecassino) was familiar with the works of ancient writers quoting from Apuleius, Aristotle, Cicero, Plato, Varro, Virgil. He himself wrote poetry imitating Ovid and Horace. Saint Anselm, as abbot of Bec, commended Virgil and other classical writers to his students.
The other great scholar of the so called Dark Ages was Gerbert of Aurillac who later became Pope Sylvester II. He taught logic but also ancient literature: Horace, Juvenal, Lucan, Persius, Terence, Statius, Virgil. Then there is St. Hildebert who practically knew Horace by heart.
(Paparella, Medieval Monasticism as Preserver of Western Civilization, 2008, accessed 3/22/2024 at Metanexus.com)
Beyond that, monasteries also conserved agricultural practices, metallurgical practices, stoneworking, beekeeping, winemaking and many other technological tidbits.
Well then, if all that knowledge was preserved, why do people call it the "Dark Ages"?
Well, that is because...
While most knowledge was not lost, the organization to deliver and exploit it was destroyed
...in Western Europe by the fall of the Roman Empire. Indeed, if you look at the Frankish Empire, as soon as someone is strong enough to enforce some kind of coherent organization, the country can jump exponentially by exploiting conserved know how.
We have now established that the knowledge existed, there were educated individuals able to teach it, and it was available on a state-wide scale if conditions were right. So,
Why didn't the knowledge get to the ordinary people?
There are several factors playing into this.
First off, Missing Infrastructure.
Roman society was highly urbanized, based on densely populated areas. With post-Roman agricultural society—which relied on smaller, somewhat isolated communities—building of educational infrastructure required much greater investment to be practical. Individuals seeking to get their education were required to abandon their community to get it, which was problematic. At the same time, there was also a:
Sharp decline in the European population.
As a result, it was impractical to exclude able-bodied people from fieldwork to pursue education and, by extension, occupations that required literacy. Because of this, there was little incentive.
Outside the church, there were little to no job opportunities for the literate. In feudal (and proto-feudal) society, social mobility simply did not depend upon one's literacy. Birth was everything. As a result, if you went to all the trouble and expense to get educated, your job opportunities were limited to joining the Church or seeking a (relatively rare) job as a court scribe.
The first thing to decide is the incentive. What incentive would normal people have to strive for education; but also, what incentive would a church have to provide it?
Let's say the church plays a very active role in the administration of the realms, and therefore seeks to widen their talent pool as much as possible. Additionally, they can purposely complicate the bureaucracy to get many of "their people" into the government.
If selection for positions of power was traditionally meritocratic, common people would have incentive to get at least some of their children literate.
You need to keep high population, or at least high density locally, so there is enough, workforce that sending some individuals off to get educated won't endanger the community, thereby causing educational infrastructure to become more efficient.
To achieve this, centralize and make cities the centers of political power early (in our world this started to happen in the late medieval era, when literacy proportions also started going up again). The administrative center of a city may be a monastery.(as I mentioned earlier, they are the pickle cans of knowledge.)
If you keep high centralization, but with low overall population, suddenly the states will consist of swaths of wild country with islands of civilization centered around cities. Long-range communication based on written language will become necessary for administration of such states, adding another incentive.
Let the church have important technology; printing press and papermaking were central to making literacy widespread. Since it needs to meet the literary needs of more people, your Church would have a lot more to print.
A final optional change would be to have the Church preserve all knowledge, not cherry-pick the bits they thought were interesting or useful at the time.
There is no economic advantage to making a medieval society universally literate. It's an agrarian society in which most of the population is engaged in subsistence agriculture. You do not need to be literate to succeed as a subsistence farmer, and it would not even help you much: sure you could read about all the farming techniques, but you cannot adopt them for lack of disposable income (which you don't have because remember, you are a subsistence farmer), and because any failed experiment may well cause you and your family to starve. And of course to be a successful subsistence farmer, you would first need to learn subsistence agriculture, a surprisingly complex system, which is best achieved by doing and/or by observing those who already know how to do it; and you cannot do this while you are learning to read.
But not all is lost! You can come close to your goal in two ways:
Organized religions are, as the name suggests, organizations. Powerful organizations in general are greedy when it comes to their power, and do not like sharing it.
Teaching to read and do basic math is one thing, promoting individual thought, scientific reasoning and philosophy is a completely different game.
I can see an organized religion doing the first, teaching people how to write, read and do basic math, because it can be useful in everyday life. But from there to promote individual thought, philosophy and scientific reasoning is something I am rather skeptical, as it would undermine the power position of the religion itself.
What I can see is the religion organizing ways to keep the development inside limits which are acceptable for the organization purposes, and using its moral suasion power to hinder those which are not reputed acceptable.
Literacy is estimated to be 15% in the ancient Roman Empire (ref), making likely that it was much higher in Rome. There was an universal, obligatory elementary school system.
Lack of paper (parchment, papyrus) was a problem, but they solved it by using waxed tablets.
There is no reason to not do the same in a medieval world, unless no-one thinks about it.
Churches, merchants, and lots of other groups were generally fairly good at promoting writing because an educated population is much easier to control and manage. If you can write orders to people you can teach them much more effectively what the correct morality is than if they learn from word of mouth.
The main limitation was freedom to be educated. A number of wealthier places managed to do it. See Education and Learning in the Netherlands, 1400-1600, 123. 90% of the population was educated because between harvests they would send kids into schools to learn. Quoting a traveller in the dutch countyside.
There were and still are many learned men here, well versed in all all sciences and arts. The common folk mostly have some knowledge of grammar and nearly everybody – even peasants and country-folk – can at least read and write.
Lodovico Guicciardini, Descrittione.
You just need to be wealthy enough to have public schools, and in the off seasons when harvests don't need to be collected the kids can be sent to schools.
You could add a religion, that demands the believers to write down there lifes daily struggle for their lifes and for gods work to continue in diaries. As in there is the holy book and then there are family ammendments, basically extended family chronics, that start with the holy book and a family history ever since they became believers.
To not write down the world, to become forgotten life, could be the original sin for that religion. Burning books would be like genocide. The individual may die, but the history of the gods must be saved.
Right incentives are required. For example starting from 1700s onwards in Finland being able to read certain religious text was required for communion and marriage. Similar carrot could be effective tool to motivate regular believers.
Other aspects required is to have texts available in native language and invention of printing press for sufficient availability of duplicated texts. Hand written copies would be too limiting for larger population. Later being invented in late Middle Age making universal literacy possible in theory.
To be noted, just technically being able to read might have sometimes meant person memorized enough verses and tried enough times. And their signature might have been something very simple. But most people could very well be able to read. If not write.
In the religion of that people include commandments which can only be obeyed by a literate person.
It can be a simple as a commandment to write out the entire copy of the Law (whatever that Law may be), and a commandment that the adults of the community take it in turns to read from that Law on the holy days.
Movable Type
Movable type was introduced in China about 500 years before it was introduced in Europe. It did not have the same impact that it had in Europe for several reasons, including the complexity of a Chinese font.
When Gutenberg introduced movable type in Europe, one of his major goals was to produce thousands of copies of the Bible at a reasonable cost. This could not have been done economically using printing presses that lacked movable type.
If you introduce movable type in Europe in about 1000 AD, you might introduce near universal literacy centuries earlier than what happened historically.
You will need several other factors. One is the technology of metal casting that was Gutenberg's great secret. He could make long lasting fonts out of metal using an alloy that had the right properties at the right cost to make the whole enterprise workable.
Another factor you will need is a book like the Bible that occuies a central role in the propagation of the prevalent faith. Some religions would not produce the same information revolution that Christianity did in Europe after Gutenberg.
You need an alphabet that is simple like the Roman Alphabet. People who learn to read Chinese are still encountering new words decades after they have learned the basics of literacy. People encounter new words into their middle age in europe as well, but this is not seen as expanding literacy as such.
You need translators willing to put the sacred script into language the common people can understand. There was no shortage of these in Europe of the 16th century. You may also need authors willing to generate new manuscripts, whether religious or not. This may depend on passing copyright laws. Protection from pirated copying was much more necessary after Gutenberg than before.
You need social advantages for the literate over the illitierate. If, for example, voting rights were attached to literacy, this would be a powerful incentive to get people to learn how to read.
If you combine movable type, metal alloy fonts, a simple alphabet, a text based religion, and social benefits for the literate, you should get the kind of explosive growth in literacy you are aiming for.
Korea achieved universal literacy before the invention of the printing press, under the King Sejong the Great. All it needs is a motivated ruler who is good at surrounding themselves with wisemen, getting the idea that literacy would be a good idea and creating an orthography that's easy to learn. ("A wise man should be able to learn it in a day, a fool in two weeks.")
When you look at what Sejong the Great did... he didn't do much of it. He would see some important problem (literacy, time keeping, taxation systems) and order someone smart to work on it. The reason we call him "the Great" is he kept doing that throughout his life and a few of the things he commissioned happened to work out extremely well (e.g. like Hangul).
I find it interesting that the children of Chinese migrants are often illiterate in reading Chinese characters (even though they can speak quite fluently), but the children of Korean migrants all read Korean quite confidently and pass it on to their children. So literacy with a good orthography is "sticky": it will survive being overrun by other countries, mass migrations, wars, demographic collapses and so on.
I think all you need in your world building is some influential person a generation or two (or more) before in history who had wealth and power and a desire to see universal literacy; perhaps a lack of sycophancy might help. Maybe you could have some drug that makes people smarter and more perceptive briefly, but makes them forthright and blunt. That way, some major leader would want to give their court that drug for the advantages it brings, but would have to develop a culture of not shooting the messenger when they say inconvenient things, but instead developed a culture of tasking them with fixing problems that they saw under the influence.
