On 15 May Dr. Margriet Hoogvliet gave a Miraeus Lecture on the religious reading culture of lay people in the region between Paris and Antwerp in the fifteenth century. Dr. Hoogvliet is a member of the research group Cities of Readers: Religious Literacies in the Long Fifteenth Century at the University of Groningen. The lecture (in Dutch) is now available on our page on SoundCloud.
Different historical publications have already shown that lay people had a sophisticated religious literacy in the fifteenth century, which was often shared by middle class groups and even occasionally by poor people. Nevertheless, the idea of wide-spread illiteracy among these groups, their ignorance, superstition and even opposition to religion remains persistent in popular works, and even in historical reference works: “The elite’s greater level of literacy gave them the ability to develop their piety through religious readings”; “For most of the middle ages the great majority of people did not read and write” (The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Christianity 2014).
Archival and codicological sources from Paris, Amiens, Douai and Tournai show a completely different picture: there is an abundance of documentation on middle and lower class lay people who were literate and owned one or more religious books. Their other possessions show that their homes were often decorated with altar pieces and other religious works of art, meaning that the private house was a space where the sacred was present, at any case visually. Reading activities in private houses took place in the direct context of these works of art, and undoubtedly sometimes in relation with them.
In the spirit of ‘microstoria’, Dr. Hoogvliet presented the material culture of some religious private households in the North of France and the Southern Low Countries, together with examples of preserved books that were once in the possession of common townspeople and were read by them. This historical documentation was the starting point for a deeper analysis: a social history approach will map the social spread of religious reading, together with the groups of readers that were related to these books in private possession. Spatial analysis, based on the rooms where books were found in private houses, shows that manual labour, trade, daily life and religious reading went hand in hand. The private house was a space with a specific meaning, generated by the presence of religious objects and by the reading events that took place.
References
- S. Corbellini, M. Hoogvliet & B. Ramakers,Discovering the riches of the word. Religious reading in late medieval and early modern Europe. Leiden 2015.
- M. Hoogvliet, ‘Religious Reading in French and Middle Dutch in the Southern Low Countries and Northern France (ca. 1400-ca. 1520)’, in: N. Morato & D. Schoenaers (eds.), Medieval francophone literary culture outside France. Studies in the moving word. Turnhout 2018.