Nicholas, Stanford-on-Avon, Northamptonshire, England south aisle, east window, farthest left panel.

“Saint Anne teaching the Virgin to Read,” about 1330–50, the Church of St. Nicholas in Stanford-on-Avon, Northamptonshire, England. 7 One such survives today in the Church of St. Depictions of her teaching Mary to read appeared in stained-glass windows, manuscript illuminations, wall paintings, and other artistic representations.

Alphabets and these simple prayers could be written out on a variety of surfaces: boards, painted walls, wooden trays covered in ash or sand, ceramic or metal vessels, or hand-held tablets made of materials such as slate, horn, or board covered in parchment (more on this below).īeginning around 1300 in England, medieval parents had a model of teaching in St. Because reading was important to promote spiritual instruction, and had indeed been cited at least as far back as Jerome in the fourth century as a reason girls should be taught to read, some of the earliest texts learned were the Pater Noster, the Ave, and the Creed. 6 Singing might have been used as well to teach pronunciation, as sung Latin was used in church services. In this way they acquired the basic skills of early reading, called contemporaneously sillibicare (sounding out syllables) and legere (sounding out words), even if they didn’t understand what those sounds or words meant. 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.

Medieval Women by Henrietta Leyser