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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
At the end of the 17th century, 80 per cent of the French were illiterate. A hundred years later, despite a certain amount of progress in reading and writing above all in already favoured regions, their number still represents 63 per cent of the population. Throughout Europe from the 16th to the 18th century, the proportion is never lower than this.
1 Certainly it was there that George Sand bought a couple for the needs of the little Fadette.
2 To confront this question let us refer ourselves above all to the case of France where some studies on the misunderstood past, based on minute inventories, are offered to us by the research of scholars such as Mandrou and Bollème; we do not know of works of this kind in other European countries.
3 As well as approximately 450 booklets to which it seems necessary to add about ten selected (and sometimes deformed) works coming from classical literature which, according to the author, express a completely different mentality but make up, nevertheless, a part of the Troyes stock (the choices, very selective, as Mandrou remarks, of plays by Corneille, fables of La Fontaine or Aesop, are nonetheless meaningful).
4 Le grand Kalendrier et Compost des Bergiers avecq leur astrologie et plusieurs autres choses—noted in Nicolas Le Rouges’ edition of 1510—is a universal calender of erudite origin.
5 Published in 1579 by Henry III in France, the decision of 1585 of Pope Sixtus V, etc. In the edition of Mathieu Leansberg 1811 one may read: “It was in 1636 that M. Leansberg began his predictions, in announcing to the whole world the good and evil that seemed likely to come, but with scrupulous attention to avoid all personal references.”
6 We find an identical position beside this in Islamic traditions. According to Jacques Berque, the word Taçwir (image, representation) finds its origins in the Arabic word çawwara (to represent) from which is extracted the name Al-Muçawwir, the name of God, the “Creator.” “Now, how can one call oneself Maçawwir when one is a man? According to the same terms, to pose the question of Taçwir constitutes an impiety. This capacity or this art cannot, by essential definition, come back to Man.”
