Talking about Literacy

Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England by David Cressy (Cambridge University Press, 1980)

Today in Britain the necessity for literacy is assumed: alarm is expressed at warnings from educationists that an increasing number of children leave school as functional illiterates. We believe that people without the ability to read or write are at a disadvantage in our society.

In his recently published book Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge University Press, 1980) David Cressy sets out to discover what proportion of the population in those times were literate and how important was the ability to read and write for participation in the mainstream of early modern society. Dr. Cressy's book is described as an exploration of the social context of reading and writing in pre-industrial England and raises these important questions to further our understanding of society in Tudor and Stuart times.