"This book will be a monumental contribution to the topic and a staple of scholarship for decades." - Michael B. Katz"A remarkable volume of critical synthesis and passionate revisionism." - Journal of Economic History" ... ambitious and stimulating ... required reading not only for social historians but also for policy-makers and activists." - Histoire Sociale"Clearly an important book ... marks a significant point in the history of literacy studies." - History of Education Quarterly"A stimulating challenge to traditional assumptions and scholarly commonplaces." - Journal of Communication

• PrefaceAcknowledgmentsPart One: Setting the StageIntroduction: Literacy's Legacies1. The Origins of Western Leteracy1. From Writing to Literacy2. Literacy's First Legacies: From Athens3. ...to Rome, and BeyondPart Two: Before the Printing Press: The Middle Ages2. Th Light of Literacy in the "Dark Ages"1. Fifth-Seventh Centuries2. Seventh Century3. Eighth Century4. Ninth-Tenth Centuries3. New Lights of Literacy and Learning: From the Tenth-Eleventh to the Thirteenth Centuries1. Italy and Commercial Revolution2. The Church, Papacy, and Schools3. Patterns of Literacy4. Thought, Theory, and Practice4. Ends and Beginnings: The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries1. Humanism and the Italian Renaissance2. Continental Conditions in Literacy3. The English Example5. Print, Protest, and the People1. The Advent and Impact of Print2. Renaissance(s) Revisited3. Print, Reform, and Reformation4. Reforming Literacy Provision6. Toward Enlightenment/Toward Modernity: 1660-17801. Thinking about Literacy and Schooling2. Patterns of Literacy: Paths to LiteracyPart Four: Toward the Present and the Future7. The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Our Times1. The Setting2. Literacy's Paths and PatternsEpilogue: Today and Tomorrow: Revisioning Literacy1. Twentieth-Century Trends in Literacy Levels2. Imputed Impacts and Consequences; or, Great and Other Dichotomies Revisited3. A Crisis in Literacy?4. Literacy, Culture, and Society: Communications and the Future of LiteracyNotesIndex