NOTES
1' Maddison (2001) describes per capita growth between 1000 and 1820 in western Europe as a fairly steady process
but ‘a slow crawl’, at a rate of 0.14% a year.
2' There are two ways of deflating the nominal wage series of the different regions/countries available in order to
render them comparable in real terms.
Exchange rates is one of them but has been considered by most of the current literature as apt to produce distortions given that they do not reflect differences in prices of non-tradable goods and are affected by capital movements. The alternative is to use purchasing power parity adjustment (PPP). This involves establishing the cost at local prices in these places of a common basket of consumer goods and using the resulting indices to deflate nominal wages. The intuition isthat this exercise shows how much the nominal wage will buy in a given place compared to what it does in another taken as the reference.
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A picture confirmed by de Vries (1994) for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
We have added Portugal and Italy to van Zanden's collection of countries by extrapolating back to 1810 their relative position of 1850, as given in Reis (2000). This exercise, if extended to Scandinavia, would place Sweden and Denmark on a par with France and Belgium.
Clark and Van Der Werf (1998) cast doubt on this argument by claiming that work loads were already so high in the Middle Ages that they could not have increased much in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries.
Brewer and Porter (1993), Weatherill (1988), Torras and Yun (eds.) (1999), Malanima (1994), Boehler (1995), Baulant (1975), Kamermans (1999), and Fairchilds (1993) provide many examples.
For a full critique, see the Introduction in Torras and Yun (1999).
All of them are illustrated in the present volume.
Anthropometric history has proved valuable for later periods but as yet very little information on heights is available for the early modern period. The demographic approach is similarly helpful but is better at bringing to light major shifts in welfare than at portraying the gradual evolution over time that the ‘material consumption' approach can offer. Real wages are best in this respect but as they are used to estimate GDP per capita too, they do not allow us to contrast this result with its impact on the standard of living. The first two have the advantage of extending the concept of the standard of living beyond the narrow field of real wages, food, and durables consumption to include health, physical vigour, leisure, and general amenity.This does not mean that professional skills and literacy could not be learned at the same time and indeed often were. For examples of this, see Spufford (1979).
10' There is a large discussion about the meaning and usefulness of signatures for the history of literacy. For some references, see Houston (1988), Parker (1980), Stephens (1990), Queniart (1977), and Saugnieux (1986).
11' Notwithstanding, the correlation between signing and being able to copy a phrase was low in nineteenth-century Denmark, according to Markussen (1990). Grevet (1987) notes that, in the Pas-de-Calais, towards 1800 there was a 20 percentage point difference between the proportion of males who could sign the marriage register and males who were considered ‘literate' by official enquirers.
12' There are few reliable national estimates, the most famous being the French one by Maggiolo (Furet and Ozouf 1977). Most of the data used here are culled from more or less local studies and extrapolated, at some risk, to national levels.
13' For an early identification of these historical literacy regions, see Chartier (1985—7). It revises Cipolla's (1969) classic analysis thanks to the enormous flow of new information produced during the 1970s and 1980s.
14' There is a vast range of literature on these countries. The most useful proved to be Gelabert (1987), Benassar (1983), and Vinao Fraga (1990) for Spain; Houdaille (1977) and Furet and Ozouf (1977) for France; Hart (1976) and Kuijppers (1997) for the Netherlands; Gouveia (1998), Magalhaes (1994), and Marquilhas (2000) for Portugal; Marchesini (1983) for Italy; and Sanderson (1991) and Schofield (1973) for England.
15' For a general warning to avoid transposing educational models from the nineteenth century to earlier times, see Compere (1995).
16' The exception occurred in parts of Prussia and in Sweden during the eighteenth century, where the Pietist movement was taken over by the state and a centralized system of
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education was organized. The aim was religious—the universal acquisition of a reading ability that would permit a direct reasonable knowledge of some of the Bible and of the Catechism, but always under supervision.
In the Alpes, near Briangon, where autodidactic arrangements were common, by 1800 93% of males could sign. See Granet-Abisset (1996), and Vovelle (1975).
On the other hand, in some Dutch provinces, parents were penalized if they failed to send their children to school (Spufford 1995).
In the Netherlands, de Vries and van der Woude (1997) estimate that half the seventeenth- century population of Amsterdam was under these conditions but in other places it was probably more. See the scenarios outlined for French eighteenth-century workers and the vulnerability induced in them by price changes in Morineau (1972).
See Houston (1985 and 1988), van Deursen (1991), Larquie (1987), Nilsson and Svard (1994), Amalric (1987), and Grevet (1987).
Moreno Claverias (1999). I am grateful to the author of this text for allowing me to use this chapter of her Ph.D. thesis on ‘Pautas de consumo en la Cataluna de los siglos XVII y XVIII'.
The same point is made for Provence by Vovelle (1975), who notes that the menagers concerned themselves with becoming literate when they entered the ranks of the proprietaires.Literacy was also becoming instrumental for them by allowing easier access to credit and to the burgeoning market for their produce.
At the other end of Europe, Magalhaes (1994) has noted that the increase in the volume of legal documents pertaining to land and wealth in Portuguese rural society was having a similar effect.
See also Magalhaes (1994), Stephens (1990), Spufford (1995), Benassar (1983), Cressy (1981), and many others. Cases are cited of women who, owing to early widowhood, ran craft shops and businesses or far ms, although this was not the norm. Artisans, liberal professionals, shopkeepers, and the like were supposed to be men. In 1742, only 14% of taxable households in Amsterdam were headed by women (de Vries and van der Woude 1997).
Amsterdam, one of the most literate cities of seventeenth-century Europe, owed much of its prosperity to its role as an ‘information exchange' where widespread literacy was obviously crucial (Smith 1984).
But in rural society, opportunities existed too, as David Cressy (1980) has noted, and literacy was a component of it.
People can learn to read and write but later, for lack of use, may forget these skills, a not unusual occurrence in this period, as related by several authors.
Religious purposes, in particular, have long been associated with literacy in the early modern period, a link that has been the subject of a vast outpouring of publications. Works with a spiritual content of whatever persuasion certainly were the most common form of book until the late eighteenth century both in terms of production and in libraries, but a considerable body of recent writing has cast doubts on religious factionalism as a long-term force driving the spread of literacy or of book reading. See Parker (1980), Cressy (1981), Gawthorp and Strauss (1984), Frangois (1989), van Deursen (1991), and Spufford (1995).
According to Nicolas and Nicolas (1992), ‘although literacy is considered a consumption good today, during the early industrial revolution literacy was an investment good, the attainment of which was an investment decision by the family household'. Our view, on the contrary, is that at this time and earlier both forms co-existed, often in the same person.
”■ The number of different titles published in Europe during the eighteenth century was 3 million. In Germany alone, output was between 2 and 5 million copies a year (Houston 1988).
3 According to Braida (1995), the distribution circuit is the best way of understanding at what sort of public a particular type of publication was directed. In Italy, for example, agricultural almanacs might appear to be suited to a peasant readership but could not have been so, in fact, as they were sold in bookshops and not by peddlers.
33 In eighteenth-century France typically they cost one sol, about one-twentieth of the price of an inexpensive book (Chartier 1987). In England and the Netherlands, their price was around a fourth or a fifth of the daily wage of an unskilled labourer (Spufford 1985).
34 These figures are confirmed by several regional studies in the second volume of Furet and Ozouf (1977).
35' Several authors have noted, for instance, the coincidence between periods of prosperity or poverty, on the one hand, and the acceleration or retardation of the spread of literacy, on the other. See Grevet (1985), Houston (1985), Nicolas and Nicolas (1992).
36 In late eighteenth-century Kilmarnock fees for instruction in reading and writing were three shillings per quarter (Houston 1985).
37' One livre tournois was the equivalent of 20 sous or so∕s.
38' This is less though not a great deal less than what is indicated by Shammas (1993), who puts the ratio of durables to total wealth at around 50%.