Medieval literacy

Medieval Misconceptions: EDUCATION and LITERACY
Shadiversity | 13.II.2020
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-abyQLl8mPI

I

1:52 Nice to see two channels I like together!

[To clarify, Shadiversity as providing this video above, and the Modern History TV with its video on Did they have soap in medieval times?]

II

7:07 Guilds - Germany and France differred.

In Germany, the overall guilds for a certain number of trades were involved in the administration, hence everyone was in a guild, as he was burgher of his city.

In France, trades were going in and out of the guilds. There were from St. Louis IX to Louis XVI diversity of trades between unrelgulated, semi-regulated and guild regulated. In these last, you needed to be a master approved by the guild to open a shop.

III

10:48 You are omitting, in the Anglo-Saxon period there were Anglo-Saxon translations of Gospel texts.

Here is a fairly late example:
Wessex Gospels c.1175 Textus Receptus Bibles
http://textusreceptusbibles.com/Wessex/40/24

Up to 800, Latin was the written form of the vernacular in France.

Alcuin of York was imported to Tours in order to teach pronouncing Latin as a foreign language, that year, and 813 in that same city, a council decided after the Gospel people would be needing a paraphrase in vernacular.

This was the start of the divorce between French and Latin.

IV

10:20 "It was even heresy to translate it into other languages"

That's not generally true for the Middle Ages as a whole.

11:25 Unauthorised version of the Bible banned in 1199 - this implies there were authorised translations.

11:33 "and those who translated them punished"

Well, that is really very different from country to country. If you thought of Tyndale, he would have been punished in England for translating the Bible, he fled to Flanders, and there he was punished for something else. As we have his inquisitor's refutations of his arguments, we know that James Latomus was more interested in his Protestant understanding of Romans 3.

11:44 I think the idea of non-Latin versions of the Bible having been uncommon in the Middle Ages depends a bit on who was looking.

In the Konvertiten-Katechismus by Jesuits in Paderborn, 1950, it says Luther's unauthorised translation came only after 14 High German and 4 Low German authorised ones.

Authorised by the Catholic Church.

There was also a brief of Biblical History, the Historia Scholastica, which was translated to Flemish at least as the Rijmbijbel.

And, both the Historia Scholastica and the Rijmbijbel were authorised. Obviously.