To summarise, literacy levels were probably much lower than in Roman times during most of the Middle Ages - perhaps only 6% in England in 1300 - but after the Black Death rose steadily, until by the Renaissance they were probably higher than they had been under the Roman Empire. read more
By 1500, he estimates the literacy among males still did not exceed 10-25%. In Europe, which had always been much more under the influence of Latin, the first person to break through the Latin barrier was “Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), arguably the greatest medieval poet. read more
David Cressy, in Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England, suggests that in the 16 th century, 90% of men and 99% of women were illiterate in English. The first surviving assessment of English literacy in history, made by Thomas More in 1533, put the English language literacy rate at about 40%. read more