Why was Margery Kempe a literary pioneer of medieval times?

What percentage of people could read in medieval times?

I would guess at a literacy rate of 50% in the Byzantine Empire; a rate starting at well below 10% among the Germanic tribes and the people they conquered during the Age of Migrations, with the literacy rate rising to perhaps 25% at the end of the Middle Ages in Western Europe; and a rate remaining very low in the remainder of Eastern Europe.We have no records of what the levels of literacy were, and it is really difficult to try to piece information about literacy together in a way that would say with any certainty what the rate of literacy was. Nevertheless, we can make some observations that point toward educated guesses.The East Roman Empire opened a system for primary education in the year 425, the same year the University of Constantinople was opened. The purpose of this system was to see that the soldiers were literate, but the system is said to have been open to both boys and girls, and it operated at the level of the village. That being the case, it is possible that the majority of people, or numerically more than 50%, were literate, though we cannot know for sure. This system operated for the entire Middle Ages until the Byzantine Empire was destroyed in 1453.We have anecdotal evidence of very low literacy rates in Western Europe, such as a famous letter from a Muslim diplomat at Charlemagne's court in which he describes the Frankish nobles as people experimenting at the art of signing their names. While this is viewed as a simple fact by some people, it should not be taken at face value.We do know that the Visigoths had opened their first schools hundreds of years before the time of Charlemagne, as had the Anglo Saxons. We know that there was at least one school in Wales that was opened by a Roman Emperor that remained open during the entire Middle Ages, only to be closed by Henry VIII. The list of schools remaining from the period before 1066 shows seventeen of them: eleven in Britain, four in Germany, and one each in Denmark and Iceland (there is a link to this list below). A little math tells us that if we guess the "life expectancy" of a school was 100 years at the time it was founded, any given school from this period had no more than one chance in a thousand of surviving, and so there must have been many thousands of them at the time for this number to have survived. My guess is that in the Early Middle Ages, something over 10% of the people in Western Europe were literate, and possibly many more.With the increase in the size and wealth of the middle class associated with the rise of towns and cities, the rate of literacy could only have grown. The introduction of Arabic numerals at the turn of the 13th century created a demand for schools so merchants could learn to use them, and the result was the introduction of what are called abacus schools. These schools educated both boys and girls in the new arithmetic, but also in reading and writing in the vernacular. The result was that some large percentage of middle class people, both men and women, were literate during the High Middle Ages.It is interesting to note that most of the secular literature of the Middle Ages was written in vernacular languages, indicating both the author and the expected reader would have been literate in that language.

Why was Margery Kempe a literary pioneer of medieval times?

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What percentage of people could read in medieval times?

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