Dr. Thomas Madden

You're not writing anything down.

So the literacy was primarily constrained to the clergy, right?

at least outside of Italy where they're doing business.

But in rest of Europe, if you needed something read, you'd go to your parish priest and he would read it.

Even if you gave a peasant and you taught him how to read the letters, the Bible, he still wouldn't be able to read it because it's in Latin.

There's only one written language during the Middle Ages until about the late 13th, early 14th century, and that's Latin.

It's the only language for which there are rules for writing it down.

And so if you don't know Latin, it's not going to help you to open the book because you're not going to know what it says.

So they weren't trying to keep the Bible from anyone.

It's just that

The Bibles are rare and expensive, and the people don't have the education to be able to read them.

If you notice, the big thing of Protestants saying, you know, the Bible is everything, something that was new, all comes well after the printing press, when books are cheap.

Yeah, so you need that technological innovation to be able to allow for something like that.

Right, otherwise you'd never see a scriptura.

As far as the pagan works, the only reason that for most pagan work, the only reason that any of them survive is because monks somewhere copied them.

In the ancient world, they wrote on papyrus.

In the best of climates, the papyrus, in Europe at least, will last about three centuries before it just is brittle and dissipates.

The vast majority of things that were written in the ancient world turned into dust.

At some point, starting at about the eighth and ninth centuries, when you had these brittle scrolls, someone needed to take them and copy them down on parchment.

Now parchment, even though it's animal skin, it lasts forever.