ABSTRACT
Medieval learning was primarily associated with an elite class of men, the clergy. If mothers were responsible for initiating reading, then they would have laid the foundations within the home and not in clerical schools of an ever-widening literacy inclusive of lay men and women as well as clerics. A banal answer to this question is that some mothers did teach their children their letters, although many could not because they were too poor or too ignorant. Christianity might, then, be considered almost as a matrilineal religion, which makes the available evidence for female literacy and cultural transmission through books and their ownership even more significant. Descriptions of King Alfred and St Louis learning to read at the direction of their mothers are memorable because they are exceptional. This illustrates how reading was initiated by getting the learner to point to each letter or syllable in the Latin text and pronounce it correctly.
