ABSTRACT
The ability to read and write was a function of access to schooling, demand for basic learning, and prevailing social and cultural attitudes to literacy. Early modern education favoured some skills over others. Until the eighteenth or nineteenth century, schools taught reading before writing and both before more esoteric training in arithmetic, geometry, languages or accounting. The effect of non-scholastic education after the age at which formal schooling was likely to end is neatly demonstrated by the case of indentured servants who migrated to the British colonies of North America in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. They generally agree that Protestantism and literacy were associated, and that denominations fostered literacy in their different ways, both through the provision of schools and the desire of individuals for direct access to Scripture. If the structures and dynamics of the spectrum of literate skills are well established for most of early modern Europe, those of numeracy are more difficult to ascertain.
