ABSTRACT
The variety of different writing systems in use across Central Europe remained largely unchanged between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The main tendency was increasing literacy, which became virtually full among (especially the male part of) the ruling elites, namely, nobility, and burghers in the Christian polities, and the civil servants (“professional Ottomans”) and the top echelons of the millets’ administrations in the Ottoman Empire. In addition, Protestantism ensured increasing literacy also among commoners, while the religiously motivated literacy among Jews (especially men) created a path for them into non-Jewish secular literacies in other languages than Hebrew, Yiddish, or Spanyol, namely, in “gentile” Einzelsprachen. The production volume of printed books grew exponentially, fueled by the propaganda needs of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. What is more, printing began spreading to Muscovy and the Ottoman Empire, despite Orthodox clergy and Muslim ulema’s (clergy and scholars) continuing shared distrust of the mechanical reproduction of texts. The tradition of hand-written manuscripts persisted (particularly in the case of “holy” texts), especially in the Balkans through the nineteenth century, and among the Tatars on the territory of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania even until the twentieth century. In both cases, some Muslims continued this tradition through the twentieth century, though in the Balkans this practice was rather limited to Bosnia.
