in the scope, limit, and variety of human experience that owed much to the increasing maturation of printing technology and distribution.
The literacy preserved by medieval and early Renaissance religious communities was on the whole Latin literacy, and power and literacy were united in the Church only so long as Europe was uniformly Christian. The literacy of secular ruling classes inevitably meant that Latin texts would be first translated into and then overtaken by the vernacular. Reading of canonical texts led to translation, then to responses, then to the creation of original texts--all in the vernacular. Vernacular literacy that was located in a secular ruling class helped marginalize religious influence and entrench aristocratic privilege vis-a-vis the lower classes. The unique ability of print to facilitate the increase of structure and system happened to reach a critical mass of sophistication during the Enlightenment.
To be sure, power and knowledge remained highly concentrated. But the acknowledgment or understanding of literacy as a social value were during the Enlightenment internalized by more than the happy few accustomed to comfort and privilege. In that sense, the Enlightenment was a period of demarcation between the old cultural world and the new, just as it was a period of demarcation between the old geographical world and the new. It is not too much to say that at the beginning of the Enlightenment the entrenched European aristocracies dominated the thought, character, and activity of culture and indeed were the very culture of Europe--the great mass of men being little more than an instrumentality of aristocratic privilege. By the end of the Enlightenment, the residue of aristocratic values undoubtedly informed the thought, character, and activity of the culture. However, the privileges of arist
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