A Brill Calendar: June 9

Few learned inhabitants of the Low Countries viewed illiteracy among the populace in the 14th century as a sad deficiency.

It would take another five centuries of European civilization until reading & writing for everyone became an objective for governments. Peasants and country-dwellers without a monastery or abbey near-by could then hardly lay eyes on any text, let alone on books. In cities like Delft, Gouda or Leyden this lack was less desperate. Many monks and nuns had mastered the arts of reading and writing in one of these cities. Within most monasteries, books were copied with assiduous devotion, letter by letter, even if the copyist hardly understood their content; and the clerical labour generated income. Outside of them, learned men capable to regulate state-affairs, formulate charters and draft contracts for individuals, guilds and municipalities carried a great deal of clout.

The case of Filips van Leyden (ca. 1325 – June 9 1382, both at Leyden) typifies the state of learning in Holland, where literacy played already a cultural role before the advent of typography a century later. Filips, ‘man behind the throne’ of Holland’s Count, Willem V (ca. 1329 – 1389), has been characterized as Holland’s ‘First Regent’; he studied Law in his youth – a profitable branch of scholarly learning - at the Orléans University, and was an avid book collector, (a precious and expensive hobby). After a long and full life in high offices, Filips spent the his last decade in ‘otio cum dignitate’, having made his Testament & Will in 1372, spelling out that his most cherished possession, his library – ‘Templum Salomonis’ – should remain publicly accessible by all & sundry, “since many have given up study because of scarcity of books, to the great detriment of both Church and State, needing learned men badly.” It is seldom – some two centuries before the ‘Dies Natalis’ of Holland’s first University – that a cultural predicament was diagnosed as precisely, so early.