We are who we are, and we are successful at who we are because we are a reading society. Of course, many if not most societies of the last thousand years developed writing and reading to some extent. Nevertheless, those skills were almost universally denied to all but elite priesthoods and scribe guilds. Only in western Europe (and only recently) did reading disseminate to the masses. And that begs today’s question: how and why did it come about in Europe?

Well, we certainly can’t credit any kind of religious tolerance for the spread of ideas in Europe. Just the opposite, really. Conversely, it is possible that nascent democratic tendencies, particularly in Britain and Germany at the time, may have helped spread some reading and writing. But no matter how liberal the society, the hoi polloi could not and would not read until they had the time and ability to read—and something to read.

As far as something to read goes, everyone points to Johannes Guttenberg. And his part certainly was important. But alas, a printing press is not all that useful without paper, and in 1440 there was darned little of it to be had. There was some, of course. The Chinese made beautiful paper from bamboo, and their process was imported to the Middle East and by the 11th century to the Arabic regions of Spain. But by and large, most books in Europe were still painted onto parchment—a rather grossly scraped and stretched animal skin. Parchment was difficult to work and did not come cheap.

And then, suddenly, there was underwear! No, really: underwear, and… suddenly. Of course, some people had worn undergarments for ages—that is, for ages there were certain people who wore undergarments. According to Wikipedia, the first evidence of underwear is over 7,000 years old. Nevertheless, the underwear habit was not common among… common folks.  I’m not sure what peasants did before, but only with the start of the renaissance did a good number of folks determine that linen undergarments were the bee's knees.

The timing of the underwear fad was not random—the start of the renaissance, at about 1400, was also shortly after the peak of the Black Death and various famines, which together cut Europe’s population roughly in half. As a consequence of all that dying, and by simple arithmetic, everyone still alive became twice as wealthy. People inherited their dead relatives’ land, pigs, and personal belongings. The bounty no doubt included poor Uncle Gunther’s undies. There were loads of linens left to the living, and the underwear craze took off.

So why does underwear matter? Well, you go commando in lederhosen on a hot August day, or in coarse woolens in January, and you wouldn’t be asking. But, of course, that isn’t the point at all. It’s when linen (and lesser-used cotton) undergarments finally wore out, when they could no longer be patched or darned, that they became interesting to history. Those personal garbs were eventually tossed out to become, literally, “garbage.” The garbage was then gathered by rag pickers, who bundled and sold the rags to the budding paper mills just making their way northward from Spain. The mills pounded the stinky dinkies into pulp to make Europe’s first widely-available linen "bond." Thus, paper came into its own just around the middle 1400s, independent of but coeval with Mr. Gutenberg's press. Gutenberg printed a total of 180 bibles by 1455. Thirty-five were done on calfskin vellum, but one hundred forty-five were printed on worn-out skivvies. 

And that's great if your eyes were good enough to read that fine print. So let's drink to old Johannes. In the 1400’s you could choose between beer, whiskey, and wine with which to toast him. It wasn’t until the mid-1500s that champagne made its rather accidental entrance (“Brothers come quickly, I am drinking stars!”) From a small monasterial beginning, champagne exploded onto the scene—often quite literally, as it was still being produced in wooden barrels and crockery. The high internal pressures during secondary fermentation generally resulted in bungs popping from barrels and jugs shattering on shelves, making champagne the “devil’s wine.”

Nevertheless, the devil’s wine was fun to drink and its popularity grew. And fortunately for Europe’s intellectual development, English glass-making technology grew to support it. The invention of the coal-fired blast furnace in the 1600s allowed for thicker glass to be made that was more difficult to break. And as Europe’s coal fields developed, those furnaces could produce large quantities of glass, thus ushering in, finally, the era of glass bottles capable of safely fermenting and transporting champagne.

What has this to do with the dissemination of knowledge? Well, glass made in large quantity is the key here. Glass had been around for a thousand years; Roman glass trinkets are well known in archaeology. But those items were small and dear. With a high-volume glass industry cranking along, people were able, then, to find new uses for the transparent stuff.

And here we have arrived at last: one of those new uses was for eyeglasses. That’s right! Not until that time, and nowhere else in the world, eyeglasses were not just invented, but made generally available to the plague-diminished populations of Europe. With eyeglasses, tinkers were no longer redundant as their eyes grew old, but could go on tinkering for another twenty years. Seamstresses seamed and engineers engineered well past middle age. Lawyers and accountants could work until they died at their desks. The economy of Europe not only recovered but exploded. And now, bespectacled and nouveau-riche readers read. And read and read. Books grew in demand, and not just bibles but scientific treatises, philosophical discourses, and fiction—much like my fiction, for instance.

Europe went on to conquer the world not just with surplus manufactures, but with ideas. And it didn’t take guns, germs, or steel to do it. Just a black death, a taste for champagne, and a lot of worn-out undies.   

(See for further reference:

• Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, 1999, by Jared M. Diamond;
• A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, 1978, by Barbara Tuchman; and/or
• https://www.medievalists.net/2018/06/underwear-in-the-middle-ages.