The Birth and Development of Pragmatic Literacy in Moldavia and Wallachia (14th to 16th centuries), by Mariana Goina, Ph.D. (November, 17th, 2011)

Summary:

In this study I have tryed to trace the spread of practical literacy in Moldavia and Wallachia

from the end of the fourteenth until the end of the sixteenth century. After the Roman withdrawal

from Dacia there is no evidence for written culture on the territories of the medieval Romanian

Principalities up to the mid-fourteenth century. Indirect evidence suggests an extremely limited use

of writing prior to the establishment of the states. The use of writing was manifest mainly after the

foundation of a central political authority, both in Moldavia and in Wallachia. The surviving data

that indicate the use of documents for practical purposes are mainly restricted to records concerning

land ownership and communications of various kinds.

As land titles constitute by far the largest part of the surviving documents, I have

concentrated first and foremost on the dynamics of the growth of literacy as reflected in the

increasing number of extant land charters. I could see that the dynamics of growth in the number of

documents and their dissemination among various social strata were, especially in Wallachia,

strongly correlated with the changes in land ownership and conflict situations deriving from

traditional land inheritance patterns and the demands of new land owners. In Moldavia the number

of documents seems characterized by a rather monotonous growth, without major inflection points.

While there is a sound expectancy that fewer documents survive from earlier ages, I claim

that the increase in extant documents reflects an actual growth in writing practice that characterizes

the research period. I stress that the formulary of the early documents reflects unsettled writing

practices, while the low value attached to written land titles up to the middle of the sixteenth

century points to a scarce use of written records.

While in Moldova written land titles were granted, received and re-confirmed as a matter of

ordinary business, in Wallachia they seem to have been asked for in extraordinary cases only. These

(specific) cases are recurrent in the documents and have permitted me to identify the factors that

stimulated Wallachian nobility to use written records instead of the customary oral rituals carried

out to perform the same task:

The first increase in the number of Wallachian charters is related to the desire to

avoid defectus seminis through the practices of praefectio (turning a daughter into a

son for the purpose of the law) and fraternal adoption (turning a stranger into a

brother). An additional element here is constituted by attempts to circumvent

customary land succession.

The sixteenth-century process of accumulating land to form great estates owned by

high-ranking noblemen triggered the appeal of writing to small land owners as they

strove to preserve their landed properties against encroachment.

Thus, the analysis of land titles reflects the differences between the written cultures in the

two principalities. While Wallachia entered the scene roughly as a pre-literate society, with a strong

emphasis on customary (oral) legal practices, in Moldavia writing seems to have had a more secure

footing from the onset. The process of transition from collective to individual forms of land

ownership in both cases is one of the reasons for the multiplication of land titles. The specificities of

Wallachia’s social structure brought about major social changes (which are less reflected in

Moldavian documents), namely the formation (during the sixteenth century) of large landed estates

at the expense of small land holders, a social conflict that stimulated a demand for written records.