[marginalia_nu]

This is a great tragedy. A lot of these gems of human thought and art have been the privilege of a few wealthy people to read. If you weren't a monk or a noble, you couldn't get close to them.

Now anyone can, yet almost nobody does.

[mensetmanusman]

This is kind of a meme because there simply wasn’t the technology available to put down information at scale, so a community had to set aside a few individuals (in the case of monks) to spend their lives copying text by hand for decades. If everyone did this, then everyone would die of starvation.

Once the books were completed, they were chained to the community center so that everyone had access and no one could take it for themselves.

[marginalia_nu]

Even if you had physical access to the priceless books made out of a hundred calf skins and carefully copied by hand, you needed to be able to not only read, but understand Latin.

[GekkePrutser]

There was definitely limited access to knowledge too. The Bible for example was a forbidden book for centuries in the Catholic church. Only accessible to the ordained, lest the peasants would ask difficult questions.

Of course most common folk were illiterate back then anyway.

[mensetmanusman]

Not quite, these texts were indeed stored in the physical churches and mostly written in the language of the Roman Empire because there weren’t enough scholars and scribes to translate to the thousands of new local languages (since the technology didn’t exist to make it practical).

It’s interesting to consider what it even means to say that the church forbid these hand written Latin texts from getting in the possession of those who couldn’t read. This is why most of the experienced Bible since about 1800 BC was experienced through vocal tradition.