> Also, wouldn't most of the volumes in the libraries have been written in Latin and thus unreadable outside of the Church. Well I'm not sure that's going to b

> Also, wouldn't most of the volumes in the libraries have been written in Latin and thus unreadable outside of the Church. Well I'm not sure that's going to be an issue if we're talking about the accessibility of the text to an illiterate person. An illiterate person can't read. So we need to consider the situation only of literate people. Interestingly, in medieval Roman countries, texts intended for public reading were written in Latin, but the lector would read it in somewhat formal popular language. This is not hugely different from the situation available in English speaking countries prior to the 1980s, when most bibles were written in a grammatically, lexically and phonetically very foreign language. Even today, our texts are still phonetically very foreign. And for general texts it was common - Greek, Arabic, Chinese - all written very differently than spoken a century ago. A literate French-speaker in the medieval period would not have reacted to a Latin text as a foreign language. They would just have read the text with equivalent contemporary pronunciations. A recently produced text would in many cases use more customary language too, so they wouldn't need to remember the dated bookish words. (And actually, in medieval England, there were scientific/theological texts produced in English. You surely couldn't read and understand them today because the language has changed too much, and they went out of fashion so they weren't maintained. But they existed.)