On the Level and Role of Literacy in the Secular Self-government of the Irkutsk and Verkhoturye Uyezds in the Last Quarter of the 17th Century

This article presents a quantitative study of the literacy level of the taxable population of Verkhoturye and Irkutsk uyezds in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. This allows for the comparison of literacy levels in these two Siberian uyezds with those of several regions in European Russia, where comparable studies have already been conducted. For this purpose, the analysis focuses on how many of the participants in elections for secular offices recorded in election acts were able to have a hand in their involvement. A total of 88 “elections” of this kind are analysed. These elections are sourced from the collections of two Russian institutions: the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts and the Scientific-Historical Archive of the St Petersburg Institute of History, Russian Academy of Sciences. Since not all residents of the uyezds participated in these elections, possible sampling errors are calculated. The calculations show that in the studied uyezds, the literacy rates among urban inhabitants (posadskie) who participated in the elections ranged from 18.8 % (Irkutsk Uyezd) to 31 % (Verkhoturye Uyezd), while among peasants (krestyane), it was around 8 %. However, since more affluent individuals tended to participate in communal meetings, these figures may be somewhat inflated. The study also reveals that the percentage of literate individuals among elders and headmen was not higher or even lower than the overall percentage in the districts. Within a single family, there was usually no more than one literate member, meaning the ability to write was not commonly passed down through generations among the general population.