Literacy and age in preindustrial England: Quantitative evidence and implications

Abstract

The extent of literacy in the past has been the subject of a considerable number of quantitative historical investigations during recent decades. In the case of preindustrial England, the analysis of such studies has relied on bivariate statistical procedures. While a number of these studies have made important contributions, their reliance on a single method of statistical analysis raises a question common in quantitative research, namely, to what extent are empirical results and interpretations specific to the estimating procedures used to produce them? This paper will present an analysis of some correlates of the literacy of some English men and women of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in an explicitly multivariate framework. Two different multivariate regression techniques will be employed in order to gain an indication of the robustness of the results to alternative specifications.