This volume is the first large-scale collection of articles on the spread of literacy in early modern Germany. By drawing additionally on the evaluation of qualitative sources, these studies extend the existing statistic surveys on the ability to sign one's name around 1800 into research on the ability to write in a more general sense. With their analysis of the actual forms of the acquisition and use of writing in everyday life, they encompass both the private and the social dimensions of writing. As investigations into writing as social practice they point up the close interplay between the evolution of written culture and processes central to the history of the early modern age.