The role of the wax tablet in medieval literacy: a reconstruction in light of a recent find from York

Abstract

MOST scholars are aware of the major role played by writing tablets as a vehicle for informal composition, learning exercises, note-taking, correspondence, accounting and document-production during Antiquity. Fewer, perhaps, are familiar with the extension and modification of their use throughout the Middle Ages (and indeed even until the nineteenth century when the fisherfolk of Dieppe still recorded their catches upon them) and with the nature of the evidence for their protracted existence and use.