regarding roland's literacy
*im not a historian, im making assumptions here which may be wrong. anyway.
i made a post earlier talking about how i suspected that roland might be illiterate bc of this panel
and i completely forgot that we see him holding reports in memoire 22 where he's researching the history of vampires and humans, which @ghostly-phantom and @sifya kindly reminded me of in this ask + replies. thank u again!
he's proving the haters wrong LOL. im sorry roland
what i do continue to believe though is that roland used to be illiterate or at least only had very basic education as a child. he is from from a poverty stricken background, and compulsory education was only introduced in 1882 in france, which would make him 19 at the time – way too old for it to apply to him. we don't know much about roland's backstory yet but, to me, the idea that he just was too poor to be able to attend school seems very plausible. even if there were church funded elementary schools for poor children, a lot of children couldn't afford to attend regularly, if at all, because they had to help their parents with farm work etc.
becoming a chasseur and ultimately a paladin meant far better education, since the church has been one of the few places one could acquire literacy and knowledge throughout history. imo that's where he learned to read and write to the level we see in memoire 22.
the ask also mentions that multilingualism – or lack thereof – might be the core issue in the panel with astolfo, which is a really good point. iirc the church's written lingua franca still is latin in the 19th century, the populace is speaking french many langauges, so naturally as a member of the clergy you'd know both to some extent. we all know astolfo is a noble, so he's obviously had sophisticated education and it's to be assumed that he' can read and write's fluent in both french and latin. astolfo is an italian name, which could imply that he is from italian descent and thus also speaks italian. the books roland "can't read" might just be in italian – a language he doesn't speak. or, since the church uses latin in written communication he'd be constantly reading and writing in latin rather than french, so it could also be that the books are in french, but he's just not very familiar with french writing at that point in time, and that he vastly improves by the time he's a paladin.
if anyone wants to add their thoughts, feel free!
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