Cultural mediation is the way language, conventions and trusted interpreters shape what someone can understand or do. Access to the same words need not give two people the same power.
In the essay’s reading of The Betrothed, Renzo and Lucia confront written records they cannot read. A person who controls the document can act on it; the couple must depend on someone else’s account of what it says.
Read: On literacy
Essays
Literacy Is the difference between being able to formulate your own reasoning and simply selecting from pre-packaged options, between understanding a text and merely consuming it.