From the fifth to the sixteenth centuries, what we know today as the vernacular languages developed across Europe. The present volume focuses from a determinedly comparative perspective on the process of the integration of the linguae vernaculae vel barbaricae into the domain of literacy and learning. Exemplary case studies explore the issue of the beginnings of vernacular literacy at the intersection of historical sciences, philology, linguistics, media history, and literary sciences to analyse discernable patterns and norms. In this way, the common and traditional national philological narratives of the respective Origin Stories of written tradition are questioned and discussed.