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I'm curious how one is supposed to believe that Sola Scriptura ever worked in a society where there was not widespread literacy and where handcopied books were too expensive to be owned by the non-wealthy.

Literacy was much more prevalent in Europe before the Roman Church, which suppressed literacy for the commoner, came into power.

In the Eastern Orthodox areas where literacy was encouraged, many more common people were able to read the Bible and texts were numerous. Bibles were so common in that area that the EO Church, which believed the book of Revelations was written expressly for the church, excluded it from the Bible so that people would not have access to it.

Despite claims of literacy in the masses, a claim that still remains dubious (despite the article you referenced later in the thread), Claud's original point holds true.

Before the printing press (and even after it's invention for a few decades) it was prohibitively expensive for the commoner to own massive amounts of written words (be it on parchment, animal skins, etc) not because of any literacy rate, but because it was simply a time consuming (and therefore expensive) task to manually write any documents, much less documents as large as Scripture eventually came to be.

Thus, for nearly 1500 years the commoner (whether he could read or not was irrelevant) couldn't own a Bible of their own. It was simply, economically impossible. Thus, as Claud originally stated,

"handcopied books were too expensive to be owned by the non-wealthy.

"Most people back then knew the Scriptural text via the liturgy, not through having copies at home."

still remains a valid point.

Perhaps (and I'm still not willing to concede this point but it's possible) people in Jesus' time and shortly after were more literate than we believe, but literacy doesn't mean a hill of beans (as far as sola Scriptura goes) if you don't have a copy of Scripture for yourself to examine.