Medieval combat manuals often seem targeted towards a social elite. Fiore dei Liberi, for example, warns readers in his introduction to keep his techniques away from the peasants - declaring that they should be the domain of nobles alone.
Renaissance self-defence manuals, on the other hand, such as those written by Passchen and Petter, appear to be targeted towards a much wider audience. Their introductions talk about regular people protecting themselves from criminals etc.
This kind of disparity is pretty logical. Printing technology meant that works aimed at the masses were more viable in the Renaissance than they had been a couple of centuries previously.
However, how do literacy rates come into play? It's not a subject I've ever really looked into myself, but would the average person in late 17th century Holland have been able to read these manuals?
Printing makes the manuals available to a wider audience, which is not the same as a wide audience. The fact is that the peasants (about 80% of the population in most regions of Europe) were pretty much universally illiterate. Townspeople fared better, but again there was a large disparity between socio-economic groups in towns as well. Regionally, there were also huge differences. For example, in northern Italian cities in the middle ages, the average shopkeeper could read both the local Italian dialect and Latin; comparable levels of literacy won't reach north of the Alps until much later. Bottom line: even in the seventeenth century, only a minority of people in Europe could read, most of those who could were urban and reasonably well off and thus part of an expanding elite. The masses were still left out in the cold.
I contacted a professor at my university - someone from the history rather than the classics & ancient history department - and he gave me some book recommendations to check out.
From what I read, it seems that during this period (late 17th century) literacy rates and rates of book buying in the Netherlands were relatively high.
The Netherlands (more broadly, the Low Countries) were one of the only areas in Europe that were heavily urbanized (more than 50% urban) in the Middle Ages and Renaissance; they became the economic powerhouse of Europe in the seventeenth century, in terms of manufacturing, trade, and finance, as well as introducing a number of important innovations in agriculture. On top of that, the Brethren of the Common Life, a lay religious confraternity which provided most of the primary education in late medieval Europe, was started in Deventer. Thus I would expect this area to have an unusually high literacy level.
Depends what you mean by the Renaissance, of course. During what most people would describe as the Middle Ages there was a lot more trade going on and a burgeoning urban manufacturing and commercial class as well. Banking is a 13th century invention, spurred on by the amount of trade going on and the need to finance it. I'm not convinced the economic explanation of the Renaissance really works even though a lot of my doctoral work was social and economic history of the period.