While many of the readline keybindings come from Emacs, I would have said the common shell handling of Ctrl-L comes from that ^L is ASCII form-feed, which is "clear the page; start a new page" (in the same way that ^H is ASCII backspace).

I hadn't considered Bash C-L to be the same as Emacs C-L, since in Emacs I can hit C-L again to "undo" it (kinda).

C-l doesn't clear anything in it's default behavior right? It changes the line-at-poit to be at the center of the screen, bottom, or top, depending on how often yoi press it.

I would never have associated that with screen clear.

E: excuse me, of course C-l does the same scrolling in the terminal, it doesn't clear the history of course.