Tea at Trianon: Education in the Middle Ages

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, June 9, 2023

Education in the Middle Ages

From Medievalists:

If parents wished for their children to have schooling in the Middle Ages (and, naturally, if they had money) there were a few options. Many monasteries offered to educate boys, since learning was almost always meant to set children on the path towards a life in the religious community. Or, if parents preferred a more urban environment, they could send their children to cathedral schools – once again, run by the church.

In some places, municipal schools existed, but their curricula would also run along religious lines (by our standards). Boys who were destined to become knights would be fostered in other knights’ homes to learn their martial skills, and noble girls could either receive instruction from nuns (at a cloister), or from other women or tutors in the home, although this could be a little dangerous to a young lady’s virtue, as Heloise’s parents discovered.

At school, students were instructed in Latin, since it was the language of intellectual thought, with vernacular (that is, mother-tongue) schools appearing as the Middle Ages drew to a close. The curriculum consisted of a “liberal arts” education, which was divided into the trivium and the quadrivium, according to classical tradition. The trivium consisted of grammar (Latin, that is), rhetoric, and logic. The quadrivium consisted of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music.

Students did take notes during their lessons, but would most often use wax tablets, since vellum was very expensive (being made of animal hide), and paper was not prevalent until the late Middle Ages. As a result of the lack of note-taking paper, students were forced to memorize great quantities of information, something that would have come more easily to them than it would to us, as they were not trained to write things down instead of remembering (as we are now). Exams were done orally, both for this reason and as an exercise in rhetoric. (Read more.)