A Cultural History of Education in the Medieval Age by Jo Ann Moran Cruz;

Author:Jo Ann Moran Cruz;
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

FIGURE 5.6 ST. Cassian illustration in Prudentius, Peristephanon. Burgerbibliothek Cod. 264, fol. 121. Bern. Students murdering their schoolmaster.

CONCLUSION

Tracing the experiences of learners in medieval Europe entails looking far and wide: in any given time and place, even the relatively well-defined process of learning to read could look very different for, say, an adult craftsperson, a monastic oblate, and a noble girl. When we look more broadly at the experiences of learners in medieval Europe across time and place, the categories of learner and the context of the learning experience are even more multifaceted. Even the relatively tidy-seeming educational structures that appear in programmatic sources (monastic schools, cathedral schools, song schools, reading schools, grammar schools, etc.) had more complicated boundaries in reality.

Given the variety of institutional and extra-institutional contexts in which learning might occur, and the many kinds of learner who encountered them, it is perhaps surprising to find stable trends in learning materials (especially at the earliest levels) across time and place. The needs of second-language learners of Latin remained relatively consistent, so the materials they used continued to have relevance; a sixth-century student and a fifteenth-century student could have commiserated about their study of Donatus and compared notes on beast fables. Although theories about the learner and the process of knowledge acquisition were not a unified tradition in medieval Europe, strands of thought—for instance about a learner’s aptitude and the role of bodily discipline—remained in circulation for many centuries, and in many regions. Although the majority of medieval writers do not discuss in detail how they acquired their learning, and the majority of medieval learners left us nothing at all, the learning we can reconstruct from the sources is thoughtful, complex, and surprisingly coherent over time.

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