According to tradition, the Frankish Emperor Charlemagne brought about a revival of culture and the flourishing of education, which had so far been completely neglected. Half the poverty as much as the truth in such a vision of reality (because, of course, it was not that everything was due to one Karol). Consider a much more prosaic question:what was actually taught in schools in those days?
Little is known about Western European schools at the turn of the 8th and 9th centuries. There were probably two main types:lay schools and monastic schools, exclusively for boys wishing to become monks. There were also individual cathedral schools. Of course, in each case the teachers were clergymen, and education itself revolved strictly around religion. Needless to say, only boys were allowed to go to school - girls were not required to bother reading or writing.
Reading without understanding
Each student started their education by reading, specifically reciting ... without any understanding. There was one universal reading:the psalter. Of course in Latin. First, the student was expected to memorize all the psalms in an unknown language and will repeat them thoughtlessly. Only later did he begin to associate sounds and words with individual letters written in the book. The matter was so much more difficult that most schools had one or several copies of the psalter at their disposal. Therefore, there was no question of individual learning.
The medieval school was not a pleasant place…
The beginnings of learning to read were especially difficult, because in the early Middle Ages no ... spaces between words were invented . In almost every book, all the words were linked together, and you had to guess where they ended and began. Anyone who has dealt with medieval manuscripts knows this is quite a chore. Although in the time of Charlemagne - with novices in mind - individual books were written with dots between words, but few had access to them.
Language learning… without textbook
Hardly anyone today remembers that Charlemagne was once a saint. And that he is, among others, the patron saint of students!
Once the first grader had learned to decode the letters and repeat the psalter from memory, it was time to understand what it all meant. Frankish children, of course, did not use Latin on a daily basis:this already dead language was black magic for them, just as it is for us. This state of affairs could only be changed by a good and patient teacher, because ... in fact, there were no textbooks or Latin dictionaries. Several books of this type were used in schools in the state of Charlemagne, but their detail today seems to be a parody. For example in Ars Minor Donatus, there was only one verb along with a conjugation and a small collection of nouns. Also me a dictionary! The authors of more detailed publications, on the other hand, focused on useless definitions, and not on a practical grammar lecture.
Lots of reading… no typing?
The few who managed to master Latin sufficiently to read freely (and every history student knows that it is not an easy art) was served a whole collection of readings - all from a single fairy tale. The preserved inventories show that early medieval schools had almost only religious literature:biblical poems, paraphrases of the Bible, texts on Christian virtues, moral treatises, lives of saints ... Against the background of Psychomachii . History Against the Gentiles or Harmony of the Gospel today's reading canons do not seem so scary anymore.
Let us add that in the 8th-9th centuries there were no books in the native language of the Franks. Even the first Latin textbooks in French are only an invention of the 10th century.
Interestingly, it was reading that put all the emphasis. only some students seem to have attended writing lessons . As Rosamond McKitterick, author of the Carolingian Kingdoms, explains, learning to write in ordinary schools is not sure and we have no information on it.
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Curiosity as a pagan curiosity
The article is based on the book by Rosamond McKitterick entitled "Kingdom of the Carolingians. 751-987 ”, Polish Scientific Publishers PWN, 2011.
Much more interesting reading than religious treatises were (and still are!) Various textbooks on "everything". Medieval people, on the one hand, loved collecting curiosities and seemingly important information, on the other hand, they completely lacked the flair for organizing them.
The result was a veritable pea with cabbage . For example with De Civitates Dei Saint Augustine, you could learn a lot about the essence of the state of God, but also about the fact that ... horses are impregnated by the wind.
On the other hand, the untitled Parisian textbook dated from 813-815 included, among others:
letter formulas, medical recipes, names of people who invented the alphabet, observations on human lifespan, discussions on Abraham's age , the names of some ancient doctors, the number of Roman provinces, an enumeration of known species of snakes, extracts from the Bible, liturgy and canon law, and a calendar, some arithmetic and grammar.
A lot for one book! But is it really useful for anything?
And finally math
In the time of Charlemagne, of course, mathematics as understood today was not taught, but that does not mean that it was not taught at all. First of all, computus, was taught that is, the church calendar and the principles of its construction. Today we can check everything on the Internet or in the schedule, but it was quite a challenge to manually calculate the dates of Christian holidays based on the phases of the moon.
Urgent study in a medieval school… This is evidently the end of the era. In the time of Charlemagne, it would have been unthinkable for every child to keep his own book…
At the same time - as Rosamond McKitterick writes - exist doubts as to whether arithmetic was a separate school subject. The mere knowledge of the calendar was probably enough to make most of the students happy. And those who are more ambitious, instead of mathematics, could reach for the few, but still available thematic textbooks:from agricultural and herbal, to architectural, military or medical ones. In the realities of the time, it probably made more sense than the assimilation of arithmetic.
Summing up:I don't know about you, but I'm glad that I attended schools in the 20th-21st centuries, not in the 8th century ...
Source:
Trivia is the essence of our website. Short materials devoted to interesting anecdotes, surprising details from the past, strange news from the old press. Reading that will take you no more than 3 minutes, based on single sources. This particular material is based on:
- Rosamond McKitterick, Kingdom of the Carolingians. 751-987 , Polish Scientific Publishers PWN, 2011.