One thing we haven’t mentioned is that your typical peasant had virtually no education or even opportunity for education. If you were lucky your village might have had a church school that could have taught you how to read a few basic pieces of scripture, and more importantly, some simple arithmetic so you could buy and sell seeds and breeding stock. If you weren’t so lucky you had to learn that from your family, or perhaps be apprenticed to someone in the village.
It’s hard to concentrate on developing your intellectual capacities when you’re illiterate.
Well, I don’t think that’s necessarily true at all. I mean, there’s more to know than book stuff. A smart person with a “cataloger” bent to them could be an excellent tracker, for example, or know a ton about local herbs, or weather patterns, or as somebody upthread mentioned he might be known for his animal breeding or knowledge of local birds.
Humility was considered to be a good thing, at least in theory. You could always cast your quietness as humility.
Since most people were illiterate, there were jobs for scribes and clerks. There were also law courts. Not all lawyers are outgoing. Some concentrate on legal documents. And the courts need scribes and clerks.
This isn’t true. Petrarch (mid-14th century) was the one to first create this rather pernicious idea of the “dark ages,” which he saw as the fall of Rome up to his own day. He called it dark not because it was unknown but because it was a fall from the glories of the classical world. He didn’t much care about the loss of technology - he tended, like most humanists, to feud with the scholastics and academics who focused on “scientific” (I use that word in the loosest possible sense) understanding of the material world - but instead he was lamenting the loss of classical intellectualism and artistic brilliance.
This was really a revolutionary metaphor at the time, since the ancient world had very, very consistently been referred to as a “dark” age because it was before the appearance of Christ, who was associated with light.
The classic cite on this topic: Petrarch's Conception of the 'Dark Ages' on JSTOR
Today, however, academic historians strongly avoid the term “Dark Ages.” Periodization in general is quite unfashionable since it so rarely works to satisfaction, and the “Dark Ages” is in many ways an inaccurate portrayal of the period which paints the centuries of time as doldrums of war, poverty, and anti-intellectualism. Obviously, nothing is that simple.
One didn’t necessarily have to wait for the renaissance. One of the attractions of town and city life was that a man desperate for opportunity could get away from the farm and try his hand at something else. This was not a done deal, however. Shopkeepers’ sons usually ended up running the shop. A coopers boy could expect to be a cooper himself. But the fact remains is that the city at least offered the chance to do something other than staring at a mules ass all day.
This discussion reminds me of a section of Mark Twain’s “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.” The title character is being told about the ranks of people in heaven, and it’s mentioned that Shakespeare ranks below a common tailor, from Tennessee, named Billings.
And later in that chapter:
Yes, the story is satire, but I think it makes a very real point, here: You have to have the *opportunity * to use your natural talents or they just go to waste. A man with natural engineering ability who was born a peasant isn’t likely to get the chance to design cathedrals. You may have a gift for working with numbers, but if you get apprenticed to a butcher by your father you aren’t going to be hired by the local lord to handle his household accounts.
True, but nerds also make up a very small fraction of the population. We just don’t realize it now, because nowadays, we have the technology (favored by nerds in the first place) to enable nerds from all over the world to congregate and socialize with other nerds.
And it should be emphasized that nerds can find ways to contribute their talents even in seemingly prosaic jobs. Suppose, for instance, that the community is all pitching in labor to build a new barn. You can build the barn half-way, discover that you don’t have enough lumber, and mill more in the middle of the job, or you can calculate from the start just how much lumber you’re going to need, and get it all ready in advance. And guess who’s going to be doing that calculation?
Anyway, even the masonry guilds didn’t draw up plans for cathedrals. They might have been doing some back of the envelope calculations, but my understanding is that they essentially built them as they went along. You can certainly see how many of them aren’t through-composed - the different towers at Chartres were built in different styles that matched the fashions as they were completed.
So do you think that the guys who built Stonehenge bragged about how many calculations per year it could perform? Would later additions be referred to as upgrades? “Dude, check it out! I put in a 5-trilithon bluestone processor! Some seriously megalithic calculating power.”
What, exactly, would ancient or medival nerds or geeks talk about?
I’m aware that the term ‘Dark Ages’ is inaccurate, which is why I only used it without capitals in a sensationalistic headline to capture attention.
A society with stratified social opportunities would have made social skills less important in some ways because you’d follow the path lad out for you anyways.
I would have died at birth or ended up as a low-dog-on-the-totem-pole peasant or something. But as Argent Towers and slaphead said, you don’t need social skills to chase chickens or plant potatoes or whatever smaller tasks children would do on a farm.
Life in small rural villages was indeed close-knit. According to the historians Joseph and Frances Gies, a average village had 50 families. So just about everything you did was public knowledge. For most folks, leaving the village was rare. So it may have been simply impossible to not interact with the rest of the community. They’d make sure you attended all the public gatherings.
I like to think my time in an African village gives me a little insight into how things might have worked in the past.
In my experience, the full range of personality traits are there. Of course there are shy, awkward, and odd people in a village setting. And village life isn’t all fields…there are marriages, festivals, childhood, religion, affairs, business, crime, and always lots and lots of gossip. Yeah, there isn’t a ton of leisure time. But if anything people are more concerned about other people’s business, because there isn’t too much else to do.
The people I knew who were seemed “geeky” would find things to focus on. This could be religion, it could be nature (now and then someone would say something like “sometimes I like to go off in the bush for a few weeks and identify plants”), it could be some other subject like history or genealogy. Information was harder to come by, but they could obsess over details the same.
Often things were a bit easier for them because marriages were arranged and personality wasn’t as big of a part of it. And maybe it was just Cameroon, but I found there was a lot more tolerance for general “oddness.” Everyone knew each other from childhood and so I think everyone just got used to each other’s quirks.
That’s true of villages and small towns everywhere. Some people are just strange, and they’re part of the community too, because what are you going to do about them?
I am sure he sucks it up and falls in line with everyone else.
It’s not like geeks are some kind of separate species of humanity or they’re genetically pre-determined to be dorks or nerds. A soft, fat boy will quickly become hard and lean if he’s put to the test.
I’m no expert, but it strikes me that even today, farmers are not particularly known for being outgoing, talkative, gladhanding social butterfly types. So if by ‘geek’ we mean socially withdrawn, then I’m not sure that’s always a disadvantage for a farmer.
