Here’s a question for all of you that know a lot or a little about medieval life.
I just got a brand spanking new time machine. My dream is to travel back to Medieval England and enroll in Cambridge or Oxford and get an old-fashioned degree while having a cultural blast drinking ale at ye olde college pubs and wearing the fancy robes. I figure I already speak the language (albeit with an odd accent), and I’ll be bringing back plenty of reference material including several online encyclopedias, the entirety of Project Gutenberg, as well as a generator that runs on lamp oil.
Assuming that I can, uhh, “get in” to Oxford or Cambridge without a well-heeled sponsor, how well would I do assuming that I have the average knowledge of a modern-day American?
On the one hand, from what I have read, Latin and Greek were considered important subjects and modern education does not emphasize them and that they were a major subject in the Prep Schools of those days, so I may be a little behind in ancient languages and need to play catch up (though I may be able to afford this as I might be ahead on other subjects). On the other hand, I figure that with complete illiteracy rampant in those days, I have a major leg up against the average person on the street.
What do you think? How much has education changed in the past few hundred years? Would an average American be on a hopeless course to flunking out because the material and expectations are hopelessly foreign, would they be so far superior that school would seem a joke, or would it be roughly as hard as a degree nowadays but with different emphases? What would be the biggest challenge a modern time-traveling student would encounter? Would it be emphasis on academic subjects no longer emphasized? Would it be overall greater level of rigor in the classes but with mostly familiar subject matter? Would the problem be that even though the classes would be easy, fitting in socially would be such a big problem that one would be unlikely to survive practically?
How about non-English speaking schools? Would a modern Francophone from Montreal or Paris do decently well at a medieval French school?
I think your problem would not be keeping up with learning the ideas that are new to you and everybody else. Your problem would be everything you know that ain’t yet so.
If you studied medicine, for instance, could you in good conscience stand there and leech a fever patient? Especially if he/she was already dehydrated and anemic?
Or if you studied alchemy, how would you manage to walk up to the steaming cauldron if you knew it was spewing mercuric gases?
I don’t know what other courses might have been available, but there were certainly poisonous ideas being taught as well. Think what a medaeval divinity student would be expected to embrace! Why, you’d end up on the rack! (Unless you are currently a member of a Quiverful-type fundamentalist sect, in which case you may have the turn of mind necessary to get by.)
I think that before you specialize, it would be easier than the current courses. Out of grammar, logic, rhetoric, music, astronomy, arithmetic, and geometry, the only one I can think of that might be changed for the harder in medieval times is music, because their system of music could be so different and all musical classification is pretty arbitrary when you get down to it. Sort of like learning a new language.
Interesting point. College today includes a fair amount of memorizing and regurgitating “facts” that the academic establishment have determined to be true, but there is also an emphasis on independent thinking where it doesn’t matter nearly as much whether or not you remember how many soldiers died at the Battle of Hastings or what the names of the 4 highest ranking Norman officers were as long as you can discuss what might have happened if the battle had gone the other way. Would this have been true in medieval times, or was it just memorizing a list of facts after facts after facts to memorize where a copy of Wikipedia and a modern high school (or even college) education would leave you woefully unprepared? E.g. “Test: 1) List the number of cathedrals in England and identify the current and previous bishop of each one by Christian name, surname, birthplace, and alma mater. 2) How many children does the Earl of Northumberland have and what are their current noble titles, if any? 3) List each type of tree known to modern man and draw a sketch of its leaf.” If you forget and list American trees that were unknown, the professor decides you are a nutcase and flunks you.
My guess is that you’d flunk out faster than Snooki from an MIT graduate astrophysics class. From the standpoint of someone in medieval times, you know none of the prerequisites. Obviously you don’t know Latin or Greek, you don’t know rhetoric, you don’t know any of the classic authors (assuming average American knowledge). You might barely have * heard* of Galen. Any of the mathematics terms would be unfamiliar to you. Even your handwriting would probably be unreadable (once you’ve mastered the quill). Your manners would probably be alternately boorish and far too dainty. And your science and anatomy professors would be teaching material that you know is complete crap, so there’s that as well.
But the average person on the street wouldn’t have been able to get a degree at Oxford or Cambridge in those days. That’s not the standard you’re going to be judged against.
Latin wasn’t just “considered an important subject,” it was the official language of a medieval university. If you don’t already know it, you’re screwed. If you know a little, you might be able to pick it up by sheer immersion, but be prepared not to understand a word of the lectures or of your fellow students’ conversation until you do.
On the other hand, practically nobody in a medieval western European university would have known Greek. Knowledge of Arabic was probably more useful and more common, but still rare. Knowledge of Greek did not become common amongst western academics until well into the renaissance, and the texts of Greek thinkers (actually almost entirely of Aristotle) that were studied were Latin translations, often Latin translations of Arabic translations, and the Arabic versions themselves might quite often have been translations from Syriac translations that themselves were translated either from the original Greek or from earlier Latin translations of it. All this, of course, gave medieval scholars plenty to get their teeth into in figuring out what Aristotle had actually originally been trying to say! However, this would not have been an issue for undergraduates, just their teachers.
Once you had the Latin down (and note that that’s medieval Latin, which was quite a bit different from the Classical Latin taught these days), I do not see why you should not be able to cope, provided you were willing to buckle down, take the discipline (which could be harsh), and not try to be a smartass. Your modern knowledge would be more hindrance than help, but so long as you can swallow your pride, you should be able to put it aside and just get on with learning the curriculum (much of which will be stuff with which you are probably quite unfamiliar). I do not think academic standards at the undergrad level at a medieval university were particularly high.
So, take a good dose of humility and an intensive course in Medieval Latin, and you should be good to go.
This is sort of a tangent, but over the course of a decade or so I went from writing at least my outlines, notes, and first drafts by hand to typing everything on a word processing program. It changed the way I wrote, and the way I approached the act of writing. Hell, it changed the way I thought.
Medieval scholars, whether European or Asian, wouldn’t have the luxury of endless cutting and copying and rearranging. Most of them wouldn’t even have the luxury I enjoyed in high school: an eternal supply of paper and ink. I could take as many notes as I wanted, do several dozen drafts, keep a rambling diary…I could always pick up a notebook at the Dollar Store, a pack of pens at K-Mart. But most scholars then would have to prioritize their limited supplies of materials.
I also learned that prior to the Renaissance, many writers didn’t actually write: they dictated their stuff. With this in mind, I wonder how different the mental processes were for scholars and writers back then. It seemed to me that more of the process of composition would be mental, would take place in the writer’s head rather than get hashed out on the page or on the screen. Just a different way of thinking.
Makes sense. I gather that professors aren’t going to be too keen on me insisting on the correctness of certain facts that were not known then. To them, I’m just a lowly undergrad who is coming up with all this weird stuff. Now, if I can manage to actually PROVE something (e.g. demonstrate modern aluminum smelting) then that might be something they would respect and might land me a scholarship to study more or even a professorship.
In my OP I mentioned that I would be bring back technology and a generator to run it. This is a good point. I wonder if having access to a word processor would significantly decrease the time it would take to write a paper, or if it would give me a leg up in terms of quality because the other students just don’t have time to go back and re-write their paper out by hand again with minor changes, so they just turn it in as is and pray. All my “write it out and read it from the beginning to judge it” would be done on the word processor. I imagine I would compose the paper in a word processor until I’m finished, then write it out longhand once, only rewriting if I make a critical gaffe in writing it out.
Yeah, but I imagine that your average medieval smart person would be, by necessity, much, much better at writing up an essay on the fly. What what they could do in one draft would rival what your average modern day smart person can do with a word processor.
So if my theory here is correct, your fellow students would slay you when it came to exams, both written and oral, just because they are more used to thinking on their feet. And I think exams would be a much more important component of your academic success than the medieval equivalent of research papers or theses.
Another thought: I know privacy is basically a modern concept, but how did the students live? Would you be able to, you know, rent a room off-campus where you can hide all your futuristic stuff, or were you expected to sleep and study in chambers with your fellow student body?
Scholasticism was the academic system of medieval universities. It was a different mindset then what we have now. You weren’t supposed to discover new knowledge because the foundation of scholasticism was the supremacy of classical texts. So you were supposed to derive knowledge by studying and applying what classical texts said. In some ways it was akin to modern theology - you don’t get points for discovering something new about God. Your knowledge of God is supposed to come from accepted scriptures like the Bible or the Quran.
So if there was a topic you were studying, your investigation wouldn’t be to set up experiments or anything like that. You would study what the classics had to say on the subject. You’d form a hypothesis and present the classical references that supported it. And you’d also form a counter-hypothesis and present what classical references supported that. Then you’d study the two sides and see which one was better supported by the classical texts and reconcile any apparent contradictions between the sources. Eventually you’d arrive at a fact that was supported by all the classics and was thereby proven as correct.
Science and engineering had no place in the medieval university. Smelting aluminum might impress a medieval blacksmith, but wouldn’t matter at all to a university professor.
To succeed you’d need to:
Become fluent in reading, writing and speaking Latin.
Memorize a large body of classical literature.
Demonstrate that you could use your knowledge of the classics in an argument.
Perform basic math using sums, ratios, and geometric proofs.
Memorize a bunch of astronomical facts.
The math and astronomy should be easy for a modern person with a decent high school education. It’s grammar, logic, and rhetoric (the classic trivium) that will be challenging.
Re: Arabic, the settlers in the kingdom of Jerusalem, and particularly their children, almost certainly learned “kitchen Arabic”, if you will, if not fluently at least well enough to get by at the marketplace. Being literate in Arabic was quite a feat, however, in a time when most people weren’t literate in their native language. A couple of chroniclers mention that Raymond of Tripoli learned to read and write Arabic during nine years (!!!) of captivity in Aleppo. This was regarded as remarkable by his contemporaries.
Yeah, what The Hamster King said. Your knowledge of aluminum smelting would not be any more relevant to medieval professor than, say, a knowledge of auto mechanics would be to to modern professor of…well, just about any subject except perhaps mechanical engineering.
This may be true, but I am not sure it has much to do with the medieval European university. As I understand it, although some scholarly texts may have been brought back to Europe by crusaders, the main route by which both the texts of the ancients, and the knowledge of Arabic needed to translate them, found their way into western Christian Europe, was over the Pyrenees from Muslim Spain. That is probably why the texts that came to dominate the European universities were almost entirely those of Aristotle (and of Arabic commentators on Aristotle): because Muslim Spanish intellectual life, at the relevant time, was dominated by the Aristotelian school founded there by Averroes. If the influence had come from further east in the Muslim world, it might not have been quite so one-sidedly Aristotelian.
History remembers the great scholars of the middle ages,* but even back then, half of the students were below average. These were bored second sons of noble families being groomed for a cushy job in the Church bureaucracy. As long as you showed up, paid your fees, and avoided too much blasphemy and property damage, I’ll bet you could muddle through just fine.
*And even as to the great ones, it’s not necessarily for their scholarship. I suspect that Abelard might be largely forgotten today if someone hadn’t cut off his balls.