I don’t think we appreciate enough the degree to which memorization was central to Medieval learning. You were routinely expected to memorize vast amounts of stuff that we, today, just can’t do without years of special training. Our cheap extelligence has made us overall mentally flabby like too many intellectual Big Macs.
And I’m thinking that there are some things that students today are expected to be able to look up, summarize, explain, and synthesize from, but they are not expected to have it all memorized. In one of the last classes I took, we covered Martin Luther as part of the curriculum. I was expected to be able to discuss some of his viewpoints and how they have been interpreted by later scholars, but I certainly didn’t memorize the entirety of his Table Talk or Large Catechism, and if you asked me today to write 3 pages on how Luther’s viewpoints on civil authority changed or did not change from his time in Catholic seminary, through his dissent, and onward to old age and death and provide appropriate quotations, I could not do that from memory. I could research it though and get you the paper.
You’d have a hard time concealing your futuristic knowledge and the technology you brought. You’d inevitably let slip tidbits that will alarm those around you.
You’d be accused of witch-craft in no time and burned.
There were Star Trek episodes that touched upon these ideas.
In “The Paradise Syndrome”, Kirk demonstrates mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, whereupon the natives recognize him as a god.
In “All Our Yesterdays”, Kirk finds himself in a Medieval-English-like place, where he is accused of witch-craft, but escapes before anything really really bad happens.
Contrary to popular belief, and perhaps the beliefs of Star Trek (and Monty Python) scriptwriters, witch hunting was not particularly prevalent in the middle ages. The great age for witch hunting (and burning) was the Early Modern period, especially the 17th century (just when the scientific revolution was in full swing, in fact). Even then, it was much more a Protestant than a Catholic obsession.
I wonder how much the lack of handwriting skills/muscles woudl affect you? Given the amount of copying they did, writing with big quills, for several hours a day, I would imagine a modern person would fall behind very, very quickly. Even if you knew what to write, writing it would be a whole new challenge.
Students wrote relatively little, though: most classwork would be oral, as would tests.
Aluminum wasn’t known at all in medieval times. Also it is smelting with large quantities of electric power and this might have been a bit hard to find in the middle ages. Your best bet, assuming you had mastered Latin and Greek and all that, might be in mathematics. Come armed with a couple of new proofs of the Pythagorean theorem and maybe some new geometric theorems. Above all, don’t dispute geocentrism. Don’t attempt to introduce calculus; it would have been incomprehensible to them. Maybe how to find roots of third and fourth degree polynomials, although how to do that without introducing complex numbers escapes me (it is provably impossible actually).
Rather than attempting the impossible, then assuming you could overcome the language barrier, your best bet might be to hand out a shingle and become a physician. You could hardly do worse that the competition and could actually do some good. Chew willow bark for pain; boil water before drinking; put bread mold on infections; give cholera victims salted, honeyed water; that sort of thing. You might become rich and famous.
Assuming I could communicate…
I couldn’t do it because I would go to every single lecture, read every book, knowing that every single damn bit of it is crap. And that which isn’t crap is wrong. And that which isn’t crap or wrong is extremely long-winded.
My writing style would be completely different from every one of the day. People typing on the computer tend to short paragraphs, 3-4 sentences long, as blocks of text on a computer screen are simply too hard to read. OTOH, when you’re writing minuscule on paper and need to put as many words on a single page as possible, paragraph breaks become a luxury, hell, a cost center.
I’d probably last for a week, quit, and go invent the lightning rod and gunpowder. Blow some shit up, get a sinecure or three, change history, and die at the age of 53 because of a dental infection. Good times.
Indeed; written exams came along relatively late. That’s what an examination meant, you stood up and had to justify yourself verbally in the face of a testing verbal examination.
Without a computer, I would simply perish.
My handwriting is bad, due to some in-born coordination problem. I probably get thrown out just for bad handwriting and spilled ink all over the parchment.
All right, upon reading that you don’t really need write, well without the Internet, I simply will perish too, considering that I major in Computer Science and am not that strong in languages or arts.
- Join the priesthood. Oxford and Cambridge wasn’t for civilians in those days – they were set up to train clerics.
Paragraph breaks? A lot of early text didn’t even take breaks between words.
Textjustranonlikethisandyouhadtofigureoutwhattheindividualwordswere
And that could be a problem. Even if we assume that long division is the highest math that a student would be expected to do, who here can divide 443225/3242 in their head? I could do it with a piece of paper and a pen but if you hauled me in front of a professor who asked me to do that, it would be incredibly difficult to keep all the figures in my head. Maybe the real medieval students would be trained to have such a memory.
Way OT: I seem to recall an old story from Omni where Isaac Newton was presented with a pocket calculator and it scared the shit out of him.
That and most people used the calculators of their era: an abacus. But how many people today know how to use an abacus (or a slide rule)?
Even if you could write it down, you would have to be using Roman numerals. Also, you wouldn’t be using pen and paper because paper did not exist and parchment was far too expensive to be used for temporary notes. You might have has something like a slate and chalk. The Romans used to use a waxed board and a stylus (to cut into the wax) for noting things down. Very possibly these were still used in the medieval period, but I am not sure.
Depending on the time and place, Arabic numerals would already be in use. Slate and chalk was in use in some areas, clay tablets and chalk or coal in others, broken gables… basically, if you were going to run any calculations / outlines / extremely rough drafts, you used your own mini-blackboard.
I was thinking this would be the chief risk, especially for a person not especially religious in the first place (not referring to the OP specifically). And it wasn’t enough back then to be devout - it was necessary to be righteous in the approved sense.
It’d be hard enough for a modern student to be accepted at a major university circa 1875 given their lack of knowledge of classics, rhetoric, Latin, Greek etc.
I suspect that the amount of required rote memorization has declined since my grad/med school days, but the human brain could readily adapt to such requirements again if need be.
I was actually going to mention this, though I no longer recall when, and over what period, our typical spacing and punctuation would have evolved. Writing that way would not have been particularly difficult (once you got the actual script sorted out) but reading someone else’s writing would have been a huge challenge.
I’m speculating but the shift probably occurred when paper-making was introduced into Europe around the twelfth century. Before paper was widely available, people had to write on very expensive sheets made of parchment or papyrus and that would have encouraged them to get as many letters as possible on each page.
Once paper was around, the priority shifted from the expense of the writer to the ease of the reader.