Vintage canada edition, 1998 Copyright 1996 by Alberto Manguel

orationis by Aelius] Donat”, and who felt, among the younger students, “like a hen among the chicks”,
described in his autobiography how he and a friend had set off in search of instruction. “When we
reached Strasbourg, we found many poor students there, who told us that the school was not good, but
that there was an excellent school in Sélestat. We set off for Sélestat. On the way we met a nobleman who
asked us, ‘Where are you going?’ When he heard that we were headed for Sélestat, he advised us against
it, telling us that there were many poor students in that town and that the inhabitants were far from rich.
Hearing this, my companion burst into bitter tears, crying, ‘Where can we go?’ I comforted him by saying,
‘Rest assured, if some can find the means of obtaining food in Sélestat, I’ll certainly manage to do so for
both of us.’ ” They managed to stay in Sélestat for a few months, but after Pentecost “new students
arrived from all parts, and I no longer was able to find food for both of us, and we left for the town of
Soleure.”
In every literate society, learning to read is something of an initiation, a ritualized passage out of a state
of dependency and rudimentary communication. The child learning to read is admitted into the communal
memory by way of books, and thereby becomes acquainted with a common past which he or she renews,
to a greater or lesser degree, in every reading. In medieval Jewish society, for instance, the ritual of
learning to read was explicitly celebrated. On the Feast of Shavuot, when Moses received the Torah from
the hands of God, the boy about to be initiated was wrapped in a prayer shawl and taken by his father to
the teacher. The teacher sat the boy on his lap and showed him a slate on which were written the Hebrew
alphabet, a passage from the Scriptures and the words “May the Torah be your occupation.” The teacher
read out every word and the child repeated it. Then the slate was covered with honey and the child licked
it, thereby bodily assimilating the holy words. Also, biblical verses were written on peeled hard-boiled
eggs and on honey cakes, which the child would eat after reading the verses out loud to the teacher.

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Though it is difficult to generalize over several centuries and across so many countries, in the Christian
society of the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance learning to read and write — outside the
Church — was the almost exclusive privilege of the aristocracy and (after the thirteenth century) the
upper bourgeoisie. Even though there were aristocrats and grands bourgeois who considered reading and
writing menial tasks suitable only for poor clerics, most boys and quite a few girls born to these classes
were taught their letters very early. The child’s nurse, if she could read, initiated the teaching, and for
that reason had to be chosen with utmost care, since she was not only to provide milk but also to ensure
correct speech and pronunciation. The great Italian humanist scholar Leon Battista Alberti, writing
between 1435 and 1444, noted that “the care of very young children is women’s work, for nurses or the
mother,” and that at the earliest possible age they should be taught the alphabet. Children learned to
read phonetically by repeating letters pointed out by their nurse or mother in a hornbook or alphabet
sheet. (I myself was taught this way, by my nurse reading out to me the bold-type letters from an old
English picture-book; I was made to repeat the sounds again and again.) The image of the teaching
mother-figure was as common in Christian iconography as the female student was rare in depictions of
the classroom. There are numerous representations of Mary holding a book in front of the Child Jesus,
and of Anne teaching Mary, but neither Christ nor His Mother was depicted as learning to write or
actually writing; it was the notion of Christ reading the Old Testament that was considered essential to
make the continuity of the Scriptures explicit.
Two fifteenth-century mothers teaching their children to read: left, the Virgin and Child; right, Saint Anne
with the young Mary. (photo credit 5.1)
Quintilian, a first-century Roman lawyer from northern Spain who became the tutor of the Emperor
Domitian’s grand-nephews, wrote a twelve-volume pedagogical manual, the Institutio oratoria, which was
highly influential throughout the Renaissance. In it, he advised: “Some hold that boys should not be
taught to read till they are seven years old, that being the earliest age at which they can derive profit
from instruction and endure the strain of learning. Those however who hold that a child’s mind should not
be allowed to lie fallow for a moment are wiser. Chrysippus, for instance, though he gives the nurses a
three years’ reign, still holds the formation of the child’s mind on the best principles to be a part of their
duties. Why, again, since children are capable of moral training, should they not be capable of literary
education?”
After the letters had been learned, male teachers would be brought in as private tutors (if the family
could afford them) for the boys, while the mother busied herself with the education of the girls. Even
though, by the fifteenth century, most wealthy houses had the space, quiet and equipment to provide
teaching at home, most scholars recommended that boys be educated away from the family, in the
company of other boys; on the other hand, medieval moralists hotly debated the benefits of education —
public or private — for girls. “It is not appropriate for girls to learn to read and write unless they wish to
become nuns, since they might otherwise, coming of age, write or receive amorous missives,” warned the
nobleman Philippe de Novare, but several of his contemporaries disagreed. “Girls should learn to read in
order to learn the true faith and protect themselves from the perils that menace their soul,” argued the
Chevalier de la Tour Landry. Girls born in richer households were often sent to school to learn reading
and writing, usually to prepare them for the convent. In the aristocratic households of Europe, it was
possible to find women who were fully literate.
Before the mid-fifteenth century, the teaching at the Latin school of Sélestat had been rudimentary and
undistinguished, following the conventional precepts of the scholastic tradition. Developed mainly in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, by philosophers for whom “thinking is a craft with meticulously fixed
laws”, scholasticism proved a useful method for reconciling the precepts of religious faith with the
arguments of human reason, resulting in a concordia discordantium or “harmony among differing
opinions” which could then be used as a further point of argument. Soon, however, scholasticism became
a method of preserving rather than eliciting ideas. In Islam it served to establish the official dogma; since
there were no Islamic councils or synods set up for this purpose, the concordia discordantium, the opinion
that survived all objections, became orthodoxy. In the Christian world, though varying considerably from
university to university, scholasticism adamantly followed the precepts of Aristotle by way of early
Christian philosophers such as the fifth-century Boethius, whose De consolatione philosophiae (which
Alfred the Great translated into English) was a great favourite throughout the Middle Ages. Essentially,
the scholastic method consisted in little more than training the students to consider a text according to
certain pre-established, officially approved criteria which were painstakingly and painfully drilled into
them. As far as the teaching of reading was concerned, the success of the method depended more on the
students’ perseverance than on their intelligence. Writing in the mid-thirteenth century, the learned
Spanish king Alfonso el Sabio belaboured the point: “Well and truly must the teachers show their learning
to the students by reading to them books and making them understand to the best of their abilities; and
once they begin to read, they must continue the teaching until they have come to the end of the books
they have started; and while in health they must not send for others to read in their place, unless they are

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asking someone else to read in order to show him honour, and not to avoid the task of reading.”
Two school scenes from the turn of the fifteenth century showing the hierarchical relationship between
teachers and students: left, Aristotle and his disciples; right, an anonymous class. (photo credit 5.2)
Well into the sixteenth century, the scholastic method was prevalent in universities and in parish,
monastic and cathedral schools throughout Europe. These schools, the ancestors of the Latin school of
Sélestat, had begun to develop in the fourth and fifth centuries after the decline of the Roman educational
system, and had flourished in the ninth, when Charlemagne ordered all cathedrals and churches to
provide schools for training clerics in the arts of reading, writing, chant and calculus. In the tenth
century, when the resurgence of the towns made it essential to have centres of basic learning, schools
established themselves around the figure of a particularly gifted teacher on whom the school’s fame then
depended.
A scene from an early sixteenth-century school in France. (photo credit 5.3)
A teacher continues his lesson beyond the grave, his craft commemorated on a mid-fourteenth-century
Bolognese tomb. (photo credit 5.4)
The physical aspect of the schools did not change much from the times of Charlemagne. Classes were
conducted in a large room. The teacher usually sat at an elevated lectern, or sometimes at a table, on an
ordinary bench (chairs did not become common in Christian Europe until the fifteenth century). A marble
sculpture from a Bolognese tomb, from the mid-fourteenth century, shows a teacher seated on a bench, a
book open on the desk in front of him, looking out at his students. He is holding a page open with his left
hand, while his right hand seems to be stressing a point, perhaps explaining the passage he has just read
out loud. Most illustrations show the students sitting on benches, holding lined pages or wax tablets for
taking notes, or standing around the teacher with open books. One signboard advertising a school in 1516
depicts two adolescent students working on a bench, hunched over their texts, while on the right a
woman seated at a lectern is guiding a much younger child by pointing a finger at a page; on the left a
student, probably in his early teens, stands at a lectern, reading from an open book, while the teacher
behind him holds a bundle of birches to his buttocks. The birch, as much as the book, would be the
teacher’s emblem for many centuries.
A signboard advertising a school, painted in 1516 by Ambrosius Holbein. (photo credit 5.5)
In the Latin school of Sélestat, students were first taught to read and write, and later learned the subjects
of the trivium: grammar above all, rhetoric and dialectics. Since not all students arrived with a knowledge
of their letters, reading would begin with an ABC or primer and collections of simple prayers such as the
Lord’s Prayer, Hail Mary and Apostles’ Creed. After this rudimentary learning, the students were taken
through several reading manuals common in most medieval schools: Donat’s Ars de octo partibus