Dr. Z joined me in the studio to discuss medieval education,

and we had a wide-ranging conversation that lasted about an hour or so,

and I thought you guys would enjoy it, so here's a small sample.

One of the big things about, we talked about hegemony, the hegemonic change when the Normans come in.

The Normans are not just doing that to England, they're also going south.

Remember, they're in Salerno as well.

Yep.

Is the Latinification of everything.

So things rapidly go to Latin because they function in Latin as the official

language of official acts. They're speaking French, but if you're doing anything important,

it's being written in Latin, you're often speaking in Latin. Latin's very important. So when they

go to England, all that change of putting things in vernacular English doesn't go away entirely.

It's not lost, but it's not pushed.

Okay.

And so when we talk about school at this point, we are talking about a turn towards a Latin type of education.

So that said, let's go back.

Talk about, we're mostly talking about this publicly available school to non-religious children.

And then going up into young adulthood.

In monasteries, it appears that once you committed to a monastery, you were taught pretty uniformly and formally all the way up. So you would have

started reading. You would have immediately learned Latin. And you would have probably gone all

the way up to full literacy in Latin and doing whatever the monks of your monastery did. And

some became full scholars and were writing new moral texts and treaties and became like the people that we

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