You know, normally, far be it from me to critique praise of medieval learning, particularly from a classicist, I love medieval learning, it's what I...do with all my time but...WOW this is a meteorically bad take.
First, there are just a bunch of amusingly wrong details in this tweet that come from this man being a classicist who has no idea what he's talking about. First, there was no university at York in 800, and there were likely very few 18 year old students. By that time, anyone who was getting an education had probably already either nearly finished or taken monastic vows. Even later, when universities came to be, students started at much younger ages, 14-16 were typical, at least for the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Paris.
Second, they didn't read music better, on account of there not being a system of written music in 800s Britain. Also as for the "more about astronomy:" There are 8 planets in the solar system and they orbit the sun. I have now given you a piece of information that absolutely no one in the Middle Ages had, or could discover. This isn't to say that they were stupid, if you dig through my posting history you'll find countless examples of me shouting into the void that medieval people were intelligent and did good intellectual work, but we simply have access to a wealth of scientific knowledge that they did not and could not have.
Also, "knew more mathematics" is wild, given that most high school educations get you at least through Calculus, which neither the middle ages nor the ancients ever developed.
Next, we get to some bigger issues, one of which is this: Everyone can go to school now. Reading, writing, and education in general, was overwhelmingly the province of the rich, all through the premodern period. Only very recently has universal schooling until the age of 18 come into being, the same is true for large scale programs to make university affordable. The only way to truly get any sense of medieval learning is to read the texts that have survived, and those have, often, survived because they were considered of very high quality. They were what medieval authors considered the cream of the crop. To compare the most learned and most talented of an extraordinarily narrow and privileged elite against the average modern student is incredibly unfair and, I think, facially ridiculous.
Fifth, this sort of kids these days nonsense has been around since the dawn of time.
And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.
This is Socrates, in Plato's Phaedrus, talking about how this newfangled writing stuff is going to make every student stupid. Here is a delightful twitter thread from Medievalist Matt Gabriele, detailing a list of complaints against university students. Sound familiar? It's important to remember that a student starting at Oxford would be (1) 14 years old or so. (2) Much like our university students, away from his (and it would be his, women were not allowed in medieval universities) family for the first time. (3) Legally protected from local law, because university students were only subject to ecclesiastic courts, not local secular ones.
What the heck do YOU think a bunch of 14 year old boys, away from their families and with substantial protection against prosecution got up to in their time at university? If you thought it was "exclusive and devoted study of the classics and of theology" then I have a freaking bridge to sell you. The University of Paris's charter, handed down in 1215, had several legal provisions designed to sort out jurisdictional issues that resulted from a massive tavern brawl between a bunch of locals and a group of German students (This is from Medieval Violence: Physical Brutality in Northern France, 1270-1330, which contains a full chapter on student violence) Hell, the founding story of the University of Cambridge is that a bunch of Oxford clerks got run out of town for causing the death of a woman, and several were hanged without recourse to the ecclesiastic courts. Town and Gown dislike is also as old as Universities.
I'm not as familiar with the classical record, but given that Plato's idea of a great intellectual gathering was "Let's get wine drunk and talk about love," my suspicion is it is much the same.
Finally, and somewhat pettily, it's not the "So-Called Dark Ages," John. It's the Early Middle Ages. Only Classicists and Modernists who don't know better call it that.
This seems to be one of those statements which is technically almost true, but requires some slightly specious reasoning. Frankly, it seems like a dig at modern students more than anything, which seems unwarranted.
Information from the 2011 Census suggested that 92% of people in the UK had English as a first language, while 7.7% spoke English "well" as a second language. This 2017 survey, admittedly based on now-unsourced data from /r/dataisbeautiful, suggests that the average Briton speaks '1.6' languages; to whit, a lot of people have only half-remembered GCSE French. Your average student from 800 would, in this case, most likely have an edge: students would, of course, have spoken (Old) English, but would have been trained in Latin from an early age, and some may even have had the opportunity to study a third language, perhaps even Greek. By the 1170s, clergy such as Jordan de Fantosme even start writing in vernacular French. This wasn't always the case, however: prior to the "Carolingian Renaissance" of the late 8th Century, Alcuin of York (one of its main proponents) expressed a concern that many parish priests lacked the necessary training in Latin to even carry out their masses properly, let alone to study the Classics.
Modern schools and universities are a far more diverse yet specialised mode of education: a modern student might only learn maths to a GCSE level, specialise in geography from then on, and never have any educational interaction with Logic and Philosophy, astronomy or music, for example. The University of Exeter, to use an example, currently offers degrees in Economics, Finance and Accounting, Business Management, Computer Science, Engineering, Drama, Geography, Bioscience and Neuroscience, among others, alongside subjects expected of a ninth-century student such as Classics, Theology and Religion, Natural Sciences or Philosophy.
Astronomy, optics, and the associated mathematics were considered important subjects by the Church for their use in calculating important dates such as Easter, and for a philosophical desire to better understand man's place in God's creation, so our Ninth Century Student may well have had a much better understanding of that maths compared to a modern student who only studies to GCSE or A-Level, but then that knowledge would pale in comparison to that of a modern astrophysicist. Our NCS almost certainly wouldn't have had any mathematical knowledge of engineering, for example. Practical skills such as architecture were typically taught via physical training and apprenticeship, rather than in a classroom setting.
Philosophy is not currently a part of that National Curriculum in the UK, so outside of a Philosophy or PPE degree, the 'average' modern student is indeed unlikely to be familiar with classical Logic as a field of study, so that one is technically true, but does seem like a somewhat unnecessary dig at the modern student.
I cannot speak for the other parts of the tweet, since I am not well versed in historical subjects other than history of mathematics. However, the comment about knowing more mathematics is not possible for a simple reason: the mathematical tools that are currently taught to university students today were simply not invented yet. Actually, even most high school math subjects were not known to anyone in the world, let alone a university student.
Examples:
-Calculus, which is taught at high school or freshman year at a university, was non-existent until Newton and Leibniz. There are at least 800 years until the notion of derivatives appears. And the modern form of integration, which is called the Riemann integral, was developed by Riemann in 1854.
-Solutions of the polynomial equations are very well known right now, thanks to the work of Evariste Galois and Niels Henrik Abel, who were both born in early 1800s. Their combined work shows us that there is no general solution to polynomial equations of degree higher than five. This is something that is taught in group theory courses, which most math students take in the second year of their education. (Some institutions teach group theory to other majors such as physics and engineering, although it is not really typical) However, in 800s, not even the solvability of 3rd degree equations was established. The formula for the cubic equation has to wait at least 700 years until Gerolamo Cardano is born.
-Almost any undergraduate student who is in engineering or STEM takes a course on differential equations, which is also not possibly known by anyone in 800s, for the simple reason that differentiation is non-existent.
-Set theory is a subject that is taught at high school level. I remember hearing about set theory paradoxes such as Russell's paradox (formulated in 1901) in high school. The modern understanding of set theory came into existence in late 1800s and early 1900s with Georg Cantor, Richard Dedekind, Ernest Zermelo etc.
-The fact that pi is irrational was not known until 1700s. Adrien-Marie Legendre gave the first correct proof in 1794.
-The study of complex numbers, which is taught (at least primitively) in high schools, was virtually non-existent until 1500s. (until Bombelli and Cardano)
-Analytic geometry was developed by Descartes and Fermat in 17th century.
I think the only subjects in which a university student in 800s could know as much as an average, modern university student are basic geometry, trigonometry and calculations/problem solving. But even the claim that an average student who just graduated from a university in 800s knew more mathematics than an average high-school graduate of today is not a legitimate claim.
I can talk specifically about mathematics, and in that circumstance the tweet is woefully incorrect.
To begin with consider what mathematics an 18 year old student in 800AD York would have known. The most impactful mathematical text of the time was Euclid's elements and this had been lost to Europe during this period, while being preserved by the Arabs. Instead geometry was restricted to simplistic and practical applications. Consequently any appeal to the students having an in-depth and rigorous knowledge of Euclidean geometry and the proof methodology it contains are categorically false. Indeed, there is a story of Gerbert of Aurillac (later Pope Sylvester II), who was a known scholar and proponent of mathematics, struggling to solve a problem that would have been basic for mathematicians familiar with Euclid: given a right angle triangle with known hypotenuse and area, find the other two sides.
Instead much of the mathematics revolved around arithmetic, word problems and the problem of calculating the date of easter (which is essentially an applied arithmetic problem). Arithmetic would have been a challenge since they used Roman numerals, hence calculations with large numbers would have been a substantial obstacle. Moreover, decimals did not exist and manipulations with arbitrary fractions were still unknown (fractions were mostly of a fixed form). This was part of the difficulty Bede faced when trying to calculate the date of easter.
The word problems were, in general, correspondingly simple. Alcuin of York, who conveniently lived until 804 AD wrote a book of elementary word problems that can be found here. As the site states "it is worth remembering as one reads the problems, that this was the highlight of mathematics in Europe at the time." Here is an example of such a problem
There is a field which is 30 yards on one side, 30 yards on another, and 18 metres in the front. How many square yards is the area of such a field?
This is just calculating the area of a triangle.
Let us compare both of these to what mathematics a modern "average student" from university knows. Well, putting aside a lack of practice and excluding the wiggle-room that the phrase "average student" entails, most students know quite a lot. They are certainly familiar with performing arithmetic with arbitrary fractions and decimals, including the relationship between the two and a knowledge of place value. They are also aware of how to calculate the area of a triangle, and indeed many of Alcuin's word problems would be comfortable for students who finished a mathematics education at 16. Looking at Gerbert's problem in modern terminology, you are solving the equations x^2 + y^2 = H and xy=2A. Similar to Alcuin's problems, this would not be a challenge for many with a mandatory maths education.
If the average university student was a STEM student then they would probably have knowledge of calculus, complex numbers and basic differential equations. These would be unrecognisable to anybody from that period and much later, although problems that could be phrased in the language of calculus, such as movement of pendulums, would obviously be understandable.
If the average university student was a mathematics student they would probably have knowledge of analysis, abstract and linear algebra, elementary topology and elementary number theory (among others). Much of this knowledge and machinery was unknown to people 200 years ago, let alone 1200, and an average student of today often learns mathematics that was cutting edge only 150-200 years ago. The overwhelming emphasis on proof would also be unrecognisable to the 800AD students, since they hadn't seen Euclid.
This all comes with the caveat that the students in 800AD were not intellectually incapable and that the steps mathematicians made throughout history were extremely important and significant in the field's development. I tend to be of the opinion that if the great mathematicians of the Middle Ages lived today they would also be very strong, although possibly in other disciplines.
Essentially mathematics in 800AD Europe was just so basic that the advanced research level was trivial in comparison to the discipline we see today, so an average student then would be woefully ill equipped in comparison to modern students. Some of this may also apply to logic with the progressions in mathematical and symbolic logic, although I am not sufficiently familiar with non-mathematical logic to comment.
Definitely not. As no chronological and geographical boundaries were set for the last expression in the original claim, using the in dubio pro reo principle I will limit myself to the UK in recent years, to maintain the comparison between English students in the year 800 and 2020. This said, let's dissect the claim.
Reading? Not really, no. Depending on whether John Dickson meant the reading during the university education proper or general reading experience up to and including studying university, the responses should fit the gamut between 'definitely not' and 'you surely jest'. In all developed countries today, entering university is preceded by 10-12 years of basic and intermediary education. During that time pupils are required to read quite a substantial amount of text what is further expanded by the hobby reading encompassing all the written materials, be it handbooks, documentaries, newspapers, magazines, fiction books, role-playing game materials or any other text-based sources (including internet). This was hardly achievable by the medieval students, especially as early as the year 800 due to significantly restricted access to the written materials caused by physical and technological constraints.
Languages are a tricky subject. It is safe to assume that the students in the year 800 could have spoken primarily two languages: local form of Old English and Latin used in education and ecclesiastical proceedings. Norse will still be rare around that time. Does it matter? Not that much. Please take note that students in UK are less likely to know foreign languages that their continental counterparts largely due to the fact that English replaced Latin as the lingua franca. In Middle Ages, learning Latin was a means to an end and should the scholarly and religious texts were written in vernacular, the need to learn Latin would be far less pronounced. This is corroborated by the fact that English is the most common second language across Europe. It should be also noted that modern universities, unlike the early medieval one, run language courses for their students, contributing to greater availability of the linguistic education. Last but not least, students in York around year 800 were largely local, lacking the exposure to foreign languages. In 2019, foreign exchange students accounted for almost 20%, and although 20-25% part of them were coming from English-speaking countries, there is still a large percentage of students for whom English is not a first language. On the other hand, educated English in modern period (say, 17th or 18th century) would have most likely known Latin, Greek and French in addition to their native English.
The issue of music might initially look a bit biased, as the school that existed in York around the year 800 CE was the direct descendant of the church school founded by Archbishop Paulinus in 627 and had strong focus on the teaching of choral music. Using modern comparisons, it would have been an equivalent to a specialized conservatory rather than a regular university. Comparison of reading music is also a shaky prospect. I don't know how this subject is taught in UK, but the basic education in continental Europe often includes the music course that covers the groundworks of notation. Nothing special, but enough for a student to play a relatively simple piece on any instrument they can use. Of course, how much of this is retained until the late teens/early twenties by people not interested in music is another matter, but it is taught. Furthermore, the notation we're speaking about did not really evolve into a coherent system until late 10th century, and for the initial few centuries of the Church existence, the melody of the chants were largely transmitted orally, what was one of the reasons for proliferation of choir schools. Around the first half of the 9th century, systems of notations assisting in singing or rather melodic recitation were introduced, but this means that the best musical guide students in York around 800 CE could have possibly had was the first prototypes of neumatic notation assisting the singing of verses. They did not allow to write music not accompanied by text and thus were a far cry from the standard staff notation we use today. The latter is a product of Middle Ages, having been developed around 12th century, but this is several centuries past the time we're discussing. So, again, if this claim has been made about the late medieval university, it would have been largely true, as music theory has been taught there as one of the major 'courses'. But in reference to the year 800 CE it is nowhere close to the truth.
Modern mathematics is far more advanced than anything people in 800 CE could have an access to. Although the exceptions possibly exist, average student of any faculty in modern York has been required to finish secondary education what allows us the assumption that they would need to prove understanding of concepts like polynomial equations, probability, statistics, functions and derivatives that did not exit in 9th century curricula. In addition, all students of technical universities either know differential and integral calculus that or are required to learn in the first year. This particular subject, although quite well developed in India at that time with its elements such as infinitesimals being used by scholars in the Hellenic Golden Age, generally started to take shape in Europe only in 11th century but even then they were still in its nascent in comparison to what is taught today.
When it comes to astronomy, then I would say it is an especially very bold claim. Modern students are usually aware of how the universe works at the very basic level and even if they forgot most of what has been taught, they know that the planets orbit far more massive stars and are themselves orbited by moons due to the forces of gravity. They are aware that the stars themselves radiate heat and light due to nuclear reactions and that they are vastly larger than they would appear. Students also have knowledge, no matter how nebulous, about the galaxies, asteroid belts, difference between gas giants and other planets, black holes, solar wind, atmosphere, vacuum and similar phenomena that are commonly mentioned in the physics handbooks or popular books about cosmos and are a staple elements in the science-fiction genre. Most of the the concepts I mention in this paragraph were completely unknown (not to mention that Uranus, Neptune and Pluto were discovered only in 18th, 19th and 20th centuries respectively).
So, to sum it up, with the possible exception of languages, modern people studying in York possess tremendous amount of scientific knowledge they tend to take for granted, but for the Europeans in early 9th century large part of this knowledge would have been completely groundbreaking and in many cases even incomprehensible.
Hey, folks. I'm the author of the offending tweet. If I'd known it would get such interest, I would have given it more than 2 minutes thought! 😊 Let me concede various critiques and see if I can't strengthen the basic point I was hoping to make.
1. First, I teach in a leading university in my little part of the world, so I am not entirely ignorant of the standards of language, grammar, rhetoric, logic, etc. I must say, my tweet emerges, in part, from being depressed about the decline in the liberal arts.
2. Secondly, I am really only speaking about English-speaking universities today (US, UK, Australia, NZ), not Asian, European, or elsewhere.
3. Thirdly, speaking of "York in 800", is really just (poor) code for the Carolingian schools of the 800s.
4. My core point, fourthly, is really that a student who had completed studies in one of the better schools - let's go with Fulda, Tours, Rheims, or Reichenau - will have had competencies that exceed the "average" student in an English-speaking university today. They would have strong competency in at least two languages (the home language and formal Latin, at least), and this is NOT the norm in English-speaking universities today. Their grammatical knowledge would be vastly superior. They would have a knowledge of formal logic and rhetorical forms which students today typically do not have.
5. Fifthly, what about the mathematical subjects? This is where my thesis is weakest, but I have a small defence for your consideration. I accept that their arithmetic and geometry would be (beyond) basic for a high school student today (as difficult as it must have been in Roman numerals!). I will retract that.
6. However, I think I want to retain a claim about the other two mathematical subjects, music and astronomy. Classical musical notation was not invented for centuries. However, the Carolingians (a) did have basic neumic notation to pictorialise melody, (b) invented mnemonics to recall long melodies, and, most importantly, (c) analysed music at a theoretical level to discern its harmonic proportions and measures (on the ancient classical model). They did a kind of philosophy of music. Given that the typical student today does not have any musical knowledge, I think our 18 year old Carolingian might win here.
7. And astronomy? I understand, of course, that their entire model was incorrect. However, I would maintain that their computational and observational astronomy was quite rigorous, and at least left our Carolingian kid better aware of the seasonal movements of large bodies and constellations than our typical student today. They would appear like one of those nerdy children who can point out many things in the night sky. For this, they studied Bede and even Pliny's Natural History, complete with diagrams.
8. There was a huge appreciation of poetry that is no longer present in our students. And for this they not only studied Ambrose and other Christian poets but also Ovid, Virgil, and others. And they routinely composed their own Latin poems for assessment.
Conclusion. So, while I think my hasty tweet deserves some of the criticism it received. I think I will hold firm in suggesting that a typical 18-year-old Carolingian "graduate" had knowledge and a breadth of learning that, in many respects, was superior to the (English-speaking) university student today.
Recommendation. For those who are interested, I recommend Rosamond McKitterick, “The Carolingian Renaissance of Culture and Learning” (151-66), in Charlemagne: Empire and Society. Manchester University Press, 2005. Also John J. Contreni, “The Carolingian Renaissance: Education and Literary Culture” (709-757) in The New Cambridge Medieval History. Vol.2. c.700-900. Cambridge University Press, 2008. And, of course, read as many of the primary sources referenced in these essays as you can access.
Many thanks.
John Dickson
/u/Stormtemplar gave a good answer to OP's direct question about a fictitious student at York, but let me answer about a kind of student I know more about, and that might help get to what OP's tweet is driving at. Skip to the last paragraph if you want the tl;dr. (Anything below that's uncited comes from Adam H. Becker's Fear of God and the Beginning of Wisdom, on the school of Nisibis in the context of Late Antique education. I can go back and give better citations if necessary.)
In the 9th century, during the so-called "Dark Ages" in Europe, there were schools (of a kind) that flourished in the Near and Middle East. The most famous one, which reached its zenith in the 6th century, is the school of Nisibis, on the border of modern-day Turkey and Syria, and its students and faculty were (predominantly) Christians who spoke a dialect of Aramaic (Jesus' language) called Syriac. Now, I say this is a kind of school because it is something in between a school and a monastery. That is, it was a religious community, and the education included a ton of theological and liturgical training (including singing in a choir), but it did fulfill the role of a school: young people (children and young adults) left their homes to study there, there were stages or levels of training, there were teachers and administrators, and people received an education. The first stage at the school was learning to pronounce words (Syriac, being a Semitic language, uses an abjad rather than an alphabet, which means it forms words without writing in the vowels, so learning to read was a bit more challenging); the next was learning grammar; then finally was rhetoric and theology.
But what was rhetoric and what was theology? Plato and Socrates were famously hostile toward rhetoric or some uses of rhetoric, but the Classical world at large didn't share this hostility. Rhetoric was important for daily life, and despite being cast as the enemy of philosophy, the two, in truth, often intersected.^1 This is particularly true in that both rhetoric and philosophy depended on logic, specifically a Neoplatonized form of Aristotle's Organon. (Note that, while Plato didn't like rhetoric, Aristotle wrote an entire treatise on it.) For students at Nisibis, the goal of learning rhetoric was to aid in religious disputes against Neoplatonists, Zoroastrians, and Jews (and, after the Islamic conquests, Muslims), disputes which were often conducted on the common ground of Aristotelian logic. Hence, it was imperative that they learn logic well, lest they give a fallacious argument against a religious opponent.
What did one do with this training? Aside from disputing with heretics in the street, you could continue this pseudo-monastic life and engage in what other members of the school were engaged in. One of the most fascinating aspects of Nisibis is that it played a big role in the translation of texts from Greek into Syriac, the first part of a chain of transmission that also produced Arabic and Latin translations (kickstarting the Islamic Golden Age and the Renaissance, respectively).^2 The school culture that developed among Syriac Christians is hugely important for the preservation of works like Aristotle, which went on to form the foundation of modern science when the Posterior Analytics resurfaced in the High Middle Ages.^3 So, to return to the fictional student, you would have learned Greek at some point in addition to Syriac, and pretty damn well at that.
Mathematics and astronomy, I'm not sure if those were studied in any serious way at Nisibis. However, mathematics was reasonably well developed and studied in a "theological" form at the Neoplatonic academy in Athens, among other places. A good example of this is the Theology of Arithmetic, ascribed to the Neoplatonist Iamblichus. If you read it, good luck trying to figure out what it's talking about! But more to the point, the "study" of math at this time would have involved learning Euclid and geometric proofs (the Neoplatonist Proclus wrote an enormous commentary on the Elements).
TL;DR: So to return to the question. Would the average 18 year old then have known all of those things better than the average university student today? I concur that the answer is definitely, No. But I would argue against the way /u/Stormtemplar answered the question by invoking modern scientific knowledge. By that standard, Plato knew less than the modern university student, which is obviously not what OP is asking. The average student at Nisibis, probably by the time he was "university level," knew Aristotelian logic pretty deeply, which is more than the average modern student (not engaged in math or science, and even many who are) would know; they were formally trained in singing publicly, something that many university students have no background in; they knew at least two languages well enough to read and translate--moreover, two languages from different language families: imagine the revolt if every university student had to learn Chinese or Arabic; and, depending on where they were, they would have learned mathematical proofs, which, again, university students couldn't do. As for astronomy, I would find it hard to believe that people who could see the Milky Way every night of their lives would know less about astronomy than your average university student from a city or suburb.
So, do they know those subjects better (to the extent they could) rather than knowing more (facts) than the average modern student? In my view, without a doubt.
Citations:
^1 Coulter, Literary Microcosm. First chapter discusses the "streams" of philosophy and rhetoric and ethics. ^2 On this topic, see Gutas, Greek into Arabic and Rubenstein, Aristotle's Children. The latter is a more popular text, but a pretty solid one that I highly recommend. ^3 I.e., when Francis Bacon wrote "The New Organon" it was Aristotle's Organon, which includes Post. An., that he was referencing.
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