The Church and the Medieval Education

3-7b the church and the medieval education

During the Middle Ages, the church established parish, chantry, monastic, and cathedral schools. Parish schools taught the ritual and music needed to celebrate the Mass, as well as reading and writing. Chantry schools, funded by endowments from wealthy patrons, trained boys to sing the responses in the Latin liturgy as members of the church choir.

Saint Benedict (c. 480–c. 583 CE) established the patterns of monastic life and education. Serving as repositories for medieval culture, monasteries maintained scriptoria and libraries where classical and Christian manuscripts were copied and preserved. Monastic schools trained monks either as priests or brothers in church doctrine, Latin, the rules (the regula) that governed their communities, and in reading, writing, and mathematics.46

Women’s educational opportunities were limited in male-dominated medieval schools. However, some women attended convent schools, parallel institutions to the monasteries, but for girls, unmarried women, or widows. Like the monasteries, convents often had schools, libraries, and scriptoria. Convent schools taught the rules of the religious community, Latin, singing, reading and writing, and what became the “women’s curriculum” of embroidery, spinning, weaving, and painting. While some girls took vows as nuns and remained in the convent’s cloisters, others returned to the secular world after completing their education.

A religious superior, called an abbess or prioress, was in charge of the community of nuns. Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), abbess of a Benedictine convent in Germany, was a scholar, teacher, writer, and composer. She wrote The Ways of God and The Book of Divine Works to guide women’s spiritual formation. She composed religious hymns and wrote medical tracts about the causes, symptoms, and cures of illnesses.47

Cathedral schools, established by the bishops of dioceses, offered the liberal arts and the doctrinal and liturgical studies needed by those preparing to be priests. Some of their enrollments became so large they grew into universities. The University of Bologna, in Italy, became the center for the study of law. The University of Paris

46For a thorough study of monastic life, see Janneke Raaijmakers, The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda, c.744–c. 900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 47For a biographical sketch and an excerpt from Hildegard’s writings, see Madonna M. Murphy, The History and Philosophy of Education, pp. 104–112. For a biography, see Fiona Maddocks, Hildegard of Bingen: The Woman of Her Age (New York: Doubleday/Random House, 2001). Also, see Hildegard of Bingen: Selections from Her Writings (New York: HarperOne, 2005).

72 CE Quintilian appointed to Imperial Chair of Latin Rhetoric

95 CE Quintilian completes Institutio Oratoria

161 CE Marcus Aurelius becomes emperor 330 CE Constantine makes Constantinople the empire’s capital

410 CE Alaric sacks Rome

200 CE 400 CE 600 CE 800 CE

68 CE Quintilian founds rhetorical school in Rome 35 CE Quintilian born in Calagurris, Iberia 313 CE Constantine’s Edict of Milan ends persecution of Christians