. The educational system in 5th-century Gaul was based on the Greco-Roman model, which, like the Germanic one, was male-oriented. Boys were educated at home until age seven, when they were sent to a primary school to learn to read, write, and count (unless the family had means to provide a private tutor), then at twelve to a secondary school to learn Greek and Latin grammar, and at fifteen possibly to one of the rare centers of higher learning to study rhetoric. These schools declined and eventually disappeared in the following centuries.
Germanic society emphasized the practical education of young men as warriors; their skills were perfected largely through hunting. Christianity reoriented written culture toward the sacred writings and taught the masses through sermons and the liturgy. In the early Middle Ages, centers of learning were primarily religious, both clerical and monastic. Charlemagne issued capitularies requiring each diocese and monastery to have a school. The great monastic schools, such as Saint-Gall and Saint-Riquier, boasted fine libraries. The program studied comprised the Trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and the Quadrivium (geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music); the Carolingian reform of handwriting and the 10th-century introduction of punctuation facilitated reading. But even greater changes were taking place outside the monastery. The church to a large extent succeeded in christianizing the practical warrior education of the military elite through the ideals and institutions of chivalry. Changes in the liturgy emphasized the predominant role of the priest. And the schools that were to be the most influential in the coming centuries, many of which were to develop into universities, were growing in revived urban centers, such as Orléans, Paris, and Montpellier, influenced by the Italian schools in Bologna and Salerno.
Besides these universities, municipal lay schools developed in the 12th century in Flanders and by the 14th in many other regions. These schools, financed by the municipalities, taught the bases of the Trivium. Colleges for poor pupils were founded, often by papal initiative, starting in the 14th century. Children of the humbler classes received practical and manual education in apprenticeships in the trades, and the poorest probably were put to work at about age seven. Also characteristic of the late Middle Ages is the increasing vulgarization of religious knowledge to the laity, as seen in the preaching efforts of the mendicant orders, the foundation of religious communities for laymen, and the proliferation of religious woodcut images and, by the end of the 15th century, of books.
Throughout the Middle Ages in France, the entire Jewish population learned to read in separate schools. There were at all times both supporters and opponents of female education; women were educated largely at home or in convents in the early Middle Ages. In the high and late Middle Ages, while women were generally excluded from the universities, there was nonetheless a tendency to favor some female education, as witness Héloïse and Christine de Pizan and the widespread iconographic motif of the Virgin reading at the moment of the Annunciation.
Initiation, apprentissage, éducation au moyen âge (Actes du Ier Colloque International de Montpellier (Université Paul Valéry) de Novembre 1991. Published as Cahiers du CRISIMA 1. Montpellier: Université Paul Valéry, 1993.
Rouche, Michel. L’enseignement, des origines à la Renaissance. Paris: Nouvelle Librairie de France, 1981. [Vol. 1 of Histoire générale de l’enseignement et de l’éducation en France, ed. Louis-Henri Parias.]
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