[Circle of Hands] The Teenage Years

[RangerEd]

I came across this story and thought of your setting Ron. What medieval Europe did with its teenagers (http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26289459).

The article presents evidence from after the 1100s, but the cultural norms might have had roots from the 1100s. Good fodder for thinking about a character's past, profession, and key event.

Ed

[Nyhteg]

A setting question.

In a culture where there is no education, what does it mean for a character to have Scholar as their profession?
Is this simply the distinction between education and learning? There are possibilities to learn to read and write and calculate but only for a very small minority?

G

[RangerEd]

I started another thread about the teenage years, wonder about this same point. I never realized that young people were swapped around for apprenticeships in Europe.

[I've done some splitting and merging to get the relevant posts into one thread - RE]

[Ron Edwards]

There are possibilities to learn to read and write and calculate but only for a very small minority?

Yes, with the proviso that "small minority" does not equate 1:1 to societal privilege. You can probably see that any path to scholarship can be implied by the choice of other professions, meaning that one can be born in any circumstances of the setting and happen to have landed with scholarship in some way.

Instead of starting with social rank and then choosing professions from that platform, this game looks at the present professions and identifies the social rank from there. The way the game mechanics' choices go is not the same as the character's linear experience of it.

Since scholarship is a relatively isolated profession, in terms of connections with other aspects of the society, I see it as a distinctive and rather special thing in a person's life, relative to the lives of everyone else he or she knows. The person has been mentored separately to some extent, whether born to it (as the child of scholars, for instance) or being a bookish gentry child who made a great effort to find a teacher, or being a peasant child whose dialogue impressed a traveler one day. The way I see it working, such a person may have been separated to some extent from his or her ordinary surroundings, but upon some achievement, is now aware of and connected to a larger, scattershot community across the Crescent land. Couriers with letters and translations and drafts of essays may well be traveling around, from one scholar to another, all the time.

By "no education," I mean no institutionalized or expected standard for education. Obviously every single person in the Crescent land is educated in the sense of being taught through experience and local mentorship, whether for smithying or plowing or any task you can think of. What they don't have are schools or even less a school system.

Let me know if that helps or makes sense.

[Nyhteg]

That's very helpful, yes.

I'd got the sense already that being Scholarly had nothing to do with formal schooling or even monastic life (no organised religion to offer it) but I wasn't sure what form it took in your vision of things. Much clearer.

So do you see bound books as being widely present in the setting? It's a vellum and parchment setup rather than paper based I'm assuming?
I admit the idea of couriers and letters surprised me slightly, but that's completely about me forming a fuller idea of the setting. Again, my assumption is that this would be very much an ad hoc matter rather than any form of 'postal service'.

G

[Ron Edwards]

I don't mean anything like an organized mail service at all, not one bit. I only speak of people who are carrying messages because other people are carrying out correspondence. Don't think of it as a system or an institution. (It also strikes me that scholar-wizards must be very interesting, very informed people relative to everyone else, but that's another discussion.)

For books, we have to break it into two variables: paper (from wood pulp) and binding into covers.

The stuff people write on isn't wood-pulp paper, but any number of other surfaces. I know this sounds weird, but bone is actually a great surface for ink, and a nice scapula from something like a wracker might even be a standard means of record-keeping in some places. For more scholarly pursuits like essays and maps, vellum and parchment sound about right.

The typical item for scholars would be a scroll in a well-made protective case, probably cuir boilli.

Books are a known invention but are not manufactured in the Crescent land. I'm thinking about rather large, hefty items, not easily portable, that you keep on a table or a lectern. It's certainly a treasure, a prized possession. If you own one and aren't a scholar, then scholars know who you are and will make themselves as useful to you as they can.

As I see it, literacy is another one of those things that doesn't map well to modern people. I think everyone in the Crescent land is extremely well-versed in the symbols and the mode of writing/marking that's specific to their professions, which would also be distinctive by location. A merchant would be notable in being able to understand multiple locations' and professions' methods, and in knowing where each is from. But almost none of these people would be able to read in the sense that you and I think of it, composing whatever they feel like saying and knowing that almost anyone else would be able to understand it.