Medieval Royal Tutors
Mar. 14th, 2025 02:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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Hello all! I am looking for any good overviews of medieval tutors of either royalty or nobility. England and France (and other Normanish places) are preferable, but any information is useful at this point. I'm particularly interested in the qualifications of tutors, and some politics involved in their appointment. Teaching schedules would also be useful.
Thanks!
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Date: 2025-03-15 06:28 pm (UTC)Generally, especially for royalty, it's likely to be more specific than general - after all there weren't really enough crown princes around for there to be an entire profession of tutors to the crown prince! Often (like Ascham) it would be an eminent scholar, possibly one who had already had some kind of government position, who is specifically asked to do the job as an honor, but each one would be taking a slightly different path to get there. And also especially in times of war or civil war (which was much of the middle ages in England and France) they might have had a very unstable home life that would disrupt their education. Also as you go farther back the education is going to be less and less regular (and less well-documented) until you end up with early kings who mostly had a military apprenticeship and might not even know how to read.
You might do better finding a specific royal who is a good parallel to your time and place, and looking up information about their tutors specifically. You can likely expand from there, once you have a start. For example, Henri II Plantagenet's wikipedia article has a section that talks about his education, where he was being shuttled around between different noble households and tutored by all different sorts, and you could follow up on the information about any of them.