Medieval Kids: Their Letters Prove Nothing Changes

There is a letter — written sometime in the twelfth century, surviving by the kind of archival miracle that makes historians briefly believe in providence — in which a student at a medieval European university writes to his father asking for money. The books are expensive, he explains. The lodgings cost more than expected. He has been diligent in his studies, truly he has, but the situation is urgent and he hopes his father understands.

His father, one suspects, did not entirely believe him.

What strikes me every time I encounter these letters is not their novelty but their absolute lack of it. The medieval university student — Bologna, Paris, Oxford — was navigating the same negotiation that every first-generation scholar and every comfortable merchant's son has navigated since the idea of formal education was invented: the gap between the cost of becoming something and the willingness of the people who love you to fund the attempt. The letters survive because they were sometimes used as templates. Scribes copied them into collections so that future students could learn the correct epistolary form for begging. There were, in other words, form letters for asking your parents for money. The medieval world understood that certain human needs are structural.

Around the same time these students were composing their appeals, a woman named Arégonde was buried in the Basilica of Saint-Denis, just north of Paris. She died in the sixth century — Frankish royalty, wife of Clothar I — and her skeleton lay undisturbed until 1959, when archaeologists found her still wearing the shoes she was buried in. Forensic analysis done decades later revealed that she had survived childhood polio. The disease had left one leg shorter than the other, the bones reshaped by compensation and time. She had walked like that her entire life. She had become a queen like that.

What her bones tell us is what the student letters tell us by different means: that the medieval world was not the silent, symbolic tableau we sometimes make it. It was inhabited by people managing the particular indignity of bodies that don't cooperate and finances that don't stretch, writing embarrassing letters home, limping toward thrones they had nonetheless decided to claim.

We call the Middle Ages remote because the dates are far away. But the distance is a trick of calendar, not of character. The student at Bologna asking for book money is every graduate student who ever sent a carefully worded email to a parent who suspects the real problem is eating out too often. Arégonde in her shoes, walking through a Frankish court on one leg shorter than the other, is everyone who has ever carried something invisible into a room that expected perfection.

The past is not a foreign country. It is a letter that arrived a thousand years late — and reads exactly like something you might have written yourself.