Question1:- Write the summery of Education during the Black Death.
Question1:- Write the summery of Education during the Black Death.
The economic forces of supply and demand unleashed by the pestilence affected the Church and clergy as well as everyone else. Priests supplied the necessary sacraments and religious ceremony during plague-time, and people were willing and able to bid prices up by offering more and more in fees as the clergy itself fell to the pestilence. Clerical death tolls tended to be at least as high as among the rest of society: during the first epidemic over half of the Dominicans in Florence died (77 of 150); at least 40% of the clergy in Barcelona died; in the Diocese of Coventry and Lichfield, England, about one-third of the priests died; and in Winchester Diocese almost 49% died between 1348 and 1350.
In fact, bishops and religious orders raced men through the preparation for preaching, teaching, or the priesthood in order to fill the many vacancies. They had to recruit very actively and lower standards such as age and basic literacy. Looking back to 40 years earlier, the English Augustinian canon Henry Knighton wrote of the 1350s, "in a very short time there came crowding into orders a great multitude whose wives had died in the pestilence. As might be expected of laymen many of these were illiterate, and those who knew how to read could not understand what it was they read."
Knighton had little use for many of those in the generation who had died off, but others lamented the loss of so many pastors, teachers, preachers, and role-models. Many thought that the good, dedicated men had disappeared, leaving the shirkers and vice-ridden and the new and unprepared. This loss of valuable human capital affected lay as well as religious education. Men who taught local primary schools often died or assumed better jobs, and few remained to take their places. By the 1360s this lack of preparation was telling in the university classrooms, and academic standards began to decline.
Civic-minded will-makers sometimes included scholarships or even the foundations of new colleges in their wills. At Cambridge the bishop of Norwich, William Bateman, founded Trinity Hall in 1350, and supported Gonville Hall, whose founder died in 1350. When Elizabeth de Clare took over as patron of University Hall in 1359, she noted the large number of men who served God and the state who had died in the pestilence a decade earlier. William of Wykeham founded Winchester College (1382) to provide an educated clergy and to ensure prayers for his and his parents' souls. Corpus Christi College was founded in the wake of the first epidemic, and at Oxford, Canterbury College was established in 1362 and New College in the 1370s. Emperor Charles IV not only established the first central European university in his capital at Prague in 1348, but he also founded five more between 1355 and 1369. In each of the five cases, the school's charter specifically mentions the pestilence as part of the reason for the foundation. The initiatives worked, as enrollments in theology schools increased significantly after 1350. Historian William Courtenay attributes this to three factors: society's general need for new and educated clergy, with opportunities for good incomes; the rising need for so-called chantry priests who served people's private spiritual needs; and the fact that the newly rich wanted their sons to pursue lucrative clerical careers.
Though Latin would remain entrenched in universities and the Church and its study would preoccupy Renaissance humanists, it seems clear that vernacular literacy and literature emerged rapidly and strongly after the Black Death. Prayers, poetry, short stories, plague tracts, even the Bible: all began to circulate more widely in vernacular languages than ever before. Charles IV encouraged German and Czech literature in his empire, and Old Irish (Gaelic) literature replaced Anglo-Irish after the pestilence in Ireland. In England, French all but disappeared as a common language: Latin texts were increasingly translated into English instead of French; between 1362 and 1364 three parliaments were opened in English; and in 1362 French was banned from the law courts. While some of this was due to a rising sense of nationalism— England was in the midst of the Hundred Years War—it is hard to avoid the conclusion that English speakers in Ireland, French speakers in England, and Latin speakers everywhere were declining in numbers absolutely and in relation to native speakers. This trend helped ensure that the Italian of Machiavelli, the French of Montaigne, the Spanish of Cervantes, the German of Luther, and the English of Shakespeare would develop alongside the revival of Cicero's Latin and Homer's Greek as expressions of the cultural Renaissance of the 15th and 16th centuries.
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