Philippe Ariès noted over thirty years ago that the study of medieval education heavily favored the great universities over elementary and secondary schools.1 His assessment remains largely applicable today: scholarship on the organization and curricula of the studia generalia burgeons, while basic data on the schooling of children remains scarce. This disparate scholarly attention seems puzzling if we consider that elementary and secondary schooling probably had much more impact on medieval society and culture than the universities. Perhaps the emphasis on universities reflects our ingrained prejudices in favor of "high culture" or even our own sympathies, as modern academics, for the institutions and individuals that we consider our professional ancestors. The latter possibility should encourage us to expand our conception of late medieval education beyond the institutional organization of classrooms, teachers, and pupils, which we most readily recognize as "schooling" in our era. Charles de la Roncière has lately stressed how much training of Tuscan children must have occurred inside the home, in a family business, or through social groups.2 Medieval education was surely a diffuse, complex, and broad process, involving a wide range of the basic functions of conservation, reproduction, assimilation, transformation, negotiation, and conflict commonly recognized in modern social theory.3

    Study of these functions of course depends on practical and methodological problems well known to any social historian. Because of these difficulties, comprehensive studies of medieval schools are available only for a few areas of Italy and England, while we possess scarcely a handful of articles or monographs (and often less) for entire nations elsewhere.4 The Iberian peninsula is one of those areas for which information about elementary or secondary education is so scarce that scholars eagerly seize on any document that seems to offer some insights.5 One text often cited to illustrate the schools of medieval Spain is chapter 2 from the Book of Blanquerna by the Majorcan lay theologian and philosopher Ramon Llull. As it happens, Llull's account is hardly an empirical report on practices of elementary and secondary education in his era. It does nonetheless offer a provocative contribution to discourse of and about schooling as a process of social reproduction. This essay analyzes how Ramon Llull's representation of early education especially displays the operation of two important social functions. On the one hand, his text offers numerous examples of what Pierre Bourdieu terms "misrecognition," that is, the symbolic manifestation of social power in ways that make it appear to be a force of some other kind.6 On the other hand, the Book of Blanquerna also describes very clearly the kind of process that Roger Chartier dubs "appropriation," that is, the "differentiated and contrasting uses of the same [cultural] goods, the same texts, and the same ideas."7 Llull's text is most interesting for its representation of how diverse processes of misrecognition and appropriation enable the education of children to further social reproduction.

    Analysis of Ramon Llull's Book of Blanquerna must observe the same cautions necessary in studying any aspect of his very unusual career.8 Llull was born about 1232 into a wealthy Majorcan merchant family, but abandoned worldly affairs around age 30 in order to devote the rest of his long life to promoting the reform of Christian society and the conversion of all non-believers. He spent a decade in private study and contemplation, learning Arabic and acquiring some knowledge of theology and philosophy. Around 1275 he began fifty years of virtually continuous peregrination, seeking audiences with popes and princes, visiting major universities, soliciting aid from lay patrons, befriending clerical (especially mendicant) authorities, and making several missionary trips to North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean. Despite his constant activity, contemporary testimony to his efforts is scant.9 Our chief source of information about Llull remains his own extensive oeuvre: at his death in 1316, he left over 250 writings in Catalan and Latin (he also made Arabic translations of some works, but none of these versions survive). Most of these writings expound his personal system for contemplation and argumentation, the so-called Great Universal Art of Finding Truth, whose plan he attributed to divine inspiration.10

    Ramon Llull wrote several texts that we consider literary in character, such as the Book of Blanquerna.11 This narrative traces the life of its titular protagonist,12 as he passes through various sectors of lay and clerical society. Llull's text has attracted the label of "spiritual romance" because it presents Blanquerna as a sort of Christian hero questing for spiritual perfection. Some scholars have treated this narrative as a faithful report on thirteenth-century society,13 but closer analysis suggests that Llull confected his narrative through the dramatic concatenation of exempla and commonplace ethical precepts. These scenes and precepts probably owe little to Llull's own childhood experience on Majorca, since he wrote the Book of Blanquerna at Montpellier some forty years later.14 They depend much more obviously on the general doctrine of moral finality that Llull advocates throughout his oeuvre.15 Following a tradition that extends from Augustine's distinction between uti et frui to Anselm's concept of ordinatio, Llull assigns to every creature the "first intention" or primary obligation of knowing, loving, and serving its Creator.16 Applying this single, broad doctrine of moral finality in the representation of diverse, particular conditions of social reproduction requires considerable discursive work. The Book of Blanquerna strives to define a sort of "mixed life" of secular and sacred obligations as the ideal existence for every Christian layperson.

    In general, Llull's Book of Blanquerna rather obviously dramatizes the appropriation of clerical values and practices to lay affairs, but this endeavor is hardly facile or unproblematic. The first twenty chapters of the narrative deal at length with various social, economic, and ethical conflicts that Blanquerna, his parents Evast and Aloma, and his fianc‚e Natana all face in choosing between the lay "order of matrimony" and the clerical "order of religion." Their solutions to these conflicts almost always require some misrecognition of the power or interests involved. For example, the first chapter of Blanquerna describes the background and union of Blanquerna's parents. Their decisions regarding marriage, family, and career offer some obvious, socially ordered distinctions in class and gender as individual ethical or spiritual choices. Evast is the son of a "noble burgher," the heir to a "great household" and "great wealth," but finds himself strongly tempted to enter a life of religion in order to "flee the vanities of this world" (1.1). Nonetheless, he decides to marry, in order to set a good example for other married laypeople and to raise new servants for God (1.1). For this purpose Evast asks his relatives to find him a woman who is healthy and well-formed in order to produce children of "good disposition," possesses the noble lineage that "ennobles" the body to resist vice, is "well-bred and humble," and comes from a family willing and honored to accept marriage with him (1.2). Once Aloma is found to meet these criteria, she and Evast are married, "by God's will" (1.3). Evast charges his wife with administering their household, while he pursues commerce, in order to maintain their estate and avoid the evils of sloth (1.10). In these events, the implied identifications of class with character, of health with morals, of industry with virtue, and of familial alliances with divine will manifest the manifold exercises of misrecognition necessary to organize the diverse spiritual and material interests in Evast's and Aloma's lives. This same manifold exercise appears in the subsequent representation of their child Blanquerna's physical and intellectual development, which thus consistently, necessarily, and simultaneously describes the reproduction of those same interests.17

    Chapter 2 of Llull's spiritual romance is entitled "On the birth and good upbringing (bon nudriment) of Blanquerna." This title neatly implies a dual concern for nature and nurture, which the chapter develops through a series of exemplary scenes dramatizing conventional advice on healthy physical development and rigorous moral training. The dual ideal of "sound body and soul" was a favorite theme of contemporary moralists.18 Llull's account of Blanquerna's birth begins by recalling both the piety and the power of his parents:

Evast and Aloma lived each day in love, patience, and humility. On Sundays and feast days Evast went to monasteries of male religious and sang and praised his Creator with them. Aloma did likewise in the monasteries of female religious. They also went around hospitals attending to the sick, and visited the shameful poor, giving them alms in private. They also placed orphaned children in trades, so that when they became older poverty would not provide opportunities for sin.

    The second paragraph of chapter two continues the symbolic display of privilege through piety in its description of Blanquerna's birth. Llull represents the child's arrival as both an intervention of divine grace in human affairs and as an occasion for reaffirming social alliances:

While Evast and Aloma did these and many other good things, God who is the fulfillment of all good and grace remembered the wishes of Aloma and her humility and patience. He gave her a beautiful son named Blanquerna. Great was the pleasure, joy, and happiness that Evast and Aloma felt from the birth of Blanquerna. Evast went immediately to church to give thanks to God for the son that God had given to him, and prayed to God that his son Blanquerna would be His servant all the days of his life. The day that Blanquerna was born, Evast gave great alms to the poor of Jesus Christ. On the eighth day Blanquerna received baptism, attended by many godfathers and godmothers who led saintly lives, so that God in His grace would bless Blanquerna through their sanctity. That day Evast had a saintly chaplain sing a solemn mass and give the sacrament of baptism to Blanquerna, because such a sacrament should not be administered by a wicked sinner unworthy of giving this sacrament, which is the beginning and road that leads to eternal rest.

    Chapter 2 moves quickly from concern for saving a newborn child's soul to care for promoting its healthy bodily development. The account of young Blanquerna's diet and exercise in paragraphs 3 to 5 dramatizes the kind of advice typically found in popular guides on hygiene and medicine:22

Blanquerna received a wetnurse of healthy constitution so that he would be raised on healthy milk, since bad milk makes children sickly and weak in constitution (malalts e despoderats en sa persona). The wetnurse was honorable and led a good life, because one must always avoid giving a child to nurse if the wetnurse is unhealthy, lives in sin, harbors wicked vices, has a bad constitution, or a defective vital quality or breath (sia de mala complexi¢, ni que tinga corrompuda la calitat ni lo alende).

  During the year that Blanquerna was born the only food that Aloma gave her son was milk, because infants in their first year lack digestion strong enough to accept or digest other foods, such as the pabulum made with milk or olive oil and similar foods that some force them to eat. This causes children to have scabies, ulcers, tumors, and abscesses. It also causes their vital humors to rise upwards, destroying the brain and vision, and certainly no end of other infirmities.

  This child Blanquerna was raised very diligently. Aloma his mother dressed him in such a way that in winter he could feel a little cold and in summer a little warm. Thus the elements that constitute the human body cooperate during the season of their functioning, providing the body with a temperate warmth, so that the vital humors do not become accustomed to rise upwards. Aloma kept her son Blanquerna with her until he could run and play with other children. She did not constrain him from anything that nature requires in children of this age, but rather left him to the course of nature (curs de natura) until he was eight years old.

    Where paragraphs three to five focus on the regimens of diet and exercise necessary to strengthen the body, paragraphs six through eleven review the training in knowledge, piety, and virtue necessary to fortify the soul. This section illustrates broadly how the intersection of family conditions and educational institutions control the developing individual's access to "cultural capital," in Bourdieu's terms. This capital consists not simply of knowledge, but of the "good manners," "right attitudes," "common wisdom," and so forth that enjoy most value and legitimacy.27 Paragraph six recounts that

When Blanquerna was eight years old, his father Evast sent him to school and had him taught according to the book of Instruction for Children. There it tells how one should first teach a child in the vernacular and provide it with instruction and knowledge concerning the articles of the Faith, the ten commandments of the Law, the seven sacraments of Holy Mother Church, the seven virtues and seven mortal sins, and the other things contained in that book.

    The remaining paragraphs in this chapter alternately treat various aspects of the dual care for body and soul. Throughout this section, Llull represents material interests and spiritual ideals as interactive contributions to social reproduction. For example, paragraph 7 shows how careful control of bodily appetites is especially necessary for developing virtue:

   One day it happened that Aloma gave her son Blanquerna, before he set out to school in the morning, a snack of roasted meat, and then gave him a pastry to eat at school if he became hungry. When Evast his father learned of this he severely scolded Aloma. He said that children should receive no snack in the morning except bread, lest they become gluttonous or spoiled and lose their appetite for eating at the table at dinner time. Eating bread alone does not gratify children's appetite so much that they inhibit their natural functions through overeating, but even so one should only give them bread when they ask for it.

  Blanquerna became accustomed and used to eating every kind of food, lest his nature acquire a preference for one food over another. He was forbidden strong or very diluted wine, and the heavily salted things that diminish one's natural heat. Blanquerna was given a student as guardian and tutor, who took him promptly every morning to church and showed him how to pray to God and to hear mass devoutly and attentively. After mass he took him to song school so that he could learn to serve well at sung mass.

    The ninth and tenth paragraphs describe the advanced curriculum that Blanquerna studies in a "grammar school," the most common institution of primary and secondary education in most areas of later medieval Europe. The economic and social resources invested in him since birth now yield further intellectual and spiritual rewards:

Blanquerna studied grammar so well that he learned to speak and read Latin. He also learned logic, rhetoric, and natural philosophy. Thus he could comprehend more easily the science of medicine that conserves his bodily health, and the science of theology in order to know, love, and serve God and understand how to govern his soul for the sake of eternal life in Paradise.

  Once Blanquerna had learned the book of Principles and Degrees of Medicine, from which he acquired sufficient knowledge to govern his bodily health, then his father sent him to theology school, where he heard [lectures on] Holy Scripture constantly, and sometimes responded to questions about theology.

    Of course, Blanquerna is not studying for a medical or ecclesiastical career. Chapters 1-3 included various references to his parents' plans for his eventual marriage and management of their family's estate (esp. 3.1). The following remarks on "good upbringing," from the concluding paragraph of chapter 2, evidently assume Blanquerna's eventual involvement in social and civic affairs:

While Blanquerna was educated in this manner, Evast raised him with fear and love, because all children and youths at this age should be raised and nurtured with these two mores and virtues, along with fasting, prayer, confession, alms giving, humble speech and dress, and the company of good people. Evast and Aloma taught many other things like these to their son Blanquerna, so that when he was older and reached adulthood, he would have, thanks to good customs and nature, a character pleasing to God and to other people, and so he would not rebel against accepting the customs appropriate to good upbringing, which leading citizens and nobles should be the first to possess.

    This last observation usefully returns our attention to the larger question of the role that schooling plays in Blanquerna's overall upbringing. What further "profit of distinction" does this booklearning add to the privileges already implied in the process of social reproduction that Llull clearly represents in this chapter? Taken individually, the learned practices and institutions that Llull mentions seem unremarkable, an impression perhaps due to his skill in combining and dramatizing so many commonplace elements in the form of a narrative. But the additional expertise in medicine and theology that Blanquerna acquires seems very ambitious, like the universal scope that Llull claims for his Great Art. Hence, his account of Blanquerna's education risks attracting the label "utopian" that scholars have applied to many of his other proposals.44 But we could also argue that Llull's ambitious representation simply foregrounds relations of "misrecognition" and "appropriation" that arise in the multiple, ambiguous structures inherent to any "unified market" of cultural goods. For example, clergy and laypeople alike certainly strive to exercise "Christian" virtue and piety, yet they do so in very diverse circumstances of profession, class, or gender. Similarly, the "education" achieved by Blanquerna from rudimentary manuals such as Llull's Instruction for Children or Principles of Medicine is not the same "education" acquired by university students from reading the auctores, hearing lectures, or participating in disputations. Or, the household "government" exercised by a burgher's wife is not the same as the legal and political power wielded by a royal monarch. Yet these diverse levels of activity do support a common discourse, exchange, or practice regarding "virtue and piety," "education," or "government." It is precisely the diversity of those ways that allows Blanquerna the layman to appropriate clerical forms of learning, virtue, or government without challenging the authority, value, or legitimacy of those forms. Llull's narrative is in fact one of the earliest texts to advocate extensive booklearning for the laity. This appropriation would subvert the very distinction between laicus and clericus, if it did not function in Llull's representation as a means of generating distinctions among laypersons themselves. That is, it misrecognizes the disparity between lay and clerical education as the intellectual or spiritual edification of certain privileged laypeople. Hence the most intriguing question posed by Llull's representations of laity devoted to a "mixed life" or to advanced schooling is not whether such practices disturbed the distinction of "laity" and "clergy," but how such practices served the social production of distinctions among the laity. Any answer to this question would greatly help to clarify the still very obscure development of later medieval and early Renaissance Lullism as a "popular" practice of learning and piety.45

    Nonetheless, even if we discount Blanquerna's study of medicine and theology as a very improbable means for laypeople to attain cultural or social distinction, Llull's representation of schooling may not satisfy our definitions of an "educational program." His account of "elementary and secondary education" does not give that process a preeminent role in forming the young hero's persona. Instead, it appears as a dramatization of the ascetic ideal of care for body and soul, as a misrecognition of distinctions in class and gender, or as an appropriation of clerical cultural capital. These narrative, ideological, and practical contingencies in Llull's representation of schooling suggest an important caution about isolating the education of children from other processes of social reproduction. Any inquiry that focuses on schools or schoolmasters alone will certainly be too narrow. Nicholas Orme notes, with implicit consternation, the apparently slight status of schools as "cultural institutions" in fourteenth and fifteenth-century England. According to his calculations, only 300 to 600 schoolmasters served the entire population of the country around 1400. However, this limited number should not negate their importance so much as it reminds us of the range of other interests, agents, and distinctions that contributed to social reproduction in their era. This diversity is apparent in an example offered by Barbara Hanawalt in her address to the 1995 meeting of the Illinois Medieval Association: a young man, asked to produce witnesses who can verify his identity, calls upon his relatives, godparents, nurse, household servants, parish priest, and schoolmaster. These subjects, along with the manifold social practices and relations realized through them, all contribute to the "good upbringing" that Ramon Llull represents in his Book of Blanquerna. Despite its idiosyncrasy or idealization, the scope of his representation should ultimately challenge us to recognize how our own broad concepts of "education" are equally arbitrary, heterogeneous, and constructed. Indeed, we might even wonder to what social, political, or economic ends we misrecognize and appropriate the schooling of late medieval children as a historical predecessor for our own practices.