The history of formal education and instruction in elementary and grammar schools in the Middle Ages is a difficult story to trace. While the existence of schools and teachers at this level is not disputed, it is frequently ignored. The detailed records left behind by the medieval university usually attracts scholars into a study of higher institutions of learning rather than the more obscure schools that provided such establishments with students or taught the rudiments of academic knowledge on a stand-alone basis. The focus is on the institutional and organizational history of the university and, when the daily practice of teaching and learning is discussed, students’ preparatory studies can sometimes be overlooked. This book is concerned with elementary and grammar schooling in one French city, Lyon, where it will examine and reconstruct the educational community there in the period from 1285 to 1530. It will consider two important aspects of learning and schooling in the later Middle Ages: how schools were organized and administered in a given geographical area – in this case, the city of Lyon – and how people such as teachers, parents, and pupils interacted with a nascent ‘school system’ and its constituent parts.

The concept of a school system is problematic in a medieval context. It suggests a rigidly constructed framework in which all pedagogical activities took place under the administration of an accepted authority. This was not the situation in Lyon in the later Middle Ages; but neither was the concept entirely alien. While there was no absolute authority that made centralized decisions with regard to education, certain institutions sought to establish themselves as pedagogical prime movers in Lyon. Both the cathedral chapter of Saint-Jean and the municipal council wished to serve as that centralizing authority: directly appointing schoolteachers and giving licences to teach others. The cathedral and the council intersected in manifold ways during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but they came into conflict over the question of the control of elementary and grammar schools in the city. This issue of jurisdiction had its origins in the complex history of Lyon itself as it developed into a resurgent mercantile centre from a semi-independent archbishopric in the ‘inter-zone’ between Capetian France and the Holy Roman Empire.