The medieval teacher is a tremendously difficult profession to define. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the concept of a magister (or, indeed, a magistra) scolarum was a fluid one. A teacher named as such could have taught anything from the alphabet to rhetoric. They could occupy manifold societal categories – such as rich or poor, male or female, respected or ostracized, and even educated or ignorant. The masters and mistresses who operated in Lyon during the later Middle Ages mirrored these extremities of position. Teachers interacted in different ways with the community around them, and their fellow citizens treated them in different ways. They also had to engage with Lyon's particular ‘system’ of education and with the authorities who ruled – or claimed to rule – over their schools. By examining the references to teachers in the archival records of the city, it is possible to gain some insight into how medieval elementary and grammar teachers were perceived by their contemporaries.

This chapter will concentrate on three aspects of the lives of schoolmasters and schoolmistresses in late medieval Lyon. Firstly, the education and background of individual teachers and school officials will be considered. This will be relatively brief because there is little surviving information regarding individual teachers in Lyon. Secondly, there will be a discussion of the types of teaching positions that existed in Lyon. This will include evidence of the presence of hierarchies of teachers in specific schools and in the city as a whole, and how particular teaching roles were viewed. Thirdly, the economic situation of Lyonnais teachers will be evaluated, allowing for a reconstruction of the economic status of teachers in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In addition to these points, there will be a case study of the varied career of one teacher active in Lyon at the end of the fifteenth century: Jose Badius Ascensius. To begin with, however, we will briefly exam the nature of the teaching profession in later medieval France.

What were the different types of teachers in medieval France? It is difficult to define the precise function (and preparation for that function) from the terms magister and magistra, the usual titles given to a teacher in documents.