im writing a story or "tale" during the medieval times (1100-1480s). need help with something?

Question

my story is about a cleric (a student who spends all his time reading and loves to learn) and he's trying to teach his son who reads all the time a lesson. the lesson is that you should study but you should also go out and have fun.
im telling this lesson by having the father tell his son a story of when he was younger that he entered a contest of knowledge, kind of like jeoperdy or wheel of forutune, something like that. so i want to write that he wins the first 2 rounds but loses the next 3 because the first 2 rounds are about things a cleric would know but an average person wouldnt, and the last 3 are about something an average person knows but a cleric wouldnt.
my problem is, is that i dont know what the category of the rounds should be.
the first i might do astronomy and one of the last 3 will be town events.
so the opponent wouldnt know about astronomy and the cleric wouldnt know about the town events cause hes in his house all day.

so taking the setting (medieval) into

consideration, what should the other categories be about?
the only things i can think of is like bands or clothing or celebrities but back then they didnt really have this so what can i use?

Answer 1

First of all, a cleric in the middle ages refered to someone who held an office in the church - a priest, generally, although the term could refer to someone within the monastic system like a priest or a nun.

Second, the first level of medieval education consisted of the "Trivium " (grammar, rhetoric and logic). The second level was called the "Quadrivium" (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy). After that a student would enter university. The first universities were established in the 12th century - the earlier part of the time frame for your story.

Hope that helps.

Answer 2

The things a town person would know about would be very practical things. Towns in those days were really small villages, and the villagers would know how to milk a cow, or catch and skin a rabbit for dinner or stook sheaves of wheat. Some would know how to form a wheel for a cart, and others would know how to hammer out the iron band that went around the cart wheel.
If the town was large enough, it might boast a few people who could play a lute, or a flute, or tell traditional tales.
A cleric would be unlikely to do any of these things, but he would be able to read and write, which most of the townsfolk would not be able to do.
What neither the cleric nor the men in the town would be able to do would be women's work, like spinning, carding, weaving wool, or thrashing, retting and weaving flax into linens.

Answer 3

{A cleric is usually considered a church person, and as such would have had no legitimate children...they could not marry.... You might wish to research this and find out when the church (at this time it would have been the catholic church) made marriage illegal for clerics (priests)}

Astronomy (The study of stars and planets) would not have been anything even an older person would have known about ---(research Kepler, and Copernicus)------- Astrology, (supposed influence of planets on the lives of people) would have!!!! and they are different!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Remember, the only people who could read were the priests (clerics, clergy), and they read mostly Latin. The printing press wasn't invented until about 1450... up until that time only the wealthy and clergy had books since each was hand copied...too expensive for the ordinary guy...
So the study of, or interpretation of Astrology, would be a topic you could use.

In almost every event, men of the church were the only people who had any knowledge of anything.... everyone else spent time just trying to stay alive, growing enough to eat, and burying their dead. It wasn't a pleasant time to live. If you make your setting later than 1450, your options of subject matter is much larger, but still understand that the common people grew the food, the lord of the feudal system and the knights destroyed it with their silly wars, and taxed the serfs (the common people) in the amount of food that was due the lord and knights. Clergy would probably know little about how to raise horses, how to shoe horses, how to raise cattle, and probably little in the way of things mothers gave their children to eat or to cure them of disease---herbs and the like...just keep in mind that the clergy really were the only educated people in the village, and even they didn't know much other than the bible. (see below about guilds and building big churches...)

After the printing press, even the common man learned to read, and it wasn't very many years that translations from Latin into German, French, Italian and other languages were out there. And clerics really weren't in the house all day....they were out saving people's souls, giving blessings, and again, burying people, so they certainly would know their way around a town...Things that the common people might learn from people a city would hire......know how to design a huge cathedral -- some of them built that were in the 1100's and 1200's took 80 years -- obviously the guys who started them weren't the same ones who finished. (and several fell down, killing many workers in the process, and the whole church had to be started over , even when that had 25 years in to them!!!!! {Check out Chartres Cathedral, Notre Dame, Cathedral of Reims. or if my spelling is off, Google Medieval Cathedrals - Roman Catholic.. There were also Guilds (sort of like labor unions) -- workers in stone, merchants, and the like, that priests wouldn't have know the rules in.... Sons usually followed their fathers and became what their dads did... Google Medieval Guilds for info on that.

Good luck on your game show essay -- sounds like fun.

Helpful? need anymore, write.

Answer 4

Who precisely do you think of is going to give up you? you could write despite you prefer to write down. putting zombies in medieval circumstances feels like a exciting premise as long as you're keen to put in lots of discover ways to verify you authentically seize the term. perhaps your zombies would have some thing to do with the Black dying.

Answer 5

back then a cleric wouldn't know about things like blacksmithing, they wouldn't know about animals, like shepherding or farming, things like that. he wouldn't know about jousting, fighting, contests and competitions. theres actually quite a few things to choose from! GOOD LUCK sounds like a good story!

Answer 6

1. Why are there many religions
2. Is there hell on earth
3. Who is your perfect soul mate
4. What is jealousy
5. What are the differences in the sexes of man.

Answer 7

How about knights jousting or falconry? Or maybe hunting or working the land?

Answer 8

The site below may help.

Answer 9

wow that sounds cool,let me know when you finish