Although the politics of Westeros are widely discussed in North America (well, in HESA Towers, anyway, where we’re all getting ready for an office finale viewing on Sunday), relatively little attention has been paid to the role of higher education in the Seven Kingdoms. Or rather, the ramifications of its lack thereof.
Magic and dragons aside, Westeros seems like your basic high medieval economy/society – 13th or 14th century, by the look of it. Europe at this point in its history had several dozen universities, dotted across Italy, Spain, France, England, Germany and Bohemia. But Westeros only seems to have one higher education institution, known as the Citadel.
The Citadel, intriguingly, isn’t quite a university the way we know them. It trains men (only men) to join the order of Maesters, a group of scholar/scientists. The notion of disciplines seems not to exist, even to the extent it did in Europe as the trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy). It is in effect a professional school, with no arts degree underpinning it.
Why might knowledge institutions have evolved differently in Westeros? I think I would argue that there are two separate processes at work. The first is the structure of religion; the early universities in Europe were to a very large extent places centres of theology and religious law; certainly most had a very close relationship with the local ecclesiastical authorities. While Westeros has an established religion (The Faith of the Seven) and a Bible-like holy book, it is kept quite separate from the country’s secular power structure. There is therefore seemingly no need for centres of higher learning to train people in canon law, nor to training clerics in religious disputation, and hence no impetus for the creation of things we know as universities which grant degrees.
Second, in Europe (particularly in Italy) civic competition was what created the impetus for the spread of universities. The presence of hundreds of fee-paying (and real-estate occupying) students was a big economic prize back in the day, even if they weren’t actually engines of self-sustaining economic growth. Westeros for the most part doesn’t have this. In fact, there simply aren’t too many populations centres worthy of the name “city”: it is, on the whole, a more rural society than 14th century Europe. And this again suggests little impetus for what we know as degree-granting universities.
There aren’t a lot of parallels to the Citadel anywhere, really. The Islamic world had a lot of scholarly nodes but little in the way of institutions; the Chinese had academies, but these were mostly or the purpose of test preparation (lots of scholarly/scientific activity took place in China of course, just not in the academies). To the extent the Citadel resembles any known type of medieval institution, it is the Indian monasteries such as Taxila or Nalanda. These were centres of learning which did not grant degrees, but simply became places where large numbers of scholars would congregate and where, over time, large libraries accumulated.
One way perhaps in which the Citadel does resemble medieval universities is in the mental habits of the graduates it produces; a good number of maesters seem to be vile obscurantists rather than actual scholars – and the creation of new knowledge is hardly on the agenda (as indeed it was not in European universities, either , until the early 17th century). The lone exception here is Maester Qyburn (or former maester, since he was tossed out of the order for being a complete ethical nightmare) who, to be honest, is the only person on the entire continent who could be described as a source of technical innovation (ballistae, zombie Cleganes, etc.). If there is any of this kind of experimentation in the Citadel, they are doing a damn good job of keeping it secret. Their VP Research needs to be fired, because the tech Transfer strategy clearly isn’t working.
Which brings up a broader point about the conditions under which universities operate. In this rather perceptive article on the lack of an industrial/technological revolution in Westeros (read it, it’s good), UCL’s Peter Antonioni points out that a lot of different factors have to sync up in order to create self-sustaining technological change: not just education and science, but finance, politics and urbanization. Take away any of those things and it’s not clear that you get the conditions for growth or modernization. Same for universities: church and state had to be in a particular balance with one another for them to be born, advances in scholarly communication had to occur before science really becomes a part of the institutions, and the business, finance and the state all had to progress to a certain point before you could get the modern research university which is now the global standard. In short: universities can sometimes seem like magical places, but they aren’t created with a wave of a wand. They exist embedded in specific ecosystems which are really difficult to replicate. And to grow higher education, it’s as important to feed the ecosystem as it is the institution itself.
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It will be noted that the university of Paris created enough knowledge which was innovative to the point of heresy, as to inspire sixteen lists of condemned theses in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.