Charlemagne's School
Chapter 1
Story Time, Episode 8. Goes with Story of the World, Volume 2, chapter 13. About 4 minutes. Voices were made with ElevenLabs. The music box is played live by your browser. Turn Voices off to read the captions together at your own pace; each line still moves on by itself.
Where the facts come from
- Goes with Susan Wise Bauer, The Story of the World, Volume 2: The Middle Ages (Peace Hill Press), chapter 13. The story here is our own telling.
- Charlemagne's writing tablets under his pillow, the chapel at Aachen, and Alcuin: Einhard, The Life of Charlemagne (about AD 830).
- Schools ordered in 789 (the Admonitio generalis) and Carolingian minuscule, the handwriting behind our lowercase letters: Rosamond McKitterick, Charlemagne: The Formation of a European Identity (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
- Scripture: Proverbs 4:7, King James Version.
- Made with: hand-written JavaScript on an HTML canvas; voices from ElevenLabs, including real child-character voices for the kids; music played live by the browser's Web Audio.