Question

Which of the following individuals would likely have had the MOST education in the medieval society?
a villein's daughter

a nun

a knight's wife

a serf

Answer 1

A nun, of course. Education in the modern sense of the word -- meaning learning another language (Latin or Greek), learning to read and write, reading books by famous philosophers, and so forth -- stuff you learn from a book in a classroom -- is derived from medieval religious study in monasteries.

The other three would have received what today we would call a "practical" or "vocational" education, to the extent they received any formal training at all beyond what they received from their family growing up, consisting of some kind of formal or informal apprenticeship or mentoring during the learning of practical tasks related to husbandry, farming, household maintenance, protocol and etiquette, artisanry, et cetera, whatever was appropriate to his station and role in the village. It would have been short on theory and reading, and long on practical doing. That is, the serf might have been taught quite a lot about the practical aspects of goat-herding, but he would have learned by doing, taught informally by more senior and experienced goatherds, rather than reading it out of a book. The very idea of learning anything at all of practical importance in a classroom, using a textbook, is quite recent -- dating from the no earlier than the late 1700s.

The knight's wife, or villein's daughter, if either was from a wealthy family, might have also received an education in French or Latin or something, to make her more cultured, but this would probably have been regarded as a bit of luxury consumption, like a modern student learning to juggle or speak Esperanto, not really a sine qua non for assuming her station in the way we usually think of education.