A History of Western Society: Printed Page 378
A History of Western Society, Value Edition: Printed Page 363
A History of Western Society, Concise Edition: Printed Page 379
The division between educated and uneducated people was only one of many social hierarchies evident in the Renaissance. Every society has social hierarchies; in ancient Rome, for example, there were patricians and plebeians (see Chapter 5). Such hierarchies are to some degree descriptions of social reality, but they are also idealizations — that is, they describe how people imagined their society to be, without all the messy reality of social-