I honestly wonder why the nobles of Westeros continue to maintain maesters given that they never listen to them. Contrast Dhuoda’s advice: read, and collect a lot of books, she tells William. And she is demonstrating that emphasis; Dhuoda is at pains to show off her own reading and learning throughout – one imagines as a way of building credibility with her reader (her son). That performance of education is one she expects will be understood and respected by other military aristocrats.
Public educator Bret Deveraux’s blog A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry (ACOUP) has a lot of approachable articles on a wide variety of historical topics - especially with regards to things that we don’t think about in worldbuilding premodern societies.
Some particularly useful articles and series, for our purposes, are:
- Lonely Cities (and II)
- Carolingian Values and Martial Values in the 12th Century Occitan Nobility
- Practical Polytheism
- Oaths! How do they work?
- Class, Status and the Early Church
- Bread, how Did They Make It?
- Clothing, How Did They Make It?
- Iron, How Did They Make It?
- The Siege of Gondor and The Battle of Helm’s Deep to discuss military hierarchy, tactics and logistics
- Logistics, How Did They Do It on army (and other) movement, food, navigation, etc.
- Total Generalship: Commanding Pre-Modern Armies
- Fortification, Part III: Castling
- How it Wasn’t: Game of Thrones and the Middle Ages on some common missteps of “realistic” medievalism