Good historical works on medieval educational methods?

[RenegadeHealer]

Speaking of patronage... when people say "messenger" in relation to the VMS, I originally pictured a messenger boy (they did exist), but when I was reading about Dee and Kelley and many of the other people associated with Rudolph's court, I learned that messages of any importance were rarely passed on by messenger boys, they were taken by people with patronage or who were seeking patronage. The Latin word in the provenanced letter that appears to refer to the VMS can be interpreted as "bearer" and that is a pretty general word for anyone who might have a message or parcel.

If there was a book (let's say the VMS) that was thought to have some value, from what I have read so far... it is extremely unlikely that a messenger in the lower stratum of society would have taken it to the emperor. The most important messages (or assets, whatever they might be) were typically brought to the ruler by those who had the most access, those in the inner circle.

In fact, the impression I got from reading about it, was that they vied with each other for the opportunity to take something to the emperor or to anyone high up in the court. Especially Emperor Rudolph, who was not a particularly social person.

I also learned from reading correspondence (mostly post-VMS, but not too much later) that they frequently asked each other for favors (like asking a colleague to bring back unusual insect specimens if he was traveling to Africa or the Middle East for a few years).

Do those stories about an explorer kidnapping and bringing back a couple of "the natives" of the place he explored to his king's court represent an escalation of this same peacock-strutting? 

Since the VMS's composition most likely predates Emperor Rudolf II by more than a century, it can't have been composed for him or to gain access to him, though it could definitely have been composed as part of a gambit to impress a different powerful and wealthy person, and just lingered around and changed hands. Rudolf's personality and habit of collecting expensive oddities makes it really a shame the dates don't line up, because that would have been a nice piece of supporting evidence. I wouldn't rule out the VMS having been rediscovered and used as part of more than one ruse or socio-political gambit by more than one person in succession, its past obfuscated anew each time. I come back to pretty much every detail about the VMS's origin, other than its approximate place and time of composition, being basically untraceable without a miraculous find of some genuine new artifact.