important to note in order to identify examples of social satire and social critique, the specific content of the argument seems not to be the ultimate factor of analysis: The intellectual climate of the Middle Ages is.
When . . . a modern reader begins to read a medieval discussion of intellectual knowledge, he will probably find that an initial feeling of familiarity with the questions and ways of arguing is gradually replaced by . . . a set of presuppositions and concepts he cannot share, and methods he cannot understand. But once he has gauged the distance and appreciated the reasons behind it, the reader will begin to understand how, if he (or a modern philosopher) shared the training, assumptions and aims of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century scholars, he would approach the problems which interest him now by posing the sorts of questions which medieval thinkers asked and answering them using the techniques which they favoured.
To put it another way, the intellectual climate in which ideas emerged in the Middle Ages can be instructive in sharpe
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