If my argument so far is tenable, we have good reasons, independently of William's historical works, for claiming that the central ethical conceptual schemes of William's literary inheritance play a constitutive role in at least some of his texts. However, in order to see the extent to which history could serve a moral purpose within the moral paradigms available to William we need to investigate more closely how ethics was taught and learned, how reading could be used in this context, and how the genre of history could play its part within such a learned culture.

Moral education in ancient ethics

‘Learning by doing' has become a catch-phrase in modern pedagogical scholarship as a more effective didactic alternative to traditional lecturing, and the active participation of the pupil in his or her own learning is seen as the hallmark of modern, progressive teaching. However, this principle was the core of moral education in Antiquity and the Middle Ages at least since Aristotle onwards. While the intellectual virtues are developed through teaching, the moral virtues are cultivated by practice, according to Aristotle: ‘Anything we have to learn to do we learn by the actual doing of it; people become builders by building and instrumentalists by playing instruments. Similarly we become just by performing just acts, temperate by performing temperate ones, brave by performing brave ones.' As an act is virtuous if performed in the way a virtuous person would perform it, the acts of manifestly good human beings have a strong exemplary power – not primarily as illustrations of virtuous acts, but as illustrations of the virtues that informed these acts.