What If the Black Death Never Reached Europe?

The slower transition showed up first in the universities. Oxford and Paris, never gutted of a third of their faculty in a single generation, saw no urgent need to formalize the loose guild apprenticeship system that — starved of experienced teachers in the other history — had been forced to standardize curricula and write things down that veteran masters would otherwise have simply remembered and passed on verbally.

A clerk named Aldric, cataloguing the library at a well-preserved Parisian college in 1390, noted with mild frustration that half the advanced mathematics taught there still existed only in the private notebooks of three aging professors, uncopied, because no crisis had ever forced the faculty to treat their own mortality as an administrative emergency. When the last of the three professors died of ordinary old age in 1401, two of his more advanced proofs went with him, rediscovered independently only forty years later by a student working from a different, incomplete set of notes.

It was a small loss by itself. But it was the kind of small loss that, in this version of history, kept recurring — knowledge surviving in too few heads, systems never pressured into redundancy, because the catastrophe that would have forced the issue elsewhere had drifted north on a current instead, four fifths empty, and broken apart on a beach no chronicler thought important enough to record in detail.