Early Modern Education Research Articles

Voicing Emotion at School: Quintilian, Donatus, and Nicholas Udall

Abstract: This essay argues that late antique and early modern texts could teach pronunciation through careful attention to emotional language, even when the topic was not explicitly addressed. Rhetoricians have long been aware that certain compositions require sensitive, modulated delivery. In the Institutio Oratoria , Quintilian showed that an orator needed an understanding of language and control over his voice to transmit the emotions of a client to his audience. The performance of emotional speeches was also modeled in two pedagogical works based on the plays of Terence: Aelius Donatus’s Commentum Terentii , which was read in the early modern period, and Nicholas Udall’s Floures for Latine Spekynge (1534), a collection of lines from Terence accompanied by translations into English. Donatus and Udall interpreted the plays’ emotional lines and, in doing so, guided readers to speak them well. Pronunciation was a central part of early modern education, teaching pupils to present themselves to the world with appropriateness, coherence, and composure.

Sensory Discipline and Habit in Early Modern Education: The Italian Schools of Christian Doctrine

ABSTRACT Increasingly across sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, schools paired training in behaviour with traditional instruction in reading and writing. Not only did the Council of Trent highlight the importance of training children in Christian comportment, but theological and philosophical tracts argued that the senses, rather than reason, governed human behaviour and so that habit guaranteed predictable actions. While connections among the senses, habit and behaviour became central to education by the early 1700s, these connections have remained little considered as historians have focused on teaching techniques and patronage history. This article explores such connections through the Italian Schools of Christian Doctrine, the network by which the Council of Trent instituted its training in Christian behaviour. It is argued that surveillance and strict choreography of student movement through school spaces became key techniques of instruction and thus that the history of early modern education converges with architectural and intellectual history.

Intellectual and Practical Education and its Patronage in the Northern Highlands in the Century after the Reformation, Part Two

The first part of the article looked at schools and showed that a number of northern Highlanders, including from the lower tier of society, fully embraced the educational opportunities presented to them by the Crown. The second part uncovers the intellectual training of northern Highland women in a quite original and ground-breaking way. Then, access to university is explored to gauge numbers as well as social, geographical and kinship factors. Although not a common feature of the Scottish historiography of early-modern education, the role of apprenticeship was part and parcel of the formation of the youth at the time, including in the Highlands. Finally, by focusing on studies abroad undertaken by a number of northern Highlanders and the northern Highland patronage of education, it gives an insight into the importance granted by the local elite to education and participated in their integration into the wider Scottish and British society. It was these communities’ resources and their educational patronage that supported the whole system, which can only translate in a State formation of the collaborative type in terms of education, seen with its combination of ‘imperial’ features, with its impetus from the centre, and collaborative ones, with the cooperation of local society.

Learned without Book: English Grammar Schools and the Place of Textbooks in Early Modern Education

Learned without Book: English Grammar Schools and the Place of Textbooks in Early Modern Education

Trends in the History of Medieval and Early Modern Education inHEQ

Trends in the History of Medieval and Early Modern Education in<i>HEQ</i>

Education in Early Modern Russia: Beyond the 'Petrine Revolution'

Education in early modern Russia has been traditionally described as imported from the West; secular; imposed by the state – or more specifically, by Peter I himself – from above on the unwilling population; driven by the military needs, and therefore, technical. This chapter seeks to examine and to problematize some these theses. Some of them have already been re-assessed by scholars, especially insofar as the role of the church in providing education is concerned. In other cases, the discussion is limited to identifying the gaps in our current understanding and pointing to ways of addressing them. In particular, on the basis of he author's own research as well as that of other scholars, it seeks to outline the responses of the tsar’s subjects to the educational change; problematize the role of the “state” as an actor in this process, and that of Peter I himself; to understand what exactly is meant by the practical/military drivers of educational change and how exactly the role of these drivers could be ascertained; to emphasize the role of non-state, traditional, and informal genres and providers of education in that period. The last two sections seek to place the early modern education in Russia in the Western European context by identifying more precisely what exactly has been borrowed and how this “borrowing,” in fact, resulted in innovative reconfiguring of educational forms; and to discuss the role of early modern Russia as a pioneer, in some sense, of explicitly using education as a tool of social engineering.

Rhetoric, Medicine, and the Woman Writer, 1600-1700 by Lyn Bennett

MLR, .,   further her enquiry into Middleton’s dramatic art, which, she underlines, ‘non è fatto per essere letto’ [‘is not created to be read’] (p. ). is point has oen been neglected by critics (most especially those dealing with Middleton’s comedies) who raise difficulties concerning verisimilitude and intrigue which evaporate (or never even present themselves) in the theatre itself. At every turn in this study, the reader’s attention is drawn helpfully towards key and/or recent contributions to Middleton scholarship as well as historical contextualization of the text being discussed. e second half of the volume is devoted to the dramatist’s tragic art, both to texts which were attributed to him in the seventeenth century and to those which have been attributed to him in more recent decades. Again, Guardamagna guides the reader expertly through the oen densely packed plots as well as signalling the dominant features (both linguistic and theatrical) of the dramatic universes created on stage. Shakespeare and, on occasion, Webster are ranged into view to offer more familiar lines of vision on how the Jacobean dramatists conceived of their art, and, equally interestingly, the reader is treated to notable critical insights into these plays down the generations. e discussion is enriched in this second half of the book particularly with the referencing of theatrical productions in recent years of the major tragedies, such as e Changeling (written with Rowley) and Women Beware Women. e study concludes with an account of ‘Middleton e Shakespeare’ (pp. –). Here, in a most thought-provoking manner, texts are made to rub shoulders (for instance, Middleton’s e Ghost of Lucrece with Shakespeare’s ‘e Rape of Lucrece’, or the former’s e Phoenix with Measure for Measure) and a whole of series of striking points of comparison emerges. In short, this critical publication will prove an invaluable introduction for the Italian reader into Middleton’s dramatic art and will remain a valuable resource for those who continue to conduct research in the field. B U /I. R. C. L., M 3 A H Rhetoric, Medicine, and the Woman Writer, –. By L B. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press. . xiv+ pp. £. ISBN –– ––. Lyn Bennett’s short but detailed new book offers an original perspective on the development of the medical profession in the seventeenth century. Bennett contends that the professionalization of medicine and its growing pattern of exclusion, both from religious office and from women healers, owed more to rhetorical ability than to practical knowledge. By the author’s own admission, this point may not be entirely surprising (p. ), given the major part played by rhetorical training in early modern education, but it is nevertheless carefully and convincingly elaborated and justified. e first part of the book is devoted to the role played by rhetoric in the debates that informed the still emerging medical ‘profession’. Bennett demonstrates  Reviews that physicians claimed for specific competence both in connection and in contradistinction with the clergy by confirming the early modern understanding of a complex union between body and soul. Rhetoric played a crucial part in the growing divide between the upholders of a ‘learned medicine’ based on Galenic humoral theory and the advocates of empirical knowledge; but it also contributed to downplaying that opposition. In her third chapter, Bennett examines the importance of rhetoric in the relationship between physicians and their patients, as social hierarchy made the latter ‘consumers’ (p. ) and prompted the former to use powers of persuasion in an attempt to impose their authority. In the second part of her study, Bennett turns to women’s participation in medicine, and more specifically to the interaction between the writing process, the construction of gender, and the professionalization of healing. In an important contribution to the study of early modern women, it confronts the works of female patients and healers, as well as some remedy books compiled by men but originally authored by women, such as Gervase Markham’s famous e English Housewife (). Despite its many strengths, the book suffers from a few weaknesses. Its division into two main parts, ‘Rhetoric and Medicine’ (pp. –) and ‘e Woman Writer’ (pp. –), renders the main title a little...

중국 근대 국어 교과서에 나타난 여성상 —청말민초 소학교 국어 교과서를 중심으로

The images of women in modern Chinese language textbooks in China show that they have developed from the ‘wise mother, good wife’(賢母良妻) to the Women Students, Nuguomin(女國民). And the pace of evolution is very fast. The three kinds of Chinese textbooks covered in this paper deserve to represent women’s images of early modern education, and have the following characteristics. The 1901 textbook contains the Chinese people’s desire to leap from traditional to modern education. The 1907 textbook is an early female textbook that shows the image of a woman recognized by the time. The 1914 textbook describes the women’s image during the revolutionary era that women’s social roles should be fully expanded after the republic’s inauguration. This paper used the “role analysis” method to more effectively compare the appearance of women appearing in each textbook. A woman’s story is divided into four elements: the main character, space, role and counterpart. Using this method, the authors of textbooks can understand the intended female image more clearly. As modernization progresses, the space, roles, and types of people who appear in textbooks vary. The characteristic of women in textbooks during this period is to develop from incidental to self-reliant. From being limited to a woman who raised her child and helped her husband, it develops into a general who defeats the rebels. The women’s image in modern Chinese textbooks has changed from ‘Chinese Substance and Western Function’ (中體西用) to Zhongxibingyong in both its content and its formal aspects.

Utopian spaces and the promise of education: a conceptual analysis

This paper states that modern education and utopian discourse share one common trait, that of being structurally founded on the promise of human betterment. The changing relations between concepts of education and utopianism will be developed through conceptual analysis of the dynamics of the promise in their interweaving process. This shall be discussed through three main topics. The first is the appropriation of space in early modern education (sixteenth century onward), with particular emphasis on the influence of print technology on framing a new conception of educational spaces and practices. Second, the promise of the idea of progress in the Enlightenment period, which will become the further technological promise of a society-to-come, no longer spatially but temporally presented. Finally, the promise of autonomy through and against the modern subject, in which such autonomy is presented like the end of the journey through education, supposed that there is an end to such a journey. The key frame uniting the three topics is that utopian discourse journeying towards a normative conception of human society, as well as modern educational schemes journeying towards a normative conception of adulthood, are limited insofar as their respective promises, which are more impatient than the slow project of creation, more than often outruns it. The paper thus inquires whether or not there is a way to uphold the creative and imaginative possibilities of utopia in education, by acknowledging the pervasive effects of the promise on the social imaginary.

School jailhouse: discipline, space and the materiality of school morale in early-modern Sweden

This paper uses a specific phenomenon of early-modern education in Sweden, the school jail, as a point of departure for a broader analysis of educational policy in the areas of discipline and moral instruction. The paper demonstrates how the jail evolved as a part of a wider network of objects, pedagogical technologies and social routines in this area and how this gradually came to change. From being part of a disciplinary rationale leaning on public corporal punishment, the prison was successively set aside in favour of new symbolic and more productive forms of discipline. This process of modernisation also enforced spatial and material reconfigurations, as the classroom acquired a more prominent role as an arena for regulatory practice. The paper also suggests a shift of the general scope in formal policy from a religious frame of reference towards a more secular and independent positioning of schooling.

PUPILS’ CHOICES AND SOCIAL MOBILITY AFTER THE THIRTY YEARS WAR: A QUANTITATIVE STUDY

ABSTRACTThis article presents the main findings of the first detailed reconstruction of the pattern of attendance at an early modern German school, based on the exceptionally preserved matriculation records of the Latin (grammar) school of Zwickau/Saxony in the second half of the seventeenth century. It investigates pupils’ social background, their geographical mobility, and reconstructs their educational choices. Prevailing top-down perspectives on early modern education obscure the range of choices available to pupils. This article argues that substantial social mobility into learned professions formed the backdrop to the preoccupation with rank and distinction within the Republic of Letters in the Holy Roman Empire.

Shakespeare's Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion by Lynn Enterline (review)

Reviewed by: Shakespeare's Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion by Lynn Enterline Jayne Elisabeth Archer (bio) Lynn Enterline . Shakespeare's Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Pp. 202. $45.00. Thanks to Ben Jonson, we all know about Shakespeare's "small Latin and less Greek" and the supposed deficiencies of his education. Shakespeare's Schoolroom refocuses our attention on the ways in which a grammar school education shaped the young playwright, not simply in terms of pedagogic practice—the aims and day-to-day methods of early modern education—but for the relationships through which it was conceptualized and achieved: rhetoric and the passions; imitation and punishment; and student and schoolmaster. In this work, Lynn Enterline re-examines the familiar ground of the classical training provided by grammar schools such as King Edward VI, Stratford-upon-Avon, and sheds new light on [End Page 271] the role of this educational system both in helping fashion early modern identity and in informing the language, characterization, and processes described in selected works by Shakespeare. Across the chapters of Shakespeare's Schoolroom, the assumption that early modern pedagogy helped inculcate social and moral values in an unproblematic and straightforward way is challenged, with the literary outputs of one of the products of that educational process—Shakespeare himself—used to test the validity of that claim. Enterline approaches the topic of early modern pedagogy through a consideration of its relationship with emotion and passion—or "affect" (19), as Enterline sometimes prefers to call it. The usual practice of situating emotion in the context of medical works and discourses is challenged: Enterline replaces medicine with rhetoric and traces the ways in which the particular use of words and language encouraged by humanist educators necessarily involved an experimentation with and performance of emotion. Her theoretical approach to the sticky topic of early modern emotions is informed by psychoanalytic theory, specifically Jean Laplanche's reading of Freud. In the first two chapters, "Rhetoric and the Passions in Shakespeare's Schoolroom" and "Imitate and Punish: The Theatricality of Everyday Life in Elizabethan Schoolrooms," this methodology and its implications are set out, and it is argued that Laplanche's model of nonnormative identity formation can help reveal the ways in which the early modern schoolroom drew on and played with the "theatricality of everyday life" (1). Imitatio, the keystone of humanist education, is performative by definition, and Enterline suggests that in being required to put themselves in the positions of classical, mythological, and historical individuals—women as well as men— schoolboys received an education in the language of the "eye, ear, hand, tongue, and heart" (4). The habit of experimenting with selves and voices instilled in early modern students what Enterline calls "habits of alterity" (7-8), which in turn resisted the students' assimilation into social hierarchies—the hierarchy of gender in particular. Other educational practices, such as translation and corporal punishment, it is argued, challenged, rather than reinforced, traditional gender roles and fractured, rather than bolstered, masculine identity. Perhaps most memorably, Bottom's "translation" in A Midsummer Night's Dream is reread as a parodic version of the "social, emotional, and bodily" transformations undergone by grammar school boys: "Read in light of the [grammar] school's announced goals, Bottom's translation...speaks to the school's carefully planned intervention in social reproduction" (6). Chapters 3, 4, and 5 examine selected plays and narrative poems by Shakespeare in order to tease out and scrutinize the impact of this educational method. Enterline's earlier work on Ovid (most notably The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare [Cambridge University Press, 2000]) is most influential [End Page 272] in the first of these three chapters, "The Art of Loving Mastery," on Venus and Adonis. Venus's relationship with Adonis is compared to that of master and student, and the Ovidian method of arguing both sides of a question ("cross-voicing" [88]) is used to argue that the eroticized figure of the schoolmaster could be one of maternal, rather than paternal, authority. Chapter 4, on The Taming of the Shrew, develops this meditation on the theme of "mastery," and considers its inflections through the play's various relationships...

The Improbability of “Othello”: Rhetorical Anthropology and Shakespearean Selfhood (review)

Reviewed by: The Improbability of “Othello”: Rhetorical Anthropology and Shakespearean Selfhood Matthew J. Smith (bio) Joel B. Altman. The Improbability of “Othello”: Rhetorical Anthropology and Shakespearean Selfhood. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Pp. x + 454. $49.00. The subject of Joel Altman’s new book is the conflation of probability and truth in Othello, which it amplifies and makes cogent through a wealth of contexts— rhetorical, philosophical, dramaturgical, and social, to name a few. Supplemented with illustrations from Shakespeare’s other plays, especially those that circumscribe the writing of Othello, The Improbability of “Othello” describes aspects of early modern subjectivity that result from the “impact of Iago on Othello,” that is, from characters’ responses to the realization that truth is comprised of mere contingency and evidence of likelihood (22). Like Altman’s earlier book, The Tudor Play of Mind (1978), which traces Elizabethan drama to the rhetorical tradition of arguing questions in utramque partem—on both sides—his new book also begins by connecting the classical and the early modern in what he calls the “rhetorical anthropology” of Shakespearean theater. Rhetorical anthropology is “an account of human behavior” that locates judgment between the tension of “ingenious” interpretation of material—extemporary, reliant on circumstance, and, importantly, subjectively “interested” in the outcome—and “apodeictic” interpretation—the demonstration of material as if it were self-evident, regardless of circumstance (21). The role of circumstance, here, is essential to Altman’s definition of the early modern self as it is dramatized in Othello. It is a self “determined by its address to the world” (20). He asserts that the play’s various fractures in evidence, judgment, race, and time are intentional and aim to tease out related fractures in early modern selfhood. Such fractures result from a subjectivity that is only ever intelligible in contact with particular circumstances. Therefore, embracing Thomas Rymer’s famous critique that the play is “fraught with improbabilities” yet rejecting the claim that it is “without salt or savour,” Altman argues that the conflation of probability and truth in Shakespearean drama is both a problem and a reality; it is a problem when its rhetorical manipulation allows Iago to incisively distort Othello’s perception [End Page 442] of the people and objects around him toward a tragic end, but it is susceptible to such sophistry precisely because knowledge on the Shakespearean stage is constituted by measuring probabilities. The book is comprised of five parts, each with multiple chapters. Part 1 searches the rhetorical background of Iago’s and Othello’s respective speech habits, the one characteristically ingenious and the other apodeictic. Altman’s account of Shakespeare’s rhetorical inheritance examines the works of Greek sophists, especially Protagoras and Plato, to show how Iago’s rhetorical handle on Othello’s situation and disposition (kairos) causes Othello to abandon questions of probability for false certitude. Othello’s error also results from the rhetorical construction of ethos. Altman describes Shakespeare as “the perceptive heir to Cicero” on account of Othello’s ill-fated preference for the constancy of his reputation and ethics over the world of probability (69). Part 2 further explores the logic that confuses likelihood and truth by describing early modern education in the dialectical tandem of invention and judgment, particularly as articulated by Agricola. This section takes up the Shakespearean phrase most central to Altman’s book—the conflation of the “apt and true”—and explains it through a logic of rhetoric, namely, Iago’s linguistic maneuvers from the possible to the factual. Part 3 can be thought of as the book’s transition from uncovering Shakespeare’s rhetorical heritage to integrating this reading with Shakespeare’s physical and social dramatic contexts. It begins with an especially elucidating chapter that introduces the Christian concept of the will into rhetorical anthropology. Through an extended comparison of the Pauline sentiment—that he wills what is good yet still does evil—with Iago’s inflections of “I am not what I am,” Altman resumes the threading together of rhetoric and ontology that he began in his discussion of ethos. He alleges that the distinctly Christian character of the play is found in this Pauline fragmentation of the self (ontologically) as it is...

Kulturwirkungen konfessioneller Erziehungsmodelle im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert: Zum Forschungskontext des Themenschwerpunkts

ABSTRACT Reformation and confessionalization are two important phases in the history of early modern education. In the Reformation period new educational concepts and curricula were introduced above all in higher education. In the age of confessionalization both Protestants and Catholics also sought to improve the lower school system. The discourse about education was dominated by classical concepts which were connected with general Christian ethics. New research perspectives include the different cultures of knowledge, of reading and of catechesis because these factors were as important for the general level of literacy as the public school system.

Funeral Processions, Street Urchins, Education, and Surveillance - The Relationship Between Education, State Building, Vagrancy, and Cultural Change in Stockholm, Sweden in the Latter Half of the Seventeenth Century

A modernization of the educational system was an important priority for the government. Sweden emerged as a dominant military power during the 17th century. The new schools were then established in the midst of a social, political, and cultural transformation with fundamental effects on the school system. The new schools had difficulties freeing themselves from old traditions, depended on an old economic structure, and filled a role as a system of population control. The latter was also related to the organization of the early modern educational system as well as systems of supporting the poor by conspicuous — personal — distribution of money and presents, which during the course of the 17th century was to be replaced by institutionalized care of the poor and new systems of surveillance. An important aspect of the article is a discussion of the role of early modern education for the material well being of poor families of Stockholm.

“She Learns As She Lies”: Work and the Exemplary Female in English Early Modern Education

“She Learns As She Lies”: Work and the Exemplary Female in English Early Modern Education

“She Learns As She Lies”: Work and the Exemplary Female in English Early Modern Education

(1995). “She Learns As She Lies”: Work and the Exemplary Female in English Early Modern Education. Exemplaria: Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 209-235.