Humanism and Protestantism in Early Modern English Education Humanism and Protestantism in Early Modern English Education IAN GREEN University of Edinburgh, UK © Ian Green 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Ian Green has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East Suite 420 Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401–4405 England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Green, Ian M. Humanism and Protestantism in early modern English education. – (St Andrews studies in Reformation history) 1. Education – England – History – 16th century 2. Education – England – History – 17th century 3. Humanism – England – History – 16th century 4. Humanism – England – History – 17th century 5. Protestantism – England – History – 16th century 6. Protestantism – England – History – 17th century 7. Reformation – England I. Title 370.9’42’0903 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Green, Ian M. Humanism and Protestantism in early modern English education / Ian M. Green. p. cm. – (St Andrews studies in Reformation history) Includes index. ISBN 978–0–7546–6368–3 (alk. paper) – ISBN 978–0–7546–9468–7 (ebook) 1. Education – England – History. 2. Education, Humanistic – England – History. 3. Humanism – England – History. 4. Protestantism – England – History. I. Title. LA631.5.G74 2009 370.942–dc22 2008051707 ISBN 978–0–7546–6368–3 (hbk) ISBN 978-0-7546-9468-7 (ebk.V) Contents List of Tables and Figures vii Preface ix Abbreviations xiii 1 Historiography and Sources 1 2 Grammar Schools and Grammar Teachers in Protestant England 55 3 The Uses of Latin in the Lower Forms of Grammar Schools 127 4 The Uses of Latin and Greek in the Senior Forms and Universities 191 5 Protestant Influences in Grammar Schools and Universities 267 6 Assessing the Impact 307 Index 365 THIS paGE HAS BEEN LEFT BLANK INTENTIONALLY List of Tables and Figures Tables 1.1 ‘School books’ entered into the ‘English stock’ by 1620 or published for the Stationers’ Company c. 1620–1760. 40 Figures 1.1 Advertisement of c. 1695 (British Library 1865, c.3, f. 132; 42 © British Library. All Rights Reserved). 1.2 Advertisement of 1766 (Stationers’ Hall Archives, Series 1, Box M, Folder M, Miscellaneous Valuations, Records and Stock in the Treasurer’s Warehouse. With the permission of the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers). 43 THIS paGE HAS BEEN LEFT BLANK INTENTIONALLY Preface The core of this monograph consists of the set of Waynflete Lectures delivered at Magdalen College Oxford, in February and March 2006. I am extremely grateful to the President and Fellows for the invitation to give those lectures, and for awarding me a Visiting Fellowship. I am also greatly indebted both to the Fellows, especially Professor Laurence Brockliss and Dr Christine Ferdinand, and to the other distinguished members of the audience, especially Sir Keith Thomas, Professor John Bossy, Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch and Dr Martin Ingram, for their helpful comments and suggestions for further reading. I am also very grateful to the School of History, Classics and Archaeology in the University of Edinburgh for making me an Honorary Research Fellow, and providing a quiet haven in which the lectures could be turned into a monograph. For publication the lectures have been annotated and amplified, especially in Chapters 2 and 6, and the sequence changed somewhat, but the gist remains the same. The theme of these lectures was chosen, at least in part, with William Waynflete and his foundations at Oxford in mind. Waynflete had begun his career as a schoolmaster, and his success at Winchester College and then as Provost of the recently founded Eton College led to his promotion to the episcopate. But his early career left a strong mark on his later thinking, notably in his determination to plough back many of the rewards of high office into producing a supply of Latin teachers for grammar schools, which in turn would supply recruits for the priesthood who would help stamp out heresy in the parishes. Accordingly he put much effort and considerable resources into setting up his educational foundations in Oxford: Magdalen College and Magdalen College School. But though his aims may have been conservative, he was open to change in the organization and curriculum of those creations, and especially the way in which Latin was taught – along the lines of the classical Roman writers rather than the usages of the later Middle Ages. As a result both College and School helped to open England up to influences from abroad, especially humanist influences from Italy and Northern Europe.1 Not only was an impressive and talented succession of humanist scholars appointed to teach in Magdalen College School from the 1470s to the 1560s, many of whom in turn became fellows or teachers in schools scattered wide across southern England, but also a 1 Virginia Davis, William Waynflete: Bishop and Educationalist (Woodbridge, 1993). x HUMANISM AND PROTESTANTISM IN ENGLISH EDUCATION series of innovative educational texts associated with teachers like John Holt, William Lily, John Stanbridge, Richard Sherry and Thomas Cooper were published, a number of which circulated far and wide. On the title- page of his Thesaurus linguae Romanae et Britannicae (1565), the Latin– English dictionary prepared by Cooper during his long stints as Master of Magdalen College School from the 1540s to the 1560s, he proudly described himself as ‘Magdalenensis’.2 Innovative teachers and publications were typical of the new establishments set up in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries by men like William Waynflete and Richard Fox in Oxford, John Fisher in Cambridge, and John Colet in London, and anticipated the hundreds of additional publications of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries written by teachers anxious to improve the teaching of Latin grammar and the mastery of the classics in schools and colleges, even though by then both universities and schools had experienced the buffeting winds of change from Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation.3 While historians have devoted much time to exploring how humanism in the short term came to co-exist with changing versions of Christianity, less time has been devoted to exploring how and why, in the longer term, the encouragement given to humanist studies in the decades before the Reformation proved as pervasive as the reformist efforts of the Protestant and Catholic reformers of the mid-sixteenth century. Though not unique, Magdalen College School and Magdalen College provide an excellent example of how humanism and Protestantism produced a long-lasting symbiosis. Magdalen College and School today are still Protestant establishments, albeit with strong medieval roots in their buildings and traditions, especially the choral tradition. They are also (in part) still humanist ones, in the enduring vitality of the teaching and study of languages, literature and history, even if the ‘humanities’ today are supplemented by much more than was covered by the studia humanitatis of the late Middle Ages. Indeed, it is arguable that the more typical result of Waynflete’s campaign was neither a ‘godly’ President of Magdalen like Laurence Humphrey, nor a Laudian innovator like Accepted Frewen, but the author of the Thesaurus, Thomas Cooper. For, like Waynflete, Cooper was promoted from a schoolmastership to a bishopric, and in the 1570s 2 Nicholas Orme, Education in Early Tudor England: Magdalen College Oxford and its School 1480–1540 (Magdalen College Occasional Paper 4, Oxford, 1998), and ODNB under John Anwykyll, Thomas Cooper, John Holt, Richard Sherrey, John Stanbridge and Robert Whittington; Christine Ferdinand, ‘Magdalen College and the Book Trade: The Provision of Books in Oxford, 1450–1550’, in Arnold Hunt, Giles Mandelbrote and Alison Shell (eds), The Book Trade and Its Customers 1450–1900 (Winchester, 1997), pp. 175–87. 3 See relevant entries in ODNB; see also below, pp. 3–9, 267–305. PREFACE xi and 1580s acted as a conscientious and influential diocesan, first at Lincoln and then Winchester. As bishop of the latter, Cooper was not only visitor of his old college, but also represented a middle-of-the-road, evangelical churchmanship which in partnership with humanism persisted long after the impact of the ‘godly’ and the Laudians had begun to fade.4 How typical was this of wider developments in early modern England? These lectures were prepared in tandem with the trilogy on the teaching of early modern Protestantism in England, of which Parts One and Two have appeared, and Part Three is in progress. My interest in early modern English schooling was stimulated when I was searching for the Protestant catechisms used with the young (the results of which were published in Christian’s ABC), sampling the edifying treatises and manuals widely distributed among adolescents and adults through the medium of print (as described in Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England), and examining the various other forms of oral and visual instruction deployed in church, school and home (which will appear as Word, Image and Ritual in Early Modern English