Education In Early Tudor England

This book discusses educational developments during a crucial period of English history in their social context, revising a long-standing interpretation of the effect of Reformation legislation. Tracing trends from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, it is in three parts. The first considers the pattern in the later maiddle ages and the conditions favouring the spread of humanist ideas which were to be adapted and applied at the Reformation. In Part II there is a detailed survey of measures takeen under Henry VIII and during the reign of Edward VI when state intervention to control the organisation and curriculum of schools and universities laid the foundations of the modern system of education. Finally, after a review of the relation between educational and social change, the focus is on three main aspects during the conservative Elizabethan age: consolidation of the school system, the pattern devised for the institution of the gentleman; the extension of the popular education fostered by the puritan ethic and the pressure of practical needs - forecasting the next major move for educational reform in the mid-seventeenth century.

This is the first encyclopedia to be devoted entirely to Tudor England. 700 entries by top scholars in every major field combine new modes of archival research with a detailed Tudor chronology and appendix of biographical essays. Entries include: * Edward Alleyn [actor/theatre manager] * Roger Ascham * Bible translation * cloth trade * Devereux family * Espionage * Family of Love * food and diet * James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell * inns * Ket's Rebellion * John Lyly * mapmaking * Frances Meres * miniature painting * Pavan * Pilgrimage of Grace * Revels Office * Ridolfi plot * Lady Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke * treason * and much more. Also includes an 8-page color insert.

This text offers an investigation into the history of Britain under the early Tudors from Henry VII to Mary, revealing the nature, achievements and failures of the dynasty.

He founded perhaps the most famous dynasty in history: the Tudors. Yet, in 1485 when Henry Tudor defeated Richard III to become King Henry VII, he possessed the most anemic claim to the throne since William the Conqueror. In defiance of the norms of medieval rule, he transformed England from an insolvent, often divided country in the waning years of the Wars of the Roses into an emerging modern state upon his death in 1509, a legacy inherited by his larger-than-life heir, Henry VIII. How did this happen? Through impressive archival research over several decades and a provocative perspective, Daring Dynasty illuminates what occurred by exploring key aspects of Henry’s reign, which included a dark side to royal policy. It will provide historians, students, history enthusiasts and devotees of “all things Tudor” with an understanding of how the populace and political players melded into a nation through the efforts of its king and his government.

This volume is the first attempt to assess the impact of both humanism and Protestantism on the education offered to a wide range of adolescents in the hundreds of grammar schools operating in England between the Reformation and the Enlightenment. By placing that education in the context of Lutheran, Calvinist and Jesuit education abroad, it offers an overview of the uses to which Latin and Greek were put in English schools, and identifies the strategies devised by clergy and laity in England for coping with the tensions between classical studies and Protestant doctrine. It also offers a reassessment of the role of the 'godly' in English education, and demonstrates the many ways in which a classical education came to be combined with close support for the English Crown and established church. One of the major sources used is the school textbooks which were incorporated into the 'English Stock' set up by leading members of the Stationers' Company of London and reproduced in hundreds of thousands of copies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although the core of classical education remained essentially the same for two centuries, there was a growing gulf between the methods by which classics were taught in elite institutions such as Winchester and Westminster and in the many town and country grammar schools in which translations or bilingual versions of many classical texts were given to weaker students. The success of these new translations probably encouraged editors and publishers to offer those adults who had received little or no classical education new versions of works by Aesop, Cicero, Ovid, Virgil, Seneca and Caesar. This fascination with ancient Greece and Rome left its mark not only on the lifestyle and literary tastes of the educated elite, but also reinforced the strongly moralistic outlook of many of the English laity who equated virtue and good works with pleasing God and meriting salvation.