Grammar Schools of Medieval England

Grammar Schools of Medieval England
Author: John N. Miner
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 376
Release: 1990-01-01
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0773561528

Leach struggled to rid his countrymen of the persistent myth that the monks had been the schoolmasters of the pre-Reformation period in England. To accomplish his goal he embarked on a program of research and publication, based on a mass of hitherto unexplored documents, to establish the great antiquity of many of the nation's Latin schools and to show that they derived from clerical, but secular, colleges of Anglo-Saxon times. Showing this would, he hoped, eliminate the persistant belief that monks had been the school-masters of pre-Reformation England. Miner argues that previous readings of Leach, which suggest that his main concern is to take issue with the Reformation and argue that this great watershed in history was - at least with regard to education - a retrograde step rather than a great movement forward, have not taken into account the full range of his publications. The aim of the present study is thus to place both Leach's achievements and his more controversial theses in historical context. A separate chapter devoted to unpublished material from the Charity Commission reveals Leach's method of work and provides an analytic survey of opinions on his work by reviewers and historians. The author supplements Leach's lack of material on the school curriculum through descriptive analysis of grammatical manuscripts from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, showing the presence of an educational Christendom of which Leach was clearly unaware.

Edmund Spenser

Edmund Spenser
Author: Andrew Hadfield
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 3216
Release: 2012-06-28
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0191650218

Edmund Spenser's innovative poetic works have a central place in the canon of English literature. Yet he is remembered as a morally flawed, self-interested sycophant; complicit in England's ruthless colonisation of Ireland; in Karl Marx's words, 'Elizabeth's arse-kissing poet'-- a man on the make who aspired to be at court and who was prepared to exploit the Irish to get what he wanted. In his vibrant and vivid book, the first biography of the poet for 60 years, Andrew Hadfield finds a more complex and subtle Spenser. How did a man who seemed destined to become a priest or a don become embroiled in politics? If he was intent on social climbing, why was he so astonishingly rude to the good and the great - Lord Burghley, the earl of Leicester, Sir Walter Ralegh, Elizabeth I and James VI? Why was he more at home with 'the middling sort' -- writers, publishers and printers, bureaucrats, soldiers, academics, secretaries, and clergymen -- than with the mighty and the powerful? How did the appalling slaughter he witnessed in Ireland impact on his imaginative powers? How did his marriage and family life shape his work? Spenser's brilliant writing has always challenged our preconceptions. So too, Hadfield shows, does the contradictory relationship between his between life and his art.

Humanism and Protestantism in Early Modern English Education

Humanism and Protestantism in Early Modern English Education
Author: Ian Green
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2016-05-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317119622

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.

The Oxford Companion to Family and Local History

The Oxford Companion to Family and Local History
Author: David Hey
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 1060
Release: 2010-02-25
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 0191044938

The Oxford Companion to Family and Local History is the most authoritative guide available to all things associated with the family and local history of the British Isles. It provides practical and contextual information for anyone enquiring into their English, Irish, Scottish, or Welsh origins and for anyone working in genealogical research, or the social history of the British Isles. This fully revised and updated edition contains over 2,000 entries from adoption to World War records. Recommended web links for many entries are accessed and updated via the Family and Local History companion website. This edition provides guidance on how to research your family tree using the internet and details the full range of online resources available. Newly structured for ease of use, thematic articles are followed by the A-Z dictionary and detailed appendices, which includefurther reading. New articles for this edition are: A Guide for Beginners, Links between British and American Families, Black and Asian Family History, and an extended feature on Names. With handy research tips, a full background to the social history of communities and individuals, and an updated appendix listing all national and local record offices with their contact details, this is an essential reference work for anyone wanting advice on how to approach genealogical research, as well as a fascinating read for anyone interested in the past.