Imagining Public Education in Early Modern England argues that the Tudor vernacular logic and rhetoric manuals participate in the development of early modern publicity. Although the seventeen extant manuals have a diverse set of social appeals, some of them imagine education as a concern of the many rather than the few, even if their conceptions of the "many" were far from universal. In the process of imagining a greater social participation in education, the Tudor manuals may have contributed to the ideological function of publicity as a veneer of universal accessibility over a reality involving many degrees of accessibility. In other words, at the same time that these writers were imagining a larger social function for education, they were also participating in the overall conceptual emergence of publicity itself. Chapter One examines the manuals aimed most clearly at producing social distinction. While recent studies have argued that these manuals either reinforce or subvert the established social order, I argue that they represent the intersection of distinction and publicity. Writers like Wilson and Puttenham engage with social distinction and reproduction in the forum of vernacular print not to subvert the social order but to continue these practices in a newly public way. Chapter Two focuses on the manuals which address both a professional and a public readership. These manuals contrast the social limitations of the university with the publicity of vernacular print in an allied appeal to both professional application and to the tradition of common knowledge. Chapter Three examines the two manuals with the broadest social appeals. While these authors envision strikingly inclusive ideas for education, they base their ideas of accessibility on the problematic principles of a national language and commodifed discourse. Chapter Four continues to explore the idea of public education but with a focus on the examples of Francis Bacon's The Advancement of Learning and the statutes of London's Gresham College. Contrary to the Habermasian school of public sphere theory, which allows only an impoverished notion of early modern publicity, the Tudor vernacular manuals indicate a lively and burgeoning discourse surrounding the imagination of public education.

Covering the period c.1530-c.1760, this book analyzes the aims, facilities and achievements across all levels of institutional and informal education in England. Attention is given to the education situation in the rest of the British Isles, as well as western Europe and North America. Providing a strong grasp of the medieval foundations of education in England, the book provides a comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of the current state of the debate, also integrating women's education into the general picture.

Working from a cultural studies perspective, author D. K. Smith here examines a broad range of medieval and Renaissance maps and literary texts to explore the effects of geography on Tudor-Stuart cultural perceptions. He argues that the literary representation of cartographically-related material from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth century demonstrates a new strain, not just of geographical understanding, but of cartographic manipulation, which he terms, "the cartographic imagination." Rather than considering the effects of maps themselves on early modern epistemologies, Smith considers the effects of the activity of mapping-the new techniques, the new expectations of accuracy and precision which developed in the sixteenth century-on the ways people thought and wrote. Looking at works by Spenser, Marlowe, Raleigh, and Marvell among other authors, he analyzes how the growing ability to represent physical space accurately brought with it not just a wealth of new maps, but a new array of rhetorical techniques, metaphors, and associations which allowed the manipulation of texts and ideas in ways never before possible.

The English Radical Imagination addresses current critical assumptions about the nature of radical thought and expression during the English Revolution. Through a combination of biographical and literary interpretation, it revises the representation of radical writers in this period asignorant and uneducated 'tub preachers'. This representation has become a critical orthodoxy since Christopher Hill's seminal study, The World Turned Upside Down (1972). Despite the reservations of so-called 'revisionist' historians about the misleading implications of Hill's work, culturalhistorians and literary critics have continued to view radical texts as authentic artefacts of a form of early modern popular culture. This book challenges the divide between 'elite' and 'popular' culture in the seventeenth century. While research has revealed that the rank and file of the more organized radical movements was composed of the lower 'middling sort' of people who had little or no access to the elite intellectualculture of the period, some of the most important and most discussed radical writers had been to university in the 1620s and 1630s. Chapters 1-2 investigate how critics - especially those sympathetic to the radicals - have tended to repeat hostile contemporary stereotypes of the ideologists andpublicists of radicalism as 'illiterate Mechanick persons'. The failure to recognize the elite cultural background of these writers has resulted in a failure to acknowledge the range of their intellectual and rhetorical resources and, consequently, in a misrepresentation of the sophistication ofboth their ideas and their writing. Chapters 3-5 are case studies of some of the most important and innovative radical writers. They show how these writers use their experience of an orthodox humanist education for the purposes of satire and ridicule and how they interpret texts associated with orthodox ideologies and culturalpractices to produce heterodox arguments. Radical prose of the English Revolution thus emerges as a more complex literary phenomenon than has hitherto been supposed, lending substance to recent claims for its admission to the traditional literary canon.

This book shows how liberal education taught Tudor and Stuart monarchs to wield pens like swords and transformed political culture in early modern Britain.

The Reformation changed forever how the sacrament of the Eucharist was understood. This study of six canonical early modern lyric poets traces the literary afterlife of what was one of the greatest doctrinal shifts in English history. Sophie Read argues that the move from a literal to a figurative understanding of the phrase 'this is my body' exerted a powerful imaginative pull on successive generations. To illustrate this, she examines in detail the work of Southwell, Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, Vaughan and Milton, who between them represent a broad range of doctrinal and confessional positions, from the Jesuit Southwell to Milton's heterodox Puritanism. Individually, each chapter examines how Eucharistic ideas are expressed through a particular rhetorical trope; together, they illuminate the continued importance of the Eucharist's transformation well into the seventeenth century - not simply as a matter of doctrine, but as a rhetorical and poetic mode.

This book discusses current market-based educational discourses and how they have undermined the notion of “the public” in public education by allowing private visions of education to define the public democratic imagination. Against this discouraging background, this text embraces Freire’s understanding of hope as an ontological need and calls for finding new public grounds for our public imagination. It further articulates Freire’s mandate to unveil historically concrete practices to sustain democratic educational visions, no matter how difficult this task may be, by (1) presenting an indepth description of the pedagogies and curriculums of eleven schools across historical and geographical locations that have worked or are still working with disenfranchised communities and that have publicly hoped for a better future for their students, and by (2) reflecting on how the stories of these schools offer us new opportunities to rethink our own pedagogical commitment to public visions of education. To promote this reflection, this book offers the notion of publicly imagined public education as a conceptual tool to help understand the historical and discursive specificity of schools’ hopes and to (re)claim public schools as legitimate sites of public imagination.

Distinguished historians and literary scholars explore the overlap, interplay, and interaction between history and fiction.

In early modern England, epitomes-texts promising to pare down, abridge, or sum up the essence of their authoritative sources-provided readers with key historical knowledge without the bulk, expense, or time commitment demanded by greater volumes. Epic poets in turn addressed the habits of reading and thinking that, for better and for worse, were popularized by the publication of predigested works. Analyzing popular texts such as chronicle summaries, abridgements of sacred epic, and abstracts of civil war debate, Chloe Wheatley charts the efflorescence of a lively early modern epitome culture, and demonstrates its impact upon Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Abraham Cowley's Davideis, and John Milton's Paradise Lost. Clearly and elegantly written, this new study presents fresh insight into how poets adapted an important epic convention-the representation of the hero's confrontation with summaries of past and future-to reflect contemporary trends in early modern history writing.

This book reveals the close connections between education and the stage in early modern England by looking at the child.