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

Covering the period c.1530-c.1760, this book analyses the aims, facilities and achievements across all levels of education in England, institutional and informal, acknowledging in context the education situation in the rest of the British Isles, western Europe and North America.

The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700 brings together new work by scholars across the globe, from some of the founding figures in early modern women's writing to those early in their careers and defining the field now. It investigates how and where women gained access to education, how they developed their literary voice through varied genres including poetry, drama, and letters, and how women cultivated domestic and technical forms of knowledge from recipes and needlework to medicines and secret codes. Chapters investigate the ways in which women's writing was an integral part of the intellectual culture of the period, engaging with male writers and traditions, while also revealing the ways in which women's lives and writings were often distinctly different, from women prophetesses to queens, widows, and servants. It explores the intersections of women writing in English with those writing in French, Spanish, Latin, and Greek, in Europe and in New England, and argues for an archipelagic understanding of women's writing in Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and England. Finally, it reflects on--and challenges--the methodologies which have developed in, and with, the field: book and manuscript history, editing, digital analysis, premodern critical race studies, network theory, queer theory, and feminist theory. The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700 captures the most innovative work on early modern women's writing in English at present.

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

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

These essays throw new light on the complex relations between science, literature and rhetoric as avenues to discovery in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds examine the agency of early modern poets, playwrights, essayists, philosophers, natural philosophers and artists in remaking their culture and reforming ideas about human understanding. Analyzing the ways in which the works of such diverse writers as Shakespeare, Bacon, Hobbes, Milton, Cavendish, Boyle, Pope and Behn related to contemporary epistemological debates, these essays move us toward a better understanding of interactions between the sciences and the humanities during a seminal phase in the emergence of modern Western thought.

"Between the years 1216 and 1553, there were six occasions when an underage male heir became the king of England. This collection, the first of its kind, describes the histories of these reigns and examines their historical relationship to each other, assessing the collective impact that this particular form of kingship had upon the political and constitutional development of medieval and early modern England. Combining the talents of seven highly qualified historians well-versed in their own respective periods, this volume offers a fresh look at the evolution of English kingship."--BOOK JACKET.

Early Modern Universities: Networks of Higher Education contains twenty essays by experts on early modern academic networks. Using a variety of approaches to universities, schools, and academies throughout Europe and in Central America, the book suggests pathways for future research.

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.