First published in 1908, this important work on the history of education traces the development of teaching in English Grammar Schools from the invention of printing up to 1660. It is not a history of the theories of educational reformers as to what should or should not be taught, but a history of the actual practices of the schools, of their curricula and of the differentiated subjects of instruction. The author relies heavily on the textbooks used in schools in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in particular the ‘Ludus Literarius’ of John Brinsley and the ‘New Discovery of the Old Art of Teaching School’ of Charles Hoole, and makes free use of the School Statutes which state the express intention of the Founder as to what was to be taught. The period covered is one of great significance in which the Encyclopaedia of the medieval curriculum was abandoned for the modern practice of the differentiation of school subjects. The new knowledge of the Renaissance and the introduction of critical methods and of close analysis gave students a detailed knowledge which could not be fitted into the rigid confines of the medieval Encyclopaedia, while the invention of printing enormously facilitated the increase and spreading of text books for both teachers and pupils.

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 A separate chapter devoted to unpublished material from the Charity Commission reveals Leach's method of work and provides an analytic survey of opinions on his work by reviewers and historians.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.

The Children’s Troupes and the Transformation of English Theater 1509–1608 uncovers the role of the children’s companies in transforming perceptions of authorship and publishing, performance, playing spaces, patronage, actor training, and gender politics in the sixteenth century. Jeanne McCarthy challenges entrenched narratives about popular playing in an era of revolutionary changes, revealing the importance of the children’s company tradition’s connection with many early plays, as well as to the spread of literacy, classicism, and literate ideals of drama, plot, textual fidelity, characterization, and acting in a still largely oral popular culture. By addressing developments from the hyper-literate school tradition, and integrating discussion of the children’s troupes into the critical conversation around popular playing practices, McCarthy offers a nuanced account of the play-centered, literary performance tradition that came to define professional theater in this period. Highlighting the significant role of the children’s company tradition in sixteenth-century performance culture, this volume offers a bold new narrative of the emergence of the London theater.

In this exploration of the social context of reading and writing in pre-industrial England, David Cressy tackles important questions about the limits of participation in the mainstream of early modern society. To what extent could people at different social levels share in political, religious, literary and cultural life; how vital was the ability to read and write; and how widely distributed were these skills? Using a combination of humanist and social-scientific methods, Dr Cressy provides a detailed reconstruction of the profile of literacy in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, looking forward to the eighteenth century and also making comparisons with other European societies.

Champions of Choice and Change examines the role of seventeenth-century English dissenting religious groups and the rise of democratic ideals in western society. Many people assume that the French philosophers whose ideas and writings gave rise to the Revolution in France were the creators and initiators of the democratic theories which would shape, order, and give direction to modern Western society as it developed. This work argues otherwise, claiming that such advances—ideas related to equality, choice, political involvement, education, enabling and inclusion of women, religious liberty/toleration—occurred first, not in the secular context of late eighteenth-century Enlightenment France, but in the spiritual context of radical and/or dissenting religious groups in Stuart England over a century earlier, shaped by previous ideas of the European Reformers.

This volume deals with the great changes which have taken place in the practice of the history of education in present years. It brings together a number of important articles on the subject which are not easily available to the ordinary reader.

Originally published in 1967, this volume provides an account of the early development of English education. The schools and universities of the mediaeval period arose to meet the social needs of that time. The book charts developments up to the sixteenth century when the Reformation brought profound social and religious changes which affected education: not only the organisation of schools and universities but also the curriculum. This was the turning point when the foundations of an educational system, in the modern sense of the term, were laid.

This is the first of three volumes concerning the history of the oldest press in the world,a history that extends from the sixteenth century to the present day.