Education in Renaissance England

Kenneth Charlton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135688431
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Covering both formal and informal education, this volume examines Renaissance education in England and Italy, set within the relevant social, political and historical context.

Part One
Origins

I
The Medieval Background

THE modern western world, so we are told, is split into 'two cultures', the result of an educational system which increasingly separates the humanities from the sciences. The fundamental lack of communication between the artist and the scientist becomes increasingly a cause for alarm. The gap widens both at school and at university. Historically the gap is a modern one. 'The arts' had their origin in the term 'liberal arts', found first in the writings of the Greeks, and until the end of the medieval period the words 'arts' and 'sciences' were used synonymously. Indeed it was not until the twelfth century that the phrase 'liberal arts' became anything like a technical term, and even then by definition it comprehended as well as the 'arts' of grammar, dialectic and rhetoric, the 'sciences' of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music, the trivium and quadrivium respectively of the medieval university statutes, the essential preliminary to the further study of law, medicine and 'the queen of all the sciences', theology. The etymology of the adjective reminds us of the original purpose of liberal studies, the education of a free man, that is a free citizen in the Greek city-state of the fourth century B.C., one who would have the leisure to contribute to the administration and government of the State. Their purpose, then, was practical, though the emphasis placed on the different parts varied. In Plato 'the coping stone on top of all our liberal studies' was dialectic, a five-year course in what we should now call logic, but which for Plato was to be regarded as a tool of thought and inquiry inextricably linked with the study of moral and political philosophy. As he put it, 'the course leads what is best in the soul up to the vision of what is best in things that are. Dialectic finds the eye of the soul embedded in what is really a swamp of barbarism and gently draws and raises it upwards, using the arts which we have enumerated as hand-maids in the work of conversion.' Knowledge and its attainment, then, were to be regarded as:

a kind of conversion of the soul from darkness to light. . . . Unless a man can abstract the form of the good from all else and distinguish it by analysis; unless he makes it run the gauntlet of every proof and is eager to try it by the test not of seeming but of reality and finally unless he emerges from it with all his principles not o'er thrown, then will you not say that he does not know the real good from any other good?¹

This was the purpose of liberal education, to find the form of the good, using dialectic as a kind of 'science of the good'.

It was a philosophical and ultimately a metaphysical view of education, one that was opposed by Isocrates, whose school at the Lyceum in fourth-century Athens rivalled Plato's Academy. And in the end it was Isocrates and not Plato who educated Greece and certainly Rome later on. Isocrates' emphasis lay on the rhetorical or oratorical side of liberal studies. For Isocrates, however, eloquence had a civic and moral purpose which nowadays we exclude when we use the term. If we use the word rhetoric it is generally in a pejorative sense, and oratory is now something suspect. Isocrates, on the other hand, linked his method with his content and purpose, all three being directed to ideas and problems involved in the moral and political affairs of the community. He was concerned with concrete problems requiring discussion and debate before decision. A truly educated man was one who had the ability to provide a solution to a problem which was best or most nearly was best suited to particular circumstances. The ability to ask the right questions, to grasp the complexity of human affairs, to make decisions, these were the virtues which Isocrates sought to foster, it was not surprising, therefore, that the Romans found his ideas more congenial to their outlook on life than they did Plato's. It was the Isocratic tradition rather than the Platonic, then, that Cicero in the first century B.C. and Ouintiiian in the first century A.D. chose to develop. For Cicero and Ouintiiian, the man of affairs was one who not only could speak eloquently and persuasively, but who also had something to say that was worth saying. The orator, in Quintilian's phrase, was 'a good man skilled in speaking' who matched his powers of speech with an elegance of life permeated by the Roman concepts of gravitas, decorum, honestum and frugalitas.

If the emphasis was placed on rhetoric, the wide scope of liberal studies remained, set out for example in texts such as Varro's Disciplinarium Libri Novem which added architecture and medicine to what ultimately came to be the traditional seven liberal arts. But with the advent and spread of Christianity the problem of what constituted a liberal education was enormously complicated by the need to reconcile scholarship with piety, to reconcile the truth achieved by human reason with truth achieved by divine revelation. How, in an age before there was a body of Christian literature available, could the traditional authors who had hitherto provided the content of education, provide a Christian education as well? The life of St. Jerome (A.D. 331-420) epitomizes the dilemma which faced Christians and Christian teachers in trying to formulate a course of studies. As a pupil in Rome of Donatus, the grammarian, and later as a student of theology in Gaul he had constant recourse to classical and therefore pagan texts. Then occurred one of the several spiritual crises in his life, when he suddenly gave up 'profane' studies and retreated to the desert. 'What has Horace to do with the Psalter, or Virgil with the Gospel or Cicero with the Apostle?' he asked.¹ Even then, however, he found the old texts indispensable and it was during this period that he had his famous dream in which at the Divine Judgement he was accused of being a Ciceronian rather than a Christian. Once again he renounced his classical texts, but even in the latter years of his life, when teaching in the monastery he founded at Bethlehem, he was still using them.

It was not until early in the fifth century that St. Augustine of Hippo, in his De Doctrina Christiana, effected the reconciliation between pagan and Christian which was to provide a modus vivendi for most of the medieval period. St. Augustine's solution was to accept the disciplines of classical liberal studies, and especially the philosophical and rhetorical bases of Greek and Roman literature, but at the same time to seek their exemplification in Christian authors, a solution which would provide a Christian content and at the same time a justification for the classical basis. It was St. Augustine, too, who popularized the idea of providing textbooks consisting of readings in each of the liberal arts. Taking as his model the seven books of Martianus Capella, who had in turn based his work on that of Varro, Augustine fostered a method which became traditional in the works of Cassiodorus and Isidore of Seville, of Boethius, Bede and Rabanus Maurus. The solution was not, needless to say, universally applauded. Gregory the Great (540-605), for example, who sent his missionaries to England in 597, withdrew from the world in the midst of his secular studies 'when he saw that many of the students rushed headlong into vice . . . lest in acquiring wordly knowledge he might also fall down the same terrific precipice'. Later he wrote condemning Desiderius, Bishop of Vienne, on hearing 'that you are lecturing in profane literature . . . for the same mouth cannot sing the praises of Jupiter and the praises of Christ. . . '¹ Even Odo of Cluny dreamed of his Virgil as a beautiful vase filled with vipers, and indeed, as we shall see, such suspicion of pagan writers was still to be found in some sixteenth-century reformers.

By about the tenth century, however, we have a generally accepted pattern of liberal education which had Hellenistic origins, a mixed content and a Christian purpose.² It was no longer the free man, nor the lay gentleman, but the cleric for whom such an education was deemed appropriate, and it was in the monasteries and later in the cathedral schools that such education was to be found. It was from the monasteries of the western world, for example, that the great encyclopaedic texts of Cassiodorus and the others had come. 'Set like islands in a sea of ignorance and barbarism they had saved learning from extinction in western Europe',¹ after the disappearance in the fifth and sixth centuries of those secular schools and teachers in whose hands much of the education of Roman times had rested. The Benedictine rule had laid increased stress on the obligation to study, whether by reading or writing. In his reading the monk selected from the works of the Fathers, the Lives of the Saints, the ecclesiastical histories and the Biblical commentaries of recent authors. His writing would be confined to contributing to the local chronicle or annals, producing Lives of the Saints, and multiplying copies of service and hymn books. Yet study was not the monk's prime obligation, which was to the communal life of the monastery and the daily round of prayer and worship. For the average monk, too, his monastery was his world and Ms reading and study confined to what the monastery's library had to offer. None of this made for the constant interchange of ideas which would enable him to go beyond the mere conservation of traditional knowledge. The Cluniac reforms of the tenth and eleventh centuries, with their emphasis on colony building and central oversight did something, it is true, to break down the growing localism of monastic life. The founders of Citeau on the other hand sought to restore the simplicity of the Benedictine rule, and St. Bernard, the Order's greatest leader, was a mystic rather than a scholar. Bee which flourished under Lanfranc and Anselm was an exception to the general picture, with an excellence which was 'almost wholly accidental'.²

By the eleventh century, on the other hand, a new phenomenon was appearing in the form of a constantly-moving body of students who sought masters in the cathedral churches, which were to be found not in rural retreat but in the growing urban centres, and especially in the cathedral churches of northern France, in Chartres, Orleans, Rheims, Laon and Paris. Here the bishop, bound by conciliar canon to provide for the education of the chapter, by the eleventh century had delegated his duties to a deputy, the chancellor, who in turn was aided by a scholasticus, a 'master of the schools'. It was to the greatest of all of these schools, to Chartres, that students from all over Europe flocked to study with men like Bernard of Chartres and his brother Thierry, with William of Conches and Gilbert of La Poirrée. For half a century it reigned supreme as the centre of liberal studies in the literature of the Ancient World. 'We are like dwarfs that sit on the shoulders of giants. Hence we can see more and further than they, not by reason of the keenness of our vision nor the outstanding stature of our bodies, but because we have been raised aloft and are being carried by these men of giant dimensions.'¹ Under Thierry particularly, in the second quarter of the twelfth century, the whole range of liberal studies was studied at Chartres, some of his pupils going into Spain and returning with the mathematical and scientific texts then being translated into Latin from the Arabic and original Greek by men such as Adelard of Bath and Gerard of Cremona. It was at Chartres, too, that we find the first iconographical representations of the liberal arts, personified for example on the western or Royal Portal of the cathedral, where the seven arts are portrayed with the philosophers and authors associated with them. Elsewhere, in miniatures and on candlesticks as well as in stone, we find grammar, the key to all the sciences, holding a box and a key. Dialectic is represented by a snake, rhetoric is put in armour (to signify persuasion!) and astronomy is usually winged.²

But towards the middle of the twelfth century the influence of Chartres was being challenged by the schools in and around the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, where a young scholar, Peter Abelard (1074-...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Plates
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Part One Origins
• Part Two Formal Education
• Part Three Informal Education
• Index