6 - Pilgrimage to Parnassus: local intellectual traditions, humanist education and the cultural geography of sixteenth-century England

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The Renaissance – so scholars have said for centuries – witnessed the rise of a new scholarship and a new education. Professional humanists and young aristocrats alike bathed themselves, for five to ten years, in ancient prose and verse, before they entered on active careers in State, Church or School. Reading – informed reading of classical texts – became the preferred preparation for leadership. So much is well known.

So much is well known, but we have not begun to appreciate how local, how personalised, and how applied the traditions and the uses of humanistic literacies were in early modern Europe. From the new political history of the Victorian scholar, James Anthony Froude, to the new social history of Lawrence Stone in the 1960s, the notion that sixteenth-century England experienced an educational revolution has been given a special place in accounts of political and social change in the post-Reformation period. Insofar as textual and cultural studies have engaged with these histories, they have most usually done so via the literary analysis of printed and documentary sources in relation to ‘political thought’ and ‘political culture’, now established fields in early modern studies. Whether explicitly stated or not, one of the premisses of such work is that the educational revolution helped produce at the cultural level the integrated national consciousness that the state was seeking to impose at the political and administrative level.