Humanism and Protestantism in Early Modern English Education (review)

This substantial study represents the author’s revision of his Waynflete Lectures, delivered at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 2006. Like Ian Green’s other books, The Christian’s ABC (Oxford, 1996) and Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2000), it is an encyclopedic survey of almost an entire genre of English books—a staple of the publishing trade, textbooks printed to supply the rapidly growing numbers of grammar schools. The chief aim of the book is to explore the curious juxtaposition, perhaps tension, between the elements of Protestantism and humanism in English education.

The labors on show here are prodigious and, as far as they go, definitive. Hundreds of books are examined, many in some depth, and Green provides a detailed account of the content of an English classical education—and of the varying levels at which that education was offered—in the two centuries from Henry VIII to George II (chapters 3 and 4). Among the most interesting of his findings is the increasing role of English translations of classical works in education from the middle of the seventeenth century. Only in chapter 5 is the relationship between Protestantism and humanism addressed directly, and Green does discern tension here, although not any kind of radical dysfunction. But the case he makes there and in the summative chapter 6,“Assessing the Impact,” perhaps could have been developed a little further. After detecting a tension between an emphasis on practical virtue characteristic of the Erasmian and classical traditions and the “Protestant stress on divine grace”(p. 307), Green ultimately concludes that there was an “alliance of state religion and grammar school education” (p. 364) that prevailed until the nineteenth-century age of reform.

Yet what this precisely calls into question is the Protestantism (that is, the theology) of English Protestantism. Even Philipp Melanchthon’s enormously influential reconciliation of Renaissance humanism with Reformation theology, to which the whole European Protestant tradition was massively indebted, was ultimately something of an intellectual sleight of hand. It was more shotgun marriage than love match. What Green’s analysis of English educational textbooks suggests is that authentically Protestant soteriology made little impact in the mainstream channels of English education and therefore probably equally little among relatively broad swathes of the English elite and middling sort. A goodly, or godly, section of the clergy was always deeply committed to this theology, along with a rather narrower section of the laity. But, as Puritan ministers in the early-seventeenth century were wont to lament, all the preaching of the “Gospel” had made little difference to the majority of the population. This is not to say, of course, that the English people as a whole were not Protestant. They most emphatically were, and God help anyone who seemed to threaten their Protestantism—witness Archbishop William Laud, King Charles I, and King James II. But that Protestantism was more a matter of identity than of theology, and that identity was all about being English and not being Catholic or “popish” (that is, from an English point of view, superstitious, idolatrous, antichristian, foreign, traitorous, Jesuitical, casuistical, or equivocal). The cohesion, such as it was, of English Protestantism was entirely negative: a proposition abundantly illustrated by the unholy alliances that brought about the Glorious Revolution, and annually enacted in the November rituals of “Gunpowder Treason.” But this Protestantism was hardly something that required formal schooling or even formal catechesis for its transmission, anymore than late-medieval Catholicism had done. It was by 1700 the DNA of English culture. Nor was this Protestantism even theoretically incompatible with a classical or humanist education. It may be that Green will have more to say about that in the promised final volume of his trilogy on early-modern English Protestantism. In the meantime, he has produced a work of solid scholarship that will have something for almost any student of early-modern English educational or...