L'armonia contesa: identità ed educazione nell'Alsazia moderna (review)

Its history makes Alsace an attractive laboratory for exploring some major themes of European history, something Simona Negruzzo is very aware of in her study of Alsatian schools during the early modern period. A point of cultural intersection, Alsace was a German principality until taken over by France in 1681 and for centuries a site of competition between Protestants and Catholics. That history has drawn a good deal of scholarly attention (attested to here by the eighty-two pages of bibliography). Still, a study of schooling might reveal a lot about the concrete effects of changes in language, culture, rulers, and religion.

Negruzzo begins with the Protestant schools of Strasbourg in the sixteenth century. The central figure is Johann Sturm, who was placed in charge of city schools in 1538 and whose humanistic curriculum remained dominant through the century. He himself embodied something of Strasbourg's liminal position between cultures, Catholic and Protestant, French and German. Educated at Louvain, in touch with leading intellectuals in Paris (where he had spent several years), he maintained close contact with important German reformers and humanists. Strasbourg's city fathers put considerable resources behind the elementary schools and gymnasium Sturm directed. Students (mainly German-speakers) came from the local elite and from much farther away, and Sturm's schools were models adopted in cities from Poland to France and especially in Switzerland and Germany. His gymnasium, having weathered the transformation from association with the ideas of Martin Bucer to a stricter Lutheranism, in 1566 won from Emperor Maximilian the title of academy and the right to grant degrees, tantamount to the university status fully granted in 1622. To this general picture, Negruzzo's research adds considerable detail, about the students (their number shrank in the seventeenth century), the organization of the faculty (quite conventional), and the subject matter (always addressed through a fairly conservative humanism that tended to ignore the latest discoveries in science or geography).

Counter-Reformation competition came from the Jesuits, who in 1580 established a school in Molsheim (given university status by emperor and pope in 1617) and rapidly established other schools in towns encircling Strasbourg. Adopting the Jesuit Ratio Studiorum, these schools, too, had a humanist curriculum; and in fact the two sets of strikingly similar schools influenced each other, although the Protestant ones excelled in singing, the Jesuits in theater. On the organization of these schools and enrollment in them and on the continuing contestation through pamphlets and theater, this account is very informative. That is one of its strengths.

Another is awareness of the larger picture. Schooling suffered as religious conflict grew more violent in the seventeenth century and from the effects of the plague and the Thirty Years' War. French rule brought a certain calming as well as a greater French presence and cultural influence. While favoring Catholic institutions, including the Catholic university, the French monarchy also recognized and supported the Protestant one. Catholics and Protestants studying law and medicine continued to do so together at the still-Protestant University of Strasbourg, and foreign visitors continued to note surprising similarities in the religious practice of the two denominations. The growth of Catholicism in Alsace was primarily due rather to Jesuit and Capuchin campaigns of preaching, devotional missions, and pilgrimages—effective expressions of Counterreform piety that reached a broad public and further distanced Protestants from Catholics.

These strengths invite a certain disappointment, however. The size of schools, languages used, treatises written, literacy achieved, and much else clearly set forth were certainly related to the issues of identity, religion, social structure, and politics that make Alsace so interesting. That connection, although rhetorically asserted, is not effectively probed. The interesting information about schooling does not much modify the received picture of the larger historical trends. We learn little of the process by which they and local institutions shaped each other and almost nothing of the anguish, anger, and bloodshed that process involved. The details that documents chose to reveal are carefully...