Three Foreigners and the Philosophy of the Puritan Revolution - Hugh Trevor-Roper Conference (January 2014) (original) (raw)
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The Politics of Pedantry: English University Education and the Rhetoric of Reform, 1642-1660
This thesis applies the historiography of the early modern public sphere to analyze the political literature which militated for curricular and structural reform of England’s universities during the Civil War and Interregnum (1642-1660). The writers considered, who represent the breadth of the political and confessional spectra, advanced a multitude of reform schemes that variably proposed to topple Aristotle from the curricula, replace Oxford and Cambridge with local trade schools and abolish the Bachelor of Divinity degree. Alumni of these institutions led the effort to restructure the institutions but managed to garner wide popular readership amongst individuals who had no experience of university education. This thesis argues that the learned authors manipulated the increasingly popular recognition of a public sphere in order to underline the political threats which scholarly publications, generic conventions and overall “pedantry” in the universities posed to the nascent commonwealth. It further examines how divergent conceptions of the public sphere divided the reformist literature and ultimately produced a body of conflicting proposals for positive reform. This interpretation of the university reform debate thereby challenges the accepted historiography that characterizes the Interregnum as a stable and unrevolutionary episode in the history of the universities.
In 1653, a year the English universities received withering criticism in pamphlets, sermons and treatises, one degree candidate at Oxford was asked to defend a volatile proposition in disputation: Institutio academiarum sit utilis in republica -"The institution of academies is useful in a commonwealth." 1 The debate over this claim resonated beyond the halls of the university to printing presses and public spaces. Voices from across the political spectrum provided conflicting responses to this proposition during the Civil War and Interregnum.
Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 2012
The History and Fortune of Fénelon' s Traité de l'Éducation des filles in Eighteenth-Century England claire boulard jouslin a b s t r a c t Why was François de Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon's Traité de l'Éducation des filles (1693) published in part by Richard Steele in his popular The Ladies Library (1614) and serialized by Charlotte Lennox in her periodical, The Lady's Museum (1760)? This question deserves to be raised because Fénelon's text was produced in a specifically French Catholic and political context that was fairly different from the English context of the 1710s and the 1760s. Indeed, Fénelon's educational reforms for girls were part of a wider religious and political platform that clearly sought to defend-in reaction to King Louis XIV's politeness policy-a conservative ideal of an agrarian and aristocratic society where the traditional gender hierarchy was emphasized. The aim of this article is therefore to analyze the themes and extracts from De l'Éducation des filles that Steele and Lennox chose to translate, in order to assess what trend-conservative or reformistthese two authors privileged when they publicized Fénelon's ideas on female education. This essay concludes that both Steele and Lennox adapted Fénelon's treatise for their own ends that were sometimes in contradiction to Fénelon's original intentions. It seems that Steele ignored Fénelon's hostility to politeness and used the treatise to promote a Whig agenda that redefined politeness along English lines. Lennox was more interested in Fénelon's pedagogical methods and their impact on very young children as well as on mothers. This essay therefore seeks to reassess Steele's and Lennox's originality and conservatism. It also contends that although Fénelon's treatise is hardly mentioned by historians of education, Fénelon was alongside Rousseau and Locke as one of the most influential educationalists in eighteenth-century England. W ritten in 1684 at the request of the Duchess of Beauvillier, who had nine little daughters and with whom François de Salignac de la Mothe Boulard Jouslin • Conservative or Reformer? Fénelon was in close contact, Fénelon's Traité de l'Éducation des filles was revised and published in France in Spring 1687. Its influence in France was imperceptible at first. 1 It is only in the eighteenth century that it seems to have attracted the attention of reformers such as Madame de Lambert, who wrote L'avis d'une mère à son fils et à sa fille (1728), or Madame Leprince de Beaumont, who published her Magasin des enfants in 1757. Fénelon's treatise was also imitated after 1750 by such educationalists as Formey, Grivel, and Berquin, who really considered him as a model. 2 Abroad, however, the book immediately caught the attention of Protestant thinkers. As early as August 1687 it was reviewed in the Bibliothèque universelle et historique d' Amsterdam, published by Cornand de la Crose. In October 1687 it was Pierre Bayle who also chronicled it in Nouvelles de la République des Lettres. These two gazettes, which assured the circulation of ideas and contributed to the European republic of letters, praised Fénelon's treatise and promoted it as a useful, practical book on education that distinguished itself by its religious moderation. 3 It comes as no surprise, therefore, that Fénelon's treatise was translated into English and published in London in 1699. This anonymous translation was revised by George Hickes in 1707, an influential non-juror prelate and "a promoter of women's education" (Gardiner 364). 4 His translation entitled Instructions for the Education of a Daughter was a success. It was reedited seven times before 1750, and a new London edition was issued as late as 1797. Other editions were printed in Edinburgh and Dublin around 1750. The English periodical press echoed this success. The book was advertised in The Spectator in a letter sent by a correspondent, Annabella, who recommended it to female readers in June 1711 (Bond 405). Annabella even denied the idea that the book was useful to women of rank only, thus suggesting that its readership could be extended to the lower ranks. A new edition was printed shortly after in 1713, providing further evidence of the Spectator's influence over a large public. Two other kinds of publication signal the popularity of Fénelon's book in England. First, Richard Steele, who had long declared his interest in the education of girls and had promised in the Spectator to provide his female readers with reading advice, eventually published his three-volume The Ladies Library in 1714, in which he quoted Fénelon's treatise extensively. The book, officially written by a lady and published by Mr. Steele, was a compilation of texts mostly by divines. 5 Fénelon was the only foreign writer included. Steele, who was aware that the expansion of a female readership could be a source of profit, capitalized on his reputation as a reformer to publish this conduct book and to present The Ladies Library as a progressive text on women's education.
Historian, 2011
This book is a major contribution to a hitherto little-experienced field, despite the abundance of Arabic writings about Europe and the West in general. What also distinguishes this book is the thoroughness with which the author analyzes and comments on an array of travel accounts, letters, and descriptions written in Arabic by mostly North African travelers, rulers, and captives that shed light on conditions in Europe and the relations between Muslims and European Christians.
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2015
Reviews and Short Notices General Must We Divide History into Periods? By Jacques Le Goff. Translated by M. B. DeBevoise. Columbia University Press. 2015. xiv + 160pp. £20.00. Jacques Le Goff's slight book contains a big idea. Tackling head on both generally established ideas of periodization and specifically the place of the Renaissance within this, he argues vigorously for a critical pause and a rethink. Le Goff, well known the other side of the Channel and central to the Annales School, built his career on recasting understandings of the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries. Working across themes of time, trade, work, intellectual life, urban culture and religious experience he did much to enrich our understanding of the Middle Ages. For years Le Goff argued for the dynamism, complexity and sophistication of the Middle Ages, with past work explicitly locating the construction of a medieval Europe within the context of early twenty-first century preoccupations with 'European-ness' (see his The Birth of Europe, 2006). Beginning with an exploration of ideas of chronology, eras and periods, in this book he usefully reminds us that conventions such as dating from the birth of Christ and historians' use of centuries to stand for certain ideas and trends both are part of a longer history of historians trying to organize the past, and continue to serve to make the past manageable and understandable. Indeed, he makes it plain that 'there is nothing neutral or innocent, about cutting up time into smaller parts' (p. 2). Through discussing, for example, early Christian fathers' attempts at constructing both a chronology and a meaningful periodization, he serves to historicize our own present-day conceptions of history as charting rapid change and of 'progress'. In contrast, from St Augustine until the fourteenth century, there prevailed a sense in which 'the world grows old', and that Christendom was marking time until the second coming of Christ. Acknowledging that people in the past understood time, history and their own place in history on very different terms from our own is a crucial tool for understanding and reconstructing past world-views. All this is simply a prelude to his larger concern, that of resituating and reinterpreting the relationship between the Renaissance and modernity. Rather than standing for the beginning of a new era the Renaissance was the last incarnation of a world we would think of as medieval, forming part of a 'long Middle Ages' extending up to the mid-eighteenth century. Since Michelet and Burckhardt, the idea of the Renaissance as marking the beginning of the early modern period has been a commonplace, and it still provides the organizing logic for vast swathes of undergraduate programmes.
Journal of Jesuit Studies, 2014
Transnational approaches have recently become increasingly prominent in the history of education. This trend is itself a counter-tendency to the widespread predilection of historians of education to focus more narrowly on the individual case in a particular local and national context. Over the past decade, it has become more common to establish a broader framework, and to highlight issues in their geographical, social, and political settings that run across the boundaries of nation-states. Such work has also created methodological challenges, particularly in the examinations of archival material held in different centers, often in different conditions, and in a number of languages. Maurice Whitehead's book is an excellent example of this emergent historiographical trend, and of the benefits it can yield when combined with the more established qualities of rigorous historical research. It tells the story of English Jesuit education from its origins, beginning with the Counter-Reformation and the founding of the order, developing through the Catholic Enlightenment, and finally reaching its culmination with the establishment of Stonyhurst College in early nineteenth-century England: according to the author, "one of the most extraordinary phenomena in British educational history" (179). The particular focus of the book is on the period from 1762 to 1803, but it is well framed in this longer-term context. In some ways it provides a traditional narrative, in that the history of education has so often produced heroic accounts of triumph over adversity. In this case, the familiar style resists the common temptation to idealize its heroes. It is scrupulously researched, and observes complexity and nuance at every turn. Whitehead's book stretches across nations and continents, as well as over time. Its principal base is continental Europe, and especially the principality of Liège. Yet it documents the connections and networks that helped it to persevere, often as an underground organization persecuted by the authorities. The English College is described as constituting, by the late eighteenth century, "a truly international educational institution, with students from England, Ireland, the United States of America, the Caribbean, the Low Countries, France and Spain" (161). Whitehead highlights, for example, the trails between different locations across Europe, depicted in the detailed and helpful maps that are provided. It provides an interesting discussion of links with White Russia and the efforts to maintain and develop contacts. Above all, the volume reveals the connections with England, often fraught with danger but operating in different directions to support an international network that tended to be a widely spread diaspora of refugees.