Reading for Week 4

Education: Aristotelian scholasticism and Renaissance humanism

Education was central to the intellectual controversies as well as to the social development of early modern Europeans. The growing numbers of the educated, especially among the élite and the middle ranks, inevitably made control of the schools and universities seem increasingly important. Meanwhile, the humanistic legacy of the Renaissance, added to the missionary and propagandist imperatives of all parties in the aftermath of the Reformation, made effective educational systems of paramount social concern. Curricular disputes, however, merely intensified. Recent research has shown how old stereotypes misrepresent the period. Strictly humanist models did not easily overtake medieval scholasticism as the basis of the curriculum, and Aristotle probably remained as central to Protestant teaching as he had once been to the orthodox pre-Reformation "schoolmen". In short, a broadly scholastic curriculum and a common philosophical mind-set, as well as a deep commitment to Latinate culture, continued to unite educated Europeans until late in the seventeenth century.

Set texts

• Petrus Ramus, That There is But One Method of Establishing a Science * (extract)
• Juan Luis Vives, Against the Pseudo-Logicians * (extract)

Other reading

• J.H. Burns, 'Scholasticism: Survival and Revival', in his and Mark Goldie, (eds.), The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450-1700 (1991)
• John Trentman, 'Scholasticism in the Seventeenth Century', in Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny and Jan Pinborg, (eds.), The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy (1982)
• Charles B. Schmitt, Aristotle and the Renaissance (1983)
• P.O. Kristeller, 'Renaissance Aristotelianism', Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies (1965)
• Kenneth Charlton, Education in Renaissance England (1965)
• Walter J. Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (1958)
• P.A. Duhamel, 'The Logic and Rhetoric of Peter Ramus', Modern Philology (1948-9)
• W.S. Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700 (1956)
• Brian Armstrong, Calvinism and the Amyraut Heresy: Protestant Scholasticism and Humanism (1969)
• J. Platt, Reformed Thought and Scholasticism (1982)
• David Stevenson, King's College, Aberdeen, 1560-1641: From Protestant Reformation to Covenanting Revolution (1990)
• Linda Levy Peck, 'The Mentality of a Jacobean Grandee', in her (ed.) Mental World of the Jacobean Court (1991)