Abstract
Stone argued that most societies are judged by the achievements of their cultural elites, but that what made seventeenth-century England remarkable was the appreciation and practice of cultural activity by ‘the whole of the rural and urban propertied classes’.1 Clearly it is one-sided to judge the achievements of education by the creativity of a tiny cultural elite, but if the focus is widened to take in all the people appreciative of intellectual culture it may embrace a larger body than is normally considered the ‘propertied classes’, an elitist term in itself. In this chapter it is proposed to take four focal points, the clearly cultural elite comprising writers of literature, philosophy and history on the one hand, and their scientific equivalents in mathematics, natural sciences and architecture on the other, then the literate elite of the magistrates and governing classes, then the receptive audience of the written word stretching into lower social ranks, and finally the ebb and flow of basic literacy.
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Notes and References
L. Stone, ‘The Educational Revolution in England, 1560–1640’, Past and Present, 28 (1964), p. 79.
R. T. Gunther, Early Science in Cambridge (Oxford, 1937), p. 313.
H. Kearney, Origins of the Scientific Revolution (London, 1964), pp. 69, 36.
J. Todd, A Dictionary of British and American Women Writers 1660–1800 (London, 1987), p. 1.
Quoted in R. Perry, The Celebrated Mary Astell: an Early English Feminist (Chicago/London, 1986), p. 219.
Cited in J. Dover Wilson, Life in Shakespeare’s England (Harmondsworth, 1959), pp. 77–8.
E. Gibbon, Memoirs of my Life and Writings, bicentenary edn, ed. A. O. J. Cockshut and S. Constantine (Keele, 1994), pp. 72–3.
J. L. Axtell, The Educational Writings of John Locke: a Critical Edition with Introduction and Notes (Cambridge, 1968), pp. 281–4.
M. Feingold, ‘The Humanities’ in N. Tyacke, ed., The History of the University of Oxford, IV, Seventeenth-Century Oxford (Oxford, 1997), p.216.
M. Spufford, Contrasting Communities: English Villagers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London, 1974), pp. 177, 179.
Cited in H. Blodgett, Centuries of Female Days: Englishwomen’s Private Diaries (Gloucester, 1989), p. 54.
H. S. Bennett, English Books and Readers 1558 to 1603 being a Study in the History of the Book Trade in the Reign of Elizabeth I (Cambridge, 1965), p. 148
H. S. Bennett, English Books and Readers 1603 to 1640 being a Study in the History of the Book Trade in the Reigns of James I and Charles I (Cambridge, 1970), p. 108.
H. S. Bennett, English Books and Readers 1457 to 1557 being a Study in the History of the Book Trade from Caxton to the Incorporation of the Stationers’ Company, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1969), p. xiii.
D. Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 176, 2.
P. Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London, 1978), p. 263.
A. Hughes, Seventeenth-Century England: a Changing Culture, I, Primary Sources (London, 1980), pp. 6–7.
R. A. Houston, ‘The Development of Literacy: Northern England 1640–1750’, Economic History Review 2, 35 (1982), 205; Cressy, Literacy, p. 124.
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© 1998 Helen M. Jewell
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Jewell, H.M. (1998). Educational Achievements. In: Education in Early Modern England. Social History in Perspective. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27233-4_5
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