Ian Green, Humanism and Protestantism in Early Modern English Education (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). Pp. xvii + 373. ISBN 978-0-7546-6368-3. Hb.

摘要

There was a lot of money to be made out of publishing Latin texts and textbooks during the early modern period. As Ian Green reports, the lucky individual who secured the royal patent to print and distribute copies of ‘Lily’s Grammar’ (very much the default primer throughout Tudor and Stuart England) could look forward to an income comparable to that of a small bishopric. Not surprisingly, there was fierce competition to secure the rights to other texts. Some — grammars and dictionaries, for instance — were often within the royal gift but many others were up for grabs. Here, the Stationers’ Company in London led the field, securing monopolies on books that sold in their tens of thousands of copies. There was an avid readership, especially among the unlettered middling sort. Consequently, the era saw something of an explosion of classical works in translation: as Green reveals, Ovid and Cicero routinely outsold Calvin. The staple market for all publishers of classical wares, however, was the schoolroom, most notably, the grammar schools where, for six or seven years, the children (always just the boys) of the gentry, the yeomanry and the buoyant mercantile elite struggled with their declensions and conjugations.