A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice.

Rebecca W. Bushnell. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1996. xi + 210 pp. n.p. ISBN: 0-8014-3235-9 (cl), 0-8014-8356-5 (pap).

This volume offers a series of reflections on humanist pedagogy in early modern England, spanning roughly a century from Erasmus's Antibarbari (published in 1520) to Thomas Spenser's Art of Logik (1628). By exploring the social implications of metaphors central to literary pedagogy, Bushnell examines "the unstable terms of rule, control, and autonomy in humanist education" (181).

In an introduction entitled "Humanism Reconsidered," Bushnell reviews a number of studies of humanist education, most centrally Foucault's Discipline and Punish (1975) and Grafton and Jardine's From Humanism to the Humanities (1986). In this chapter she is largely concerned with what she calls the "functional ambivalence" (19) of humanist pedagogy, that is, the vitality inherent in conflicting or contradictory views of educational ideals. Chapter 2, "The Sovereign Master and the Scholar Prince," examines teacher-pupil relations, beginning with the notorious anecdote of how George Buchanan "whipped the Arse" of the young James VI (66). The point of departure is the issue of corporal punishment as recommended in Thomas Ingelend's play The Disobedient Child (1570). Besides the influential treatises of Erasmus and Vives, the central texts cited are Roger Ascham's The Scholemaster (1570), Thomas Elyot's Boke Named the Governour (1531) and Richard Mulcaster's Positions Concerning the Training Up of Children (1581).

Chapter 3, "Cultivating the Mind," deals with the nature-nurture debate in terms of humanist culture and agriculture. Among the various topics discussed are the ambiguity of nature in the wild for both the gardener and the "governor" of children. Bushnell also examines the twin concepts of property and propriety, relating physical boundaries to notions of decorum. In chapter 4, "Harvesting Books," Bushnell examines "how gardening metaphors permeated images of books and humanist reading"(75). Bushnell has some perceptive comments on text and garden as body. The plate of gardeners "training" vines (94) makes one wish there were a fuller investigation of the semantics of this central verb. Bushnell concludes that after 1550 commonplace books fell from favor with educators, while greater emphasis was placed on the bodily unity of texts and stricter garden symmetry. But the social or political reasons for this seemingly more repressive culture are not fully explored.

The following chapter, "Tradition and Sovereignty," examines thematic polarities inherent in sixteenth-century writings on poetics including Sidney's Defence of Poetry (1595), Buchanan's Latin tragedies, various writings on language and learning by James VI, and Samuel Daniel's Defence of Ryme (1603). Bushnell has previously written on tragedy, both classical and humanistic, and she writes with special lucidity about Buchanan. Still, there are moments of intentional complexity, like this declaration of intent (146): "While acknowledging Helgerson's politicizing of humanist poetics, I wish to complicate his binaries of the gothic and classical, the medieval and humanist, by reexamining the negotiation of history, authority, autonomy, and nature in the debate over formal innovation."

These chapters on Renaissance culture are framed by a prologue, "The Trials of Humanism," and an epilogue, "Contemporary Humanist Pedagogy," which together discuss the current debate about the traditional Western canon. Through a rich series of quotations, Bushnell presents the debate as a nearly dramatic interchange.

This is a learned and challenging work, which embraces an extraordinary range of Renaissance and contemporary texts. The author's insistence on tension and ambivalence produces a severely antithetical style that at times seems mannered. But the correlation of humanism and the humanities is an important issue which is illuminated by many insights. Appropriately for a study concerning culture and cultivation, this volume offers the reader a learned florilegium of authors past and present.

DAVID MARSH Rutgers University