Education in Early Tudor England. Magdalen College Oxford and Its School, 1480-1540.

Nicholas Orme. Education in Early Tudor England. Magdalen College Oxford and Its School, 1480-1540.

(Magdalen College Occasional Paper, 4.) Oxford: Magdalen College, 1998. xii + 84 pp. [pounds]8. ISBN: 0-9513747-4-5.

Jonathan Woolfson. Padua and the Tudors: English Students in Italy, 1485-1603.

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. xii + 322 pp. $60. ISBN: 0-8020-0946-8.

C.J. Wright, ed. Sir Robert Cotton as Collector: Essays on an Early Stuart Courtier and his Legacy.

London: The British Library, 1997. viii + 470 pp. [pounds]60. ISBN: 0-7123-0358-8.

The topics of these three books come from interlocking phases of early modern English intellectual history. Nicholas Orme's eighty-page study of Magdalen College School has chapters on the School's foundation and fifteenth-century context, its early teachers (dealing in detail with those prior to 1500), the physical structure of the School and the works and days of its pupils, and finally the School's early impact, through the "diaspora" of Magdalen teachers to other schools and the Latin grammar texts Magdalen teachers composed. Orme updates the picture of the early School provided in R.S. Stanier's A History of Magdalen College School, Oxford (2nd ed., 1958), correcting and refining Stanier's information and giving a better social picture of the institution. The most intriguing novelty lies in a more precise estimate (perhaps some downsizing) of Magdalen's distinctive historical role. The School has sometimes been portrayed as practically the unique wellspring of English educational humanism in its earlies t form, but Orme now shows "it would be wrong to imply that humanist grammar was diffused only from Magdalen, even in the 1480s" (56). Magdalen's status among historians has been largely due to its association with the texts produced by John Stanbridge, Magdalen's second master, and Robert Whittinton, which were overwhelmingly predominant among grammar texts printed in England up to about 1530. Orme, however, finds no real basis for the tradition that Whittinton was Stanbridge's Magdalen pupil. The texts attributed to Stanbridge were printed after he left Magdalen. The Stanbridge-Whittinton grammars belong less to Magdalen specifically than to an over-all climate in English schooling and London printing. All of this makes for a less heroic narrative of English educational history around 1500, in which educational practices and habits of mind are seen evolving gradually, over a broad field, from late medieval towards humanistic forms.

Padua and the Tudors: English Students in Italy, 1485-1603 is the product of extensive archival research in Italy, England, and elsewhere. Jonathan Woolfson reports his findings with exactness, and supplies a wealth of detail. His "Biographical Register of English Visitors to Padua," comprising 350 entries, should as he hopes be a valuable resource for further research.

As well as fresh research, the book offers a fresh approach to its topic, different from that of Kenneth R. Bartlett's The English in Italy 1525-1558 (1991) or earlier works. Woolfson derives his structure mainly from the University of Padua's. His first chapter deals with "The English Nation at Padua," the corporate unit into which English students were organized. The second discusses English students of the law university, one of the two separate universities of which Padua actually consisted; the next two chapters ("Students of Medicine and Natural Philosophy," "Humanists") focus on the university of arts and medicine. The last chapter deals especially with later sixteenth-century visitors more bent on "educational travel" than concentrated academic study. Woolfson's approach has its qualities and their defects. His accounts of the learning Englishmen engaged in at Padua are very concrete. On the other hand, a given English figure's work in law, in natural philosophy and on Greek will each be discussed in a different chapter; despite cross-referencing by Woolfson, one misses a strong sense of how the different kinds of work fit together in the figure's mind and experience.

A prominent feature of the book is Woolfson's intention to use Padua as a "vehicle" (8) for suggested revisions of the study of sixteenth-century English intellectual history. In particular, he quarrels with the term "civic humanism" as it has been used by recent historians. He associates it with a tendency of "the [currently] dominant historiographical tradition" to turn away from a proper definition of humanists "in relation to their commitments to . . . the studia humanitatis (especially grammar and rhetoric) and . . . the classical textual heritage," and instead to treat as a humanist "anyone who had been involved in politics or demonstrated 'civic concern' and also had a literary or theoretical turn of mind" (39).

A proviso must be registered here. To say humanism should be identified simply with classical studies and not with political activism seems as wrong as to say the opposite. Humanists were distinctive in assigning a particular vital function to the classics: as a source of models for human action. If one revises Woolfson's sense of what humanism truly was along this line, attending exclusively to humanism's political dimension still remains a fault: humanists called men to other modes of action besides political action. I am not sure recent historiography in general has been as imbalanced as Woolfson thinks, but he does good service in emphasizing the studies of natural philosophy Englishmen engaged in at Padua in the early 1500s.

Woolfson also complains that "civic humanism" has been given too much credit for instilling a "civic ethic" in educated Englishmen. The study of the civil law "offers a more viable source for a civic ethic in England than 'civic humanism'" (8). Woolfson provides a very illuminating discussion of the way civil law was understood at Padua. The rest of that chapter does not really show, however, that civil law was more important than humanism in prompting the careers of men like Thomas Wilson, who wrote the first full Ciceronian rhetoric in English and translated Demosthenes to make a political argument, as well as practiced civil law.

The desire to argue about "civic humanism" sometimes gets in the way of telling about Padua, as when a five-page rebuttal of Thomas F. Mayer's "civic humanist" interpretation of Starkey's Paduan experience takes place in the middle of the chapter on natural philosophy. Still, Woolfson provides discussions of varied aspects of English experience at Padua that are pertinent and richly informed.

The seventeenth-century antiquarianism that proceeded out of humanism is the subject of Sir Robert Cotton as Collector. It comprises seventeen essays, of which nine previously appeared in The British Library Journal. The book is handsomely produced, and the level of scholarship is high. The greater number of contributions focus on very specific topics, mostly having to do with the famous manuscript library Cotton assembled between about 1588 and 1631, "arguably the most important collection of manuscripts ever assembled in Britain by a private individual" (vii).

In his introductory essay, Kevin Sharpe reflects on developments in Cotton scholarship and early Stuart historiography generally since he published Sir Robert Cotton (1979), still the best treatment of Cotton as a whole figure in his context. Nigel Ramsay and Graham Parry discuss political and historical texts by Cotton. Roger B. Manning shows Cotton deploying his antiquarian knowledge in private litigation. David Howarth examines monuments Cotton had put up to his Scottish ancestors in his parish church in Huntingdonshire. David McKitterick discusses and Glenys Davies catalogues the Roman stones Cotton collected; Gay Van der Meer's contribution has to do with his Anglo-Saxon coins.

The leading contemporary authority on the manuscript collection, Colin G. C. Tite, provides two contributions, on manuscripts that have strayed from the Cottonian to other collections and on the relatively little-studied matter of printed books Cotton owned. Hilton Kelliher supplies a handlist of post-1500 British verse occurring in the manuscript collection. Elizabeth M. Hallam's, Elizabeth M. C. Van Houts' and E. C. Teviotdale's pieces illustrate scholarly use of Cotton's manuscripts in his time and later in the seventeenth century. James P. Carley and Janet Backhouse look at Cotton's relations to the Royal Library.

The book's last item is its most dramatic: Andrew Prescott's account of the efforts to restore manuscripts damaged in the catastrophic fire of 1731. Prescott's hero is Sir Frederic Madden, who persevered through technical and institutional difficulties with his great mid-nineteenth-century restoration project. Prescott calls for us now, with our greatly improved technology, to carry forward Madden's (and Cotton's) preservative work.